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Tiffany Paynter fell in love with poetry at the age of 11 reading pieces by Robert Frost and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She began writing her own poetry at age 12 as a way of communicating her emotions and working through problems. In recent years, Tiffany has become a regular performer at Chewstick and recently spoke and performed at the TEDx Bermuda event where she received two standing ovations and brought the audience to tears with her poem Daddy, a heartfelt confrontation between father and daughter. Here Tiffany shares with us her thoughts, opinions and dreams for Bermuda.

 

 

 

What is the hardest decision you have ever made?

"To love the woman I was in love with. I recently decided that I wouldn’t let fear prevent me from loving or living from a place of love. So the hardest decision I ever made was to love someone that I was afraid to love and to be brave enough to love her and tell her so."

 

What do you like most about yourself?

"That I am a highly teachable person and that my heart and mind are emotionally and spiritually mature."

 

What do you like least about yourself?

"I hate how quickly I make assumptions. It’s one of those vices I do alot of work to resolve and I am very vigilant in monitoring my thoughts so I can weed out assumptions but it’s hard it’s very very difficult cause the thing about assumptions is that half the time you don’t even know you’ve made an assumption about something or someone one."

 

What do you see as your life-anchors, what really drives you?

"When you say life anchors I immediately think people and poetry...sometimes it’s the people that have written poetry. But I often feel like I have an army of guardians lighting lamp posts in the darkness...laying themselves on the tracks to keep me on course. People like Stephen Broomes, Carlin Thompson, and most recently Saddhu Agam and Gordan Johnson. Poets like Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Lauryn Hill - their words and lives motivate me."

 

What do you feel deeply impassioned about?

"Everything...except fruit cake, lunges and running shoes."

 

 

Tiffany performing at TEDx Bermuda

 

 

 

What behaviour pattern in others do you most dislike?

"Narcissism. You know those ‘Beware of Dog’ signs...I wish they had a sign like that for narcissists. When you look at so many of the “evil” deeds committed and being committed or even if you just look at small selfish acts there’s an underlying root cause that is narcissism. But that’s not my a-ha moment...M. Scott Peck wrote a whole book about it called ‘People of the Lie’."

 

What do you like best about your life?

"That I am alive. That I’m not walking around like a vampire or zombie, numb to everything, part of an army of the living dead. That’s what I appreciate most about my life, that I am strong enough to continue to feel and to endure and cherish all the feelings that come with living life alive. I mean if life could be simplified as a journey from birth to death...I wanna minimize the amount of dying, metaphorically speaking, going on in the middle. You know - I wanna arrive at death as alive as ever."

 

What sort of people are your closest friends?

"Kind people. Kind people are my kind of my of people. I surround myself with people who are emotionally secure and display emotional intelligence..which is just a roundabout way of saying people who are compassionate. My friends don’t just make me wanna be a better person they actually make me better - less judgmental, less selfish etc. My closest friends are patient, creative, intelligent, kind, spiritual, and good looking. All my closest friends are coincidentally cute, sexy, beautiful people."

 

What keeps you awake at night?

"Ideas. Words. Poetry. Moments and conversations from the day are sometimes re-winded and replayed. But yeah the only thing that keeps me awake when I’m trying to sleep or should be sleeping are lines of poetry. I’ve written about 90% of my poems between 12am and 6am."

 

What was the most risky thing you have ever done in your life?

"Apart from a para-sailing tour that was not supposed to be so risky but resulted in me plummeting from the sky I’d say the riskiest thing I ever did on purpose was handing in a two-week notice, with no other job prospects, in the middle of the worst global economic recession since the Great Depression."

 

Who would you most like to have as a mentor?

"It’d be a three way tie between Mos Def, Toni Morrison and Anna Deavere Smith. All three are brilliant storytellers, furthermore their wisdom and influence is humbling and awe-inspiring. But from the pool of equally wonderful people who I’ve actually had a conversation with... it’s another three way tie between Gordan Johnson, Reginald ‘Sifu’ Cann, and Heather Nova. Maybe I’m greedy but all of their guidance at the same time would be just fine with me, they say good things come in threes."

 

If you could step out of your current role or career and try something completely new, what would you be doing?

"Another career? Weeelll by day I’d be a massage therapist and by night I’d be a masked vigilante with a black belt in Aikido."

 

If you had a magic wand and could make three wishes for Bermuda, what would they be?

"That our justice system was actually just. That our island was more spiritual and less religious. And I'd wish for Bermuda to experience a cultural renaissance that lasts for a 100 years."

 

Who would you like to trade places with for one week?

"Will Smith! Definitely Will Smith. I know you're probably thinking that I'd wanna be him because he's tall, handsome, and filthy rich. But I only want be him because he's Jada Pinkett-Smith`s husband."

 

When future historians look back at our current era, how do you think it will be judged?

"It all depends on who is writing this history and who is doing the judging."