The poet and essayist Alana Cloud-Robinson emerges onto my screen, bare-faced, in the middle of an unseasonal L.A. storm. The wind whooshes behind her. “It’s funny when it gets like this,” she says, a woman who has grown up and lived in the famously sunny city her whole life. “Everyone forgets how to behave. The traffic stops, we don’t know how to deal with anything.”

The (usually) balmy climes of the Los Angeleno hills have played their role in the distinctive upbringing of Alana, and how she sees herself in relationship to the world around her. At 16, she was a young Black girl with a French mother, reading the Beat poets and imagining herself as one of them, rowdy and rum-soaked but trapped in the body of an adolescent girl. She grew up in the hills above the Palisades, between Malibu and Santa Monica, in a largely white area. “I wanted to be this road-weary beatnik, but I think I took the Greyhound bus one time from Delaware to somewhere and… that was it,” she laughs.

After school, Alana forewent college—“I felt like I wasn't smart enough to go”—but eventually found her way back to words, in the form of poetry.

“L.A. is a weird place, there’s a tremendous amount of façade,” she tells me over our video call, resting her face on her palm. “Everyone here wants to be famous, everybody has a friend who made their millions on TikTok, everybody feels fated and destined for something.You have to dig beyond that, you have to try to get beneath that to understand what people are saying. And that’s why I think I’ve ended up choosing to do what I do now.”

What Alana does now could be considered the foil to façade: she draws on her personal experiences and her imaginings to create rich, lyrical worlds in her poetry—her first book, The Artists Are Frightened, was published in 2022, she has another coming out soon—and sharp, observational prose which she publishes online in the form of short stories.

“We’re in such a culture where everything has become very manicured, very airbrushed, very perfect. People want to present the best version of themselves—in life and on social media. But it’s amazing what you can do when you lay yourself bare.”

Alana shares her work primarily on social media, to her followers, but that’s mostly because she is, she tells me, “extremely impatient.”

“I got tired of waiting on other people to tell me whether or not I could say what I wanted to say. So I just started formatting my work and saw where it went.”

Many of her pieces are deeply personal. One recent piece published to her Instagram feed is about the intricacies of a first date and the staggered interactions that follow between two people which trace the contours of desire, intimacy, insecurity and uncertainty. In it, the main character reflects on how she feels watching a waitress at the restaurant. “The slender pretty hostess will greet you cheerfully and you will surveil the entire length and breadth of her figure—better than most, certainly better than yours,” it reads.

After it was published, an internet netizen reached out to tell Alana that she couldn’t possibly feel that way, because Alana was a model. “I’ve found that there are areas of vulnerability that culturally we’ve come to accept,” Alana muses on our call. “But we’re not ready to accept vulnerability in more complex areas, we’re still so uncomfortable with things like jealousy, or covetousness, or deep insecurity.”

Which is really the reason that she writes and continues to bare herself through pen and paper. “It’s these feelings, these emotions, that I think you can only really transmute and move through if you’re vulnerable and open. And most likely when you do so, other people will go, ‘Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed, but I’ve had that thought too.’”

Alana is an advocate for embracing the different facets of openness—not just the beautiful, soft forms that leave you feeling warm and generous. She is in it for the rough and tumble of the ride, too.

“I don’t want to just be like, here’s my open heart, like a flower. I want the mud and the muck inside of us, you know, the dirty underbrush, as well.”

For Alana, that’s about accepting one’s flaws and failings in the moment. Alana stopped drinking in 2023, and was disappointed when her initial convictions that she had undergone the most dramatic of transformations— “I was like, woah, I’m enlightened now”—gave way to the same worries and traumas that had plagued her in the past. “When the old demons kept coming, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? I just announced to all these people that I’m fixed. I’m perfect.”

But it gave way to a reflection: one of the ‘acceptable’ modes of vulnerability around us is a kind of retrospective vulnerability, a metamorphosis narrative that pushes all the negativity into some past version of oneself, no longer to be bothered with. “I see it all the time on Instagram,” she says. “You know: ‘I was in a really dark place a year ago—but now, everything’s changed. Now, I’ve arrived at this different stage. I have gained a new perspective and I am doing so much better.’”

While it’s positive to see people admitting that things were not always as rosy as they are now, Alana sees within those kinds of admissions a negation of the constant struggle for actualisation, for growth, for change.

“They sort of talk about it like it’s all done. Like, I changed my life, or got sober, or got really fit—and it’s all better now. We’re in a culture where everyone wants to appear transformed. But the thing is that we still carry things around. Whatever our issues were—even as this ‘new’ person.”

“Nobody posts and says, ‘I’m in a terrible place. I know things will get better, but I’m in a terrible place’. But I think that that would be a powerful thing to read.”

And so, the journey goes on—one of growth and degrowth and finding oneself again and coming back to oneself again. “It’s a continually progressing thing. It’s a constant evolution.”

@alanacloudrobinson

Photographer: Alexandra Lopez