Lujaine Asamarai (12), while just in high school, is already a published author. In early August of last year Asamarai published her book Pain and Prosperity. She is working on her second book Heal Me, releasing soon.
Asamarai describes her love of writing developing from a young age and the way she used it to process deep emotions. She said, “My earliest memory of writing was when I was 10 or 11 years old…I didn’t really understand that it was poetry, I was just writing to process emotions and it became a coping mechanism and later I understood how to turn it into an art form.”
In her book Pain and Prosperity, Asamarai focuses on the complex topics of relationships, grief, and healing. She said, “My first book is mainly about interpersonal relationships and processing through heartbreak, feelings of abandonment, loss, death, grief. The beginning part of the book is a lot of validation through the intensity of the emotions and it slowly goes into healing from them and accepting what happened.”
She describes her connection to the book and the value she holds in it when she said, “…It helps me process things and gives me a better quality of life. It’s like a therapy session and I find it really important, because a lot of people can’t express their emotions like that. Not everyone can write poetry, but everyone can feel poetry. So I understand it’s part of my job as a person who writes poetry to use it to do good for people, and to let people know they’re not alone on things.”
She said, “I’ve noticed a lot of personal growth throughout the book and what I’m writing and I feel that it’s freeing to me and I hope that it’s freeing to everyone who reads the book.”
Asamarai wrote this book with the intention of helping people heal and to help people know that they are not alone. She said, “I want people to heal and I want them to feel valid in things. My approach of healing is that you can’t heal if your not validated first, because a lot of people are stuck in their healing process and their questioning if their pain is real or not and if it’s worth being healed…my goal in the book and all of the poetry Im writing is validating people and letting people know that your allowed to feel pain…”
Asamarai confirms that poetry is more than a list of rules in writing. She explains her misassumptions at first when starting poetry. She said, “I would encourage everybody to try poetry because I initially was in school and I had learnt about what poetry was, I thought it was just about garbage because they taught us about the rules…and honestly I don’t follow any of those rules…art form can happen a lot of different ways it doesn’t have to be according to anything, so just express yourself and do good by it.”
Asamarai leaves with advice on starting a journey of writing poetry. She explains that writing poetry needs come from passion and authenticity. She said, “Don’t have your fixation on writing a book. With poetry specifically I would tell people that you never sit down and force yourself to write a poem because it will not be good poetry. Poetry has to be something that happens during the peak … of an emotion or just something that comes out from the heart…if you focus on the end goal being to collect a book and publish it, then you’re going to end up with not great quality stuff.”
Asamarai gives a peek into what her second book Heal Me is about; she said, “…it has three chapters, the first one is about heartbreak and interpersonal relationships, the second one is about addiction, the third one is about depression, psychosis, and general mental health issues…all of which end in a healing conclusion.”
Asamarai’s book Pain and Prosperity is available on Amazon in the form of paperback and digital.