Check Out Colin Watson’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Colin Watson.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My name is Colin Watson, but most of my friends just call me Watson. So I grew up moving from city to city up and down the East Coast in a bit of a messy family. When you’re young, you don’t quite realize how broken things at home are, but your mind and body notice something is wrong and start rebelling. Middle school was dark and lonely for the most part. I wasn’t an outgoing child, but I did fall in love with the stage through a local theater.

When the stage lights came on, I stopped being me and could become whoever I was playing. I loved that, though, long-term living like that doesn’t actually fix the brokenness. When I was 15, I had a spiritual experience in Alaska that changed me–I started to view my story in light of the stories of Jesus. It changed my trajectory. I started to believe that all my emptiness didn’t have to be so empty. Slowly, I found church community and by the time I got to college, was ready to start facing my upbringing. I wanted to express my emotions in some healthy way, and I was listening to a spoken word artist named Levi the Poet. I tried my hand at writing some poems myself. They were awful. Genuinely awful, and I am glad they never saw the light of day.

But, one summer during college, I went with a friend back to her childhood home and jotted down a few lines of a poem based on the journey. I kept working on it, and after a LOT of editing, had something I actually believed in. It was a beautiful story of redemption. That was the promise Jesus brought me, and I wanted to bring that story of restoration into my art. So I kept writing, trying to tell stories. I wrote stories about the first date in a corn maze, my dad threatening to kill a man, or about my friends and I visiting Bunnyman Bridge–a D.C. urban legend. I started sharing them with more people, and they seemed to affect people. I put together the stories I thought we good into an album and chapbook–Haunted Houses | Broken Homes.

It began with the same poem I wrote about my friend’s childhood home falling to pieces, and ended with a poem I wrote about rebuilding the scrapes we were left with. I even organized a show over at Imurj at the end of 2019 where I performed a few pieces from it. I could enjoy the stage and perform without losing who I was. In fact, I feel like when I perform poetry, I am more of myself than usual. So, I’ve just kept writing and decided to go under the moniker Spoken Watson.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I think the challenge for me has been pursuing poetry with gusto. I want to devout all the time in the world to it, but a million other things seem to take precedence. I had committed to publishing my chapbook in 2019, but that same year, I got sick with Lyme Disease. It’s not a well-understood disease, and it took over a year of treatments for me to get better.

In the meanwhile, I had had to drop out of grad school and nearly quit my job because of how sick I was. But, I wanted to see my dream for Haunted House | Broken Homes come to life. When I was finally better in 2020, the whole world shut down and all of the venues I would share poetry at suddenly disappeared.

I tried online poetry shows, but they were never quite the same. I am a bit of a perfectionist–I felt like my poor quality web camera and microphone detracted from my poetry and so it just never felt worth it. I think 2022 will be different though. I have some goals for the year, particularly to publish another chapbook.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
So I am a spoken word poet, which is a bit like overenthusiastic English majors trying to rap with absolutely no sense of rhythm. I got introduced to it at hardcore concerts, so in the midst of a bunch of bands screaming at the top of their lungs and a bunch of teenage dudes throwing themselves into the pit, a guy would get up and shout some weird poetry at us.

That guy, Chris, is now a friend of mine and we’ve gotten to perform a few shows together. My particular poetry tends to be very wordy and has a storyteller focus to it. My friend’s joke is that I just enjoy pulling out every SAT word I can think of and shoving them into my poems. The work that I am most proud of is a poem called Bunnyman Bridge. It’s a story of my friends and I visiting the titular bridge, but it’s more about the broken homes we all grew up in and how our stories ended in high school.

To promote the piece, I made a costume to dress up as the Bunnyman ax murderer, complete with a creepy bunny mask! The mask is super creepy, and so it grabs attention. But the poem itself has tended to resonate with a lot of people–it’s the universal experience of losing friends to circumstance and poor split-second decisions.

Who else deserves credit in your story?
The two biggest influences in my poetry career have been Levi the Poet and DS Will. I don’t know Levi personally, and I doubt he will ever even learn my name, but Levi is the artist that I aspire to be one day. His albums have carried me through terrible seasons and his performances inspire me. His album, Correspondence: A Fiction, is a masterpiece of poetry and music and story and love and loss and, it’s just, wonderful.

My next album is directly inspired by the dialectic structure of Correspondence: A Fiction–two people writing letters back and forth to one another. DS, on the other hand, is a local Raleigh poet. DS found me performing at an open mic and invited me to headline a show in 2018. It was the first show I ever performed a full set for, and it got me hooked.

DS is a huge supporter of the poetry community in Raleigh and Durham, and before the pandemic was elevating artists in shows almost every month. His own poems are incredible too–the man is just a talented wordsmith and inspires me to get better daily.

Pricing:

• My chapbook, Haunted Houses | Broken Homes, is $10 online, or you can just shoot me a DM and I’ll send you a digital copy
• My album, Haunted Houses | Broken Homes, is free on streaming sites

Contact Info:

• Email: spokenwatson@gmail.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/spokenwatson/
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCgKnjTMbNDak8YEH6OwGbxw