Elle Banes Sanchez is Single-Handedly Tackling The Literacy Crisis
In a world full of endless reposts and AI slop, it's quite refreshing to see multidisciplinary creatives like Elle Banes Sanchez conntinue to rise above the noise. Her latest project? A new poetry book named "Parallel To You" which explores thought provoking and self reflective themes of grief, renewal and humanity. We had the chance to ask Elle what this venture means to her and what she hopes peope take away from her art.
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JEWELIE: When did you first discover your love for poetry and expressing yourself through the medium?
ELLE: My grandfather used to drop me off at our local library when I was a kid, and that’s when I fell in love with poetry, prose and literature— Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, H.P Lovecraft, to name a few favorites (I have a bunch of poetry by Anne Sexton tattoo'd on my body). I’d spend hours reading and turned to writing as my primary form of expression, translating my feelings when I didn’t know how to find the words in casual conversation. Typography, optical illusions, exaggeration— art within language captivated my attention from a young age.
Flash forward to now, I graduated college with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing with a focus in Philosophy, and I finally self-published my first poetry book. It has become the perfect reflection of human flaw— of mistakes, of what it means to live through your teens and twenties. It's chaotic. It's all over the place. It can be romantic, and my entire life has been encapsulated with young love, desire and distraction. In hindsight, I can see that so much of it was performance— a yearning, a desire for love and validation. That's not a flaw unique to me, it's what it means to be human, because to be human is to have ego. Our greatest desires are illusions of the self. It is all context, and it is all perspective.
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JEWELIE: After 10-15 years of creating and conceptualizing, why did now feel like the right moment to launch this new chapter?
ELLE: The most difficult question any artist faces is: where do I stop? Because we don't stop living or growing, we don't stop learning, and as we create, our ideas keep evolving as time moves forward. That's why so many creatives can't finish their projects— why they can't complete something and share it with the world. It's never finished, and they can't let go. Most of us are either living in the past, which is trauma that leads to real psychological and physical consequences, or we're living in the future, which breeds anxiety and overthinking. Sometimes, it's both at once. This is what I dealt with, and it wasn’t until recently where my grandfather passed after I moved back home to help take care of him and my grandmother who had cancer, that I realized the world isn’t stopping for anyone, and I will never be ready.
I was overthinking what people might say, as the book contains versions of myself that I have outgrown, but then I realized— that fear is the whole point. I've been working on this poetry book for over a decade. When I thought I finally ready to publish, I kept changing and removing poems, and writing new ones because as I was hand-making pieces to be photographed along with the book, the poems evolved and transformed as the pieces were altered with each sample being made.
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JEWELIE: As a photographer and fashion maven, in what ways do your creative outlets merge? What does it mean to you and how does this come to fruition in your new book?
ELLE: Along with my degree in writing and literature, I also have a certification in holistic health and wellness coaching and nutrition. I’m implementing these to my career as a newly published author, poet and multidisciplinary artist, to combine personal style and poetry within something that's more tangible and interconnected, in order to create through unblocked intuition.
My goal is to explore poetry and prose within the collective mediums of fabric, clothing, movement and the human body—as a canvas and an ever-evolving series—illustrating my growth, demonstrating my love for Christ, moving away from self-deprecation into creating through unconditional love as a means of direct connection to God, while educating others throughout my journey.
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JEWELIE: What do you hope others take away from reading?
ELLE: If you read biblical literature and classic literature— the great books, the works of Milton, Jung, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Dante, and Plato, to name a few, you’d understand that the end times are here— but it’s not that the world is ending, the world as we know it is ending. We are entering a new era and currently, we are living in a global techno-capitalist hegemony with our brains atrophying in this digital AI age. We are in a literacy crisis, and reading/writing is power.
Regarding my book, I hope people, especially young queer women of color, the hopeless romantics, the people struggling with their identity, feel familiarity in this work, because so many of us live as an oxymoron. We're constantly seesawing between what we think we want and what we actually need—whether that's in our relationships, our material lives, or our feelings. That's the meaning of ‘Parallel To You’: the familiarity within chaos. The anxiety masked with peace. The desire to create something beautiful, while recognizing the ugliness inside of it— and finding ways to appreciate that ugliness, finding beauty inside of it, because I, we, wouldn't be here without all of the bad that came before the good.
Parallel things travel together — close enough to define each other by proximity, but structurally, they can never touch. That paradox is the heart of this book: Connection without contact, as a reminder that we are all one. That is the ultimate paradox, and the ultimate illusion. 'Parallel To You' is inspired by the fact that scientifically, straight lines don't exist in nature. Narrow anything down to the molecular level, and you'll find it's never truly straight. It's an illusion. It can be seen as a reminder that it's important to innovate on your own terms— not on the terms of the idea of perfection that was never real to begin with.
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