Where Are They Now? Featuring: Soala Idasetima
We’re interviewing alumni who graduated from York College of Pennsylvania to see “where they are now.” Today’s interview is with Soala Idasetima, who graduated in December 2016, having majored in Professional Writing and minored in Creative Writing. You can read some of his poetry on our site. He is the founder of The York Sound, a blog (with a video series as well!) featuring interviews with musical artists based in York, PA. We met in person to speak; below is the transcription.
EG: Why Professional Writing as your major at YCP? What are some things you took away from / remember most about your undergraduate experience?
SI: I chose Professional Writing because throughout my entire life I’ve been a creative of some sort, whether it’s through art or music or writing. Music and art aren’t, I guess, as feasible, so I decided to become a Professional Writing major. I chose a Creative Writing minor so I could work on some of my creative writing skills. I enjoyed having Vito and Travis a lot — they really helped with my creative writing skills, and I loved the exercises that they provided for me and my classmates. I took Intro to Creative Writing at HACC, then I took Poetry Writing with Travis and then Fiction Writing with Vito.
What I took away… well, I still write all the time. When you graduate, at least for me, it’s not as structured… you don’t get overly analytical. You kind of take the inspiration as it comes and turn it into something.
EG: What have you been up to since graduating in 2016?
SI: I was doing a lot of stuff. I was fortunate enough to find my first job as a technical writer like three months after I graduated. Unfortunately, that didn’t last very long — they had to get rid of me… But aside from that, writing a lot of poetry, which hasn’t been published, but I just have a lot of work lying around; writing a lot of blog posts, trying to get acquainted with the blogging world. I’ve been learning about digital marketing. It’s nice because essentially how you sell things nowadays — tags and whatever — will catch people’s attention. Writing music — that’s another hobby of mine, so I’ve been doing a lot of that. You can see it’s all over the place! I don’t even know how to talk about what I’ve been doing and make it sound cohesive, but that’s life.
EG: The York Sound is a very impressive blog you began in May of this year. Can you tell me a bit more about the process of getting it started (perhaps what inspired you, too) and how you stumble across the artists you showcase?
SI: I’m excited to answer this! Like I’ve been saying, I’ve been trying to teach myself digital marketing skills, so what I’ve been doing is playing around with website design and this little thing called SEO — which in a nutshell is like, how can I get my article to rank higher on Google when people search different things — and just as a means to get better at it, and learn from experience and whatnot, I decided to have fun with it and create a blog, a blog where I’m interviewing a lot of musicians around York. And how this idea came about… I was reading this article on NME with one of my favorite indie artists, Yellow Days, and I was like, hey, I should do something like this. And no matter the medium or the art form, I’ve always been this huge fan of interviews. It’s like, they wrote this, or they created this, but I want to know what inspired it. I’ve always been a huge fan of that. I’ve also been a fan of music since I was a teenager — I thought, how about I go into this local scene that is neglected, to be honest, because people don’t really support a lot of York musicians, ask them questions, see what inspires them, and create an entire website about it. So that’s where that all stems from.
I’ve taken some literature classes, too. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, it’s a work of fiction on the surface. It’s this yellow wallpaper with all of this crazy imagery and she’s hallucinating, but when you learn about the historical context, it’s like, okay! She [Charlotte Perkins Gilman] was going through postpartum depression at the time, so that’s what inspired the story. What I’m interested in is kind of along those lines, I guess — getting context.
A lot of these artists , either I am close acquaintances with them or I’ve met them before, and I notice that they have, like, a good following, or they have people interested in learning more about them, so that’s how I choose them, essentially. At first I posted once a week — this was from May to July — there was a new interview every week. There were eleven of them! Then I got burnt out and started again in September. Since then, it’s been once a month, and I now try to integrate video content, too, because people don’t seem to like reading that much anymore — they like watching videos.
EG: You were on The York Review staff and also wrote for the campus newspaper The Spartan. How have those experiences shaped your current pursuits, if at all?
SI: With The Spartan newspaper, when I joined it, I wasn’t a natural journalist, I would say — I didn’t take any PR classes or anything like that, so I had to learn by myself pretty much. I would say what I took away from that is, there’s this little template for writing articles called the inverted triangle or inverted pyramid — in a nutshell, the most general thing, the thing you take away from it, is put in the introduction. But in literature, you have to read and read and read, and maybe towards the end you’ll sort of get the point. [In articles], from there, it gets more and more specific. I mean, when I was writing all of these articles [for The York Sound], it wasn’t intentional at first; however, I noticed that hey, when I was introducing all of these artists, this is who they are, this is their background, I then ask more and more specific questions with time. So from being part of the newspaper staff, that’s what I gained from it. Quality journalism right there!
I took Publication Management I and II. I was just an Editorial Assistant, and then I was Print Editor. I was essentially responsible for deciding the cardstock and the format of the magazine, yadda yadda yadda, often collaborating with our graphic designers. I mean, all of this might not translate into the blog, but I did take a lot of things away from it because the interesting thing about Publication Management as a class is that, compared to most classes, it’s really practical. You do learn by doing, as Travis stresses a lot — he really stressed that on me — and it’s like, you’re working as part of a team, and you guys have a collective goal. You’re like a cog that’s part of a machine, essentially.
EG: Are there any favorite or surprising moments so far from working on The York Sound?
I’d say the biggest surprise — there’s this artist, Cody Kilburn, and what really surprised me with him is, he told me that the reason he makes music is really altruistic, like, he doesn’t necessarily make music for himself. He does it for others, to inspire others. I just found that really interesting because when it comes to me making music, I’m really selfish, like hey, how can I do this to make myself look better, so I found what he said really interesting.
EG: Interview by interview, you’re helping to illuminate the “unsung” community of York. What do you enjoy about interviews in particular? (Sort of a meta moment there, ha!) And I know that each interviewee is very unique, but have you noticed any common threads in the stories you’ve gathered throughout this year — something that perhaps reflects what York as a city has to offer in the way of music and storytelling?
SI: When you’re interviewing people, you’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. Compared to fiction writing where you create a character and you’re trying to put words in that character’s mouth for them, with interviewing, these are real people. They have a certain way of speaking, certain ideologies they believe in, so I think that’s very illuminating.
I’d say the biggest commonality is that there’s a huge folk-centered scene in York. With most of the artists, if not all of the artists, that really shows. There’s a folk influence here.
EG: How would you describe the sort of art — music, writing, the like — that you yourself enjoy creating? Any particular influences?
SI: It’s hard to put together. I’m probably pretty generic at this point because we live in the twenty-first century, and everything is so available nowadays… I guess I would define my interests as eclectic. I wouldn’t say that there’s one singular thing that puts all of my interests together because there are so many different influences that I have throughout various mediums. I’ll at least say this: I don’t really like lowbrow stuff, honestly; that’s the best way to put it. I don’t like generic pop. I don’t like generic romance novels, anime where they’re simply fighting but there’s no point to the fighting. So I like things that are more intellectual, more psychological. My favorite band is probably Nirvana, and my favorite hip-hop producer is J Dilla. My favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger because I was, I mean, I wasn’t as bad as Holden was, but I had sort of that pessimistic outlook he had in the book, so I could really relate to his character.
EG: What are some of your goals for the next few years?
SI: As far as the blog goes, maybe have a team so I’m not putting this out only once a month because, like, with how fast everything moves and how, with the internet age, you have to put out so much content… you can get lost if you’re only posting once a month. And have it going for as long as possible because I do really believe in this blog. I ask a lot of specific questions on purpose — I do a lot of research because typically when an artist gets interviewed by, say, YDR or something like that, it’s very surface-level. There isn’t any depth to it. It’s like, hey, this is an interesting story, let’s just go through the motions, whereas I want to be deep and very specific and have the artist’s best friend learn something about them.
Professionally, I’m trying to break into digital marketing… within the next few months if I can. I’m learning a bunch of stuff on my own! It’s taxing, so hopefully something will happen.
As far as the creative stuff goes, figure out what exactly I want because there are so many different things I want to do. I just haven’t been able to decide what I really want. I might be interesting in writing a poetry chapbook at some point down the line. I’m very busy!
EG: Lastly, do you have any advice for young artists hoping to get their work out there?
SI: So when it comes to the creation process, you kind of have to a nature/nurture mindset, and what I mean by that is by nurturing, you’re creating every day, you’re writing every day, you’re practicing your craft every day. But at the same time, you can’t just be stuck in that, you can’t be locked into that. You also have to be aware of your surroundings because very often you’ll be inspired by things serendipitously and you don’t really know where it came from. Like my blog, for example, it was completely a serendipitous idea because I was just reading an interview and thought hey, what if I did that for York? Keep a little notebook with you with little ideas that pop into your mind or things you see — anything. You’ll make beautiful art with that.
And then, as far as getting out there — social media, social media, social media. Learning how to use social media tools to your advantage, since part of my job, I guess, of running a blog is how to use social media effectively. This sucks, but with Facebook you have to run ads; the Facebook algorithm doesn’t work too well anymore because it’s old and everyone’s on Facebook. If you do want to get your work out there, have the right audience see it. Then with Instagram, finding the right hashtags — you don’t want to be too specific, things that only like three people have hashtagged. At the same time, you don’t want to be too broad. Like, let’s say 21 million used that hashtag — you’re just going to get lost and you’d be hard to find. When it comes to using social media for your art, and not just as a casual and social place, it can be a great thing.
One last bit of advice… networking. Not that I’m particularly good at it, but more so, when you network, you can run into people who a few years down the line might be able to help you out. With The York Sound, for example, I knew most of the musicians and could just reach out instead of just being this guy in his bedroom or basement all day just writing stuff. Networking is vital.
Don’t forget to check out The York Sound on Instagram — and please do your part to support local artists!