Do you use a pseudonym? Why or why not? 
I do not use a pseudonym.As a person and author, my name remains Tukur Loba Ridwan (last, middle, and first, respectively). I wish I could’ve conceived a pseudonym. Yet, I feel more whole with this name, being an intricate identity I’m yet to detach from.

What first motivated you to write/create art?
The urge to create art (poetry) began with pain, usually from rejection, my sensitivity, and vulnerability. It was more like a breaking point for me, back in university, 12 years ago. I was just a teen (eighteen; pun intended) trying to experience intimacy outside of my family and friendship. Aside from a wonderful family, I had good friends in university, some of whom were also poets and writers whose musings and drafts I enjoyed reading for pastime. But I wanted something more sentient, which I felt that dating and romance could give me. So, the pain and urge to write began from the difficulty of achieving that intimacy. I’d blame my hormones for that. My restless and chaotic mind found relief from writing love and heartbreak poems, not to mention my grouse with societal complexities across morality, identity crisis, and social imbalance. I was an idealist of some sort, with a knack for philosophy, being a student of Political Science. Poetry became my sweetest form of release and vessel of intellectual expression.

As a student of Literature in high school, with fond memories of poems like On His Blindness by John Milton, Songs of Sorrow by Kofi Awonoor, and The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, I was fortunate to have kept the old literature textbooks filled with lots of 20th-century poems. So, I’d read and learn the lyrical and metrical techniques from every poem I studied, then practice what I learnt by writing my own poem, then show my friends to read. They seemed to enjoy my writing for a beginner, and their encouragement pushed me further. From a mere pastime, poetry for me quickly became an addiction, as I’d always visit the school library to find poetry collections and anthologies on different themes, to broaden my horizon in this genre of literature. I’d also borrow poetry books from friends who had one or ten, then the rest was history. 

If you could have any writer/artist, living or dead, as a mentor, who would you choose? 
William Butler Yeats is one classical poet who easily comes to mind, for sentimental reasons. He’s my birthday mate. June 13, a Gemini like myself.Aside from that, I greatly benefited from the personal mentorship of a veteran Nigerian poet, scholar and ideologue, Funsho Richard, for eight years. His consistent support and guidance expanded my approach to poetry by helping me tap into my insights on identity, psychology and mental health; humanities and postmodernism. With Funsho, poetry became more of an incursion and interrogation of the logical and emotional depth of my humanity, so I couldn’t ask for any better. 

Is there one part of your creation process that’s harder for you? 
The hardest part of my creation/writing process is determining when my poem is complete. But it’s getting easier with time. I could easily pride myself in finishing a 25-line draft in ten minutes, because that’s the best way for me to pin down a burning muse or conflicting thoughts for clarity. But after finishing the draft, I perused the poem for missing details multiple times, especially in the aspects of showing and telling. I try to make my poems connect better by demonstrating practical or surreal details with imagery, allusion, metaphor, personification, etc., for literary elaboration. I also use storytelling in between the rhetoric to “show”, rather than using abstract descriptions to “tell”. So, this is where the challenge is for me, because my poem has to manifest my ideas with tight rhetorical elements, storytelling, and brevity. No vague expressions, no verbose fillers. Hence, I strive for easy-to-grasp mental pictures for a reader to connect and relate with my narratives, and that’s where the real work is. It's not necessarily the end of the poem that completes it, but the in-betweens that connect the dots in a narrative, confessional, absurdist, surrealist, or didactic poem, etc.

Talk about the moment you knew you wanted to be a creator. 
That was about two years since I started writing poetry in October 2013. I was a sucker for classic R&B music before then, and any lyrical art always appealed to my creative sense. But the problem was singing. I couldn’t sing. I remember learning to write my own lyrics in 2011 after listening to Donell Jones’ sophomore album, Where I Wanna Be. But I couldn’t find a melody for my lyrics till songwriting became a thing of the past within a year after I enrolled in tertiary education. 

Then, when poetry came by, I felt that I still had that creativity and zeal to write heartfelt words in lines, not in paragraphs. So, my university experiences sealed my bond with poetry. I just kept going till poetry became my second nature. Poetry eclipsed my academic focus for some time because multitasking wasn’t my strong suit. So, I divided my focus between studies and poetry, as the latter snatched my attention from everything else. 

Then when I won the Bridgitte Poirson Poetry Contest in March 2018, published my first poetry chapbook in April 2019 (A Boy’s Tears on Earth’s Tongue), attended the Terrifik Book Chat with students of my alma mater (Terrifik Book Chat), cohorted as a poetry mentor with SprinNG Writing Fellowship and Transcendence Masterclass in 2020, and garnered praises all along, I already knew I was born for this.

Do you have a piece that you created early in your career that makes you cringe? Will you ever go back and fix it so it can be submitted somewhere?
Of course, I have pieces. Pieces! And I’ve been working on many of them already, with so much rigour. 

The tea here is that my poem, “Out of Earth”, was first drafted in 2015. I cringed when I read it again in June this year, but what I wrote then was the height of my muse when I was so engrossed with Astrology and zodiac signs. So, I rewrote everything with better context, for a better output, and I thank Zoetic Press and Non-Binary Review for accepting and publishing the poem. Also, I’m glad that I’ve come so far with almost a thousand unpublished poems, and I still work on many of them while writing new poems.  

What is your biggest creative doubt?  
My bits of creative doubts are yet to compound into a single “big” one. I must confess that rejections fuel these doubts sometimes, but I am surmounting them with each publication milestone. For example, I still strive for nominations like the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, yet I don’t doubt bagging them. I only need to intensify my literary pursuits by further reading, writing, submitting, and researching the global literary, academic, and creative landscape for more opportunities.

You’re stranded on a desert island - what three creative tools do you want with you? 
Books,stationery, and a phone. Hope I’d find food and water around, too, so I wouldn’t die.