What is at the Centre of Your World? #3

By Piper Delilah / March 2025

A Conversation with Sá Shellard

Brazilian-born poet and model Sá draws from her days as a “former escape artist,” gathering fragments of lived experience and stitching them into musings, meditations, and poetic prose. Her work exists in the liminal space of memory, identity, and emotion—an evolving collection of allegorical narratives still taking shape. Sá invites readers into her “non-place”—the somnambulist’s playground, a complex and, self-indulgent emotional landscape shaped entirely by memory, untouched by reason. Rooted in esoteric teachings, her work is meant to incant—when spoken aloud, words should be carefully savoured or spat out as the reader sees fit.

Piper: Question one, what is at the centre of your world?

Sá: I actually had to think about this, because I don’t like to reply to things without a minute of thought, because if I just blurt out what I want to blurt out, it’s going to be love. Obviously, it’s going to be love. But then I have been thinking about it very deeply and very honestly, and I think love is a symptom of something deeper that is at the centre of my world; that would be beauty. I’ve arrived at the word beauty. And obviously when you think about beauty, we think about form and we think about what’s on the surface essentially. And to an extent, again, the symptom is popping through, as a bird pops through.  But I think it is the closest thing I have as a tool of the spirit, the language of the spirit. I use beauty as a way to access that.

Piper: I think beauty is also love though, as you said as a symptom. When you see beauty in something you love it. Anais Nin says in a lecture that jealousy is just love. For when you are jealous, you are desiring something you think beautiful or something you would want for yourself, isn’t that just a form of love masked? We are talking perhaps in material terms, but you are jealous of something for you love it.

Sá: I think for me, my trajectory has been about translating that unspoken, unsaid essence into being, and I have done that with beauty. You know what I mean when I talk about beauty, it is so much deeper than, I think we give it credit for. It’s absolutely visceral. It’s at the core. It’s the unconscious come to conscious, landscape essentially. It allows me to jump in and out of realities and different ways of being, beauty allows me to see the world charitably. It allows me to give space for things to merely exist as they are. I am someone, I have come to realise, who believes all truths. It is sort of like the existentialist in me that’s like, if everything is meaningless, then everything has meaning. How can I communicate that? how would I want to communicate that? I would like to do it through the language of the spirit, which is beauty.

Piper: Since I have known you, you have wanted to write and we did a bit of that together last year. It is the classic question, why do you write? Why do you feel inclined to write? I feel as though you are certainly directing toward it.

Sá: Yes absolutely, the reason I am being pulled to write more often and more seriously recently, is that I have all this excess cosmic energy in my body. Like a shooting star that doesn’t have the sky to play around in, it is kind of like a pinball machine Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding. It hasn’t had anywhere to sort of go? I think amongst other things in my life, having all that energy inside of me has weighed me down quite a lot. I think my way of expelling the inner thorns has been through love and romantic love, yet that aspect of creation, I think I told you about this on the phone, that aspect of creation is what I have been needing this whole time. So at this point, I write to alleviate, it’s a way of bleeding myself. I also, this probably sounds incredibly self-indulgent…I honestly write to exist, as someone who understands solitude and loneliness very well as we have spoken about, it’s a way that I come to be. I am not so interested in the whole idea of legacy or being remembered, I just want to exist.

Piper: I put it to you on the phone the other day, I have been talking a lot to people about the perfect sentence. When you write one about yourself or how you feel, you don’t even realise you are writing it as you are writing. You put the full stop and you read back and you realise, I have just nailed that. In the sense that you have put something down that enables you to understand yourself in physical form.

Sá: Yes! It’s the idea of the phantom limb, a lot of creatives, a lot of writers have this unspoken relationship to this phantom part of themselves that needs to be materialised in some way. You just know that it is there. I think a lot of us feel like that, a lot of us get disconnected from that creative aspect of ourselves… You know, I am just listening to my heart and it doesn’t need to be much more than that. At this point in time, I am a baby writer, I am okay with that. There is a lot of humility in learning, it is such a beautiful process to open myself up, that I am an absolute amateur. My sense of voice and expression is going to develop, but I am just grateful and happy, and as you said, when you get the perfect sentence, it makes you feel alive and whole. It makes you feel as though you have had this imaginary friend for a long time, and you are like ‘Guys, this is my imaginary friend’ and they are like ‘I can’t fucking see him… what are you talking about…’ When you get that writing, when you get that satisfaction, then suddenly…

Piper:… everyone can see the invisible friend.

Sá: Yeh, then they look at you and go ‘Ahhhh, I GET IT.’ You have just outlined your essence so other people can see it, and they are in there with you at the same time, author, narrator, everybody is just there.

Piper: If every time you walked into a room a song played, what would the song be? One of my favourite questions.

Sá: I am going to butcher the name… ‘Crest’ by Nursat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook. It’s the song of longing.

Piper: So most writers are also readers, so what is a book you feel in the past year that has helped you form your writing? Not necessarily imitation, just a book that has helped you find your style.

Sá: I am glad you asked this question and not what your favourite read of the last year is, for you will know, since you were the one that slipped it literally into my mail. (Steppenwolf / Herman Hesse). My life has been forever changed after that in all honesty. Most recently I have read Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-Brazilian writer. I don’t know if you have heard of her before, she is basically like a Brazilian Kafka, she writes stream-of-consciousness. I have been funnily enough quite obsessed with researching her for ages, she obviously writes in her first language which is Portuguese, which is my first language. I asked my Dad who still lives in Brazil if he could send me some works in Portuguese, as I feel I want to read it in my first language. I just finished Aguaviva, I can’t even explain how… words cannot describe how validated I feel in her writing. It’s slightly annoying, she picks up on things, niche experiences or thoughts that come through my own mind that I have been having since I was a child. Essentially there is no real narrative, she is talking through the moment with you, and you are right there with her. It’s a meditation of sorts, she sort of points you towards different areas of life and within yourself and your environment. There are a few pages where she talks about the mirror specifically, she talks about the gaze of the mirror and how mirrors are like pathways to sanctity, and does the mirror really come to if it is pointed towards itself. It’s one thing that essentially indicates there is eternity, when you see a mirror infront of another mirror going into infinity. When I read that I was like ‘Come the fuck on!’ I remember being four, having a glimpse of like my conscious self, I remember looking in the mirror and the first thing I tried to do was put my hand through it. I had such an interesting relationship with mirrors, where I wasn’t interested in seeing my reflection, I was just interested in seeing what the mirror was seeing at all times. I really did believe, really really did believe with my whole being, and deep down I still do, that there is a whole world behind the mirror. Through the mirror. I don’t think it’s mad I think it’s beautiful. I feel there are things you come equipped with when you enter this world, your toolset, your spiritual toolset. I think this is something she touches upon, she talks about the personality of flowers, she talks about the depth of breath and water and animals and death. She talked about the mirror and it is exactly…

Piper:… in tune with your own mind.

Sá: Exactly.

Piper: When similarities occur, you realise your thoughts are individual but they are also part of a whole wider picture.

Sá: It’s a crazy thing, because I feel if I were to meet her I wouldn’t even need to say anything, I think she would already know. I guess it just makes me think about my relationship to people, to the people that come into my life. It’s just so moorish knowing people, having relationships, such a delicious thing.

Piper: I keep saying to everyone ‘People are the thing,’ something a previous partner would tell when I was off people. I would say ‘I don’t like people’ over and over, and he would say ‘You’re mad! People are the thing.’ Now I have started to truly realise.

Sá: People are great, Who would I be without them? But the thing is I love solitude, we love it so deeply, but equally I just love yapping.

Piper: Next question, if you had a box of everything you had ever lost, what would you look for first?

Sá: I had this ring which was moonstone and I was just obsessed with it, three-tiered moonstone that I bought in Exeter at uni. I lost it and I fucking sobbed, and I am not super attached to material stuff because I have travelled a lot throughout my life. But I was really upset about that, and if I could meet her again, I would probably like… swallow it. The second thing, which is quite a strange one, I lost my original laugh. I lost my actual laugh, I don’t mean it in the sense that I can’t laugh, I can. In that box I would look for my true laugh. But my laugh now is other peoples stitched up. It actually kind of annoys me sometimes, because one of my favourite things about people is… I will fucking fall in love with a motherfucker if I hear him cackling. True life experience, I feel like the idea of laughter in itself is again, second to beauty, another aspect of beauty. So I miss my laugh and I cannot remember what it sounds like.

Piper: A couple of years ago I watched True Romance, the film where Hans Zimmer does the score, and I LOVED it. Patricia Arquette plays the female lead, her laugh is the best laugh in cinema. I got so obsessed with it that I used to sit on YouTube and listen to her laugh.

Sá: Really!

Piper: I thought it was just so good. A couple of weeks later I realised, ‘Oh I am now laughing like her.’ Then my laughed changed and has never gone back since. My laugh before was gone, but if the new one has come from Patricia Arquette then I am not going to be too sad about it.

Sá: You get to a stage in life where you realise you aren’t an “individual” you really are a patchwork of people you have loved, or things you have loved, or people you have despised even. In one way it validates giving love  without having to worry so much whether it’s coming back or not (but it always does.)

Piper: Where do you get your kicks? Kicks in the sense of certain films, literature, music, drugs, environment, what gives you your life highs?

Sá: People and I think, it’s a hard one because I quite literally love almost everything. But I also love everything that isn’t in the world anymore, tangible things that you can touch. I love concepts, I love preoccupations, I am deeply in love and perturbed with the world. It’s a little intense sometimes, there is suffering, a lot of grief. That is something, that for people like me we are always going in and out of. Especially with my own specific experiences with identity. I am just a big believer in the plight of the human, I get my kicks from the real and the imaginary, even the mundane. I feel incredibly honoured to have gotten the opportunity to be given a body. I find it really fucking annoying in one aspect, there are things I want to do and the body hinders me. Yet I am very grateful to have a body to experience and sense.

Piper: What is something you hope people notice about you when they first meet you?

Sá: I hope that they notice that there is a lot of hard work that goes into living with your heart outside of your chest. There is a lot of strength in fighting grief and bitterness, I think effervescent people can come off naïve, which is totally fine, I accept that too. I think there is something to say about naivety. It would be nice for people to understand the amount of work and strength it takes. I don’t know if that is egotistical but that is how it feels sometimes. What I have understood about people in my life is that those who are able to see the world through a lens of genuine compassion and radical love, are people who have gone through the depths and pits of themselves. The absolute underground of the self, and you never know what you are going to fucking find there. Sometimes you don’t get out. It’s brave to take that plight into the darkness and unknown of yourself.

Piper: Voila, that concludes the interview. Thankyou Sá.

Sá: Thankyou Piper.