Dear Outer Space

New Name: Laura Desiano

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 17:09:00 +0000

I am doing the unthinkable: changing the name under which I publish. No longer the cumbersome and all-too-common Laura E. Davis, now writing as Laura Desiano. Not married, just using my partner's name, which is also our son's surname. I wanted this to be a quick transition, but I realize it's more like months or years as I eventually publish more work under my new name.

I am okay with distancing myself from my old name. There are thousands of people with my old name and too many are writers. I like the clean sound of my new name. It feels right, and sounds right, and makes searching for me on Google much more straight forward.

At readings I'll also use this name. Not sure how I will introduce myself. Maybe my last name is less important in person unless it's a writing connection. Business cards can take care of that.

I also need a true website. No one blogs anymore. This space is still useful, with lots of content on chapbook promotion. That I am changing my name makes no difference to what I've written here. It lives.

And I will now live in this liminal transitional space between identities, between designations, just between.

#Resist by Listening: Three Podcasts for Activists

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 17:18:00 +0000

With so much fake news flying around out there on social media, and with *real* news being so freaking devastating, activists can easily get burnt out just trying to stay informed. Plus, you know, girls gotta make dinner. Enter podcasts! I've found podcasts are an awesome way to stay current and informed during this administration, and they have the added benefit of being multitask-friendly. I listen to podcasts while I cook, fold laundry, ride public transit -- basically all day long. Plus my 10-week-old son happily coos along thinking there's someone in the room when I have to duck out and hit the loo. I suspect this won't work once he gets to be more of a toddler, but I'm soaking it up for now.

There are three podcasts I'm listening to right now that have been especially informative and also fun. I think my listening skills are improving too because long-form audio really allows podcasters to delve deep into issues and personal stories. So, without further ado here are my three fave activist-friendly podcasts of the moment:

West Wing Weekly: Fans of early aughts TV drama West Wing might already be fans of this amazing podcast. Hosted by composer-musician Hrishikesh Hirway and actor Joshua Malina who played Will Bailey on West Wing, this podcast is a must-listen for both fans of the show and newcomers. They break down every episode from each of their unique perspectives, they've had pretty much everyone who's been on West Wing as a guest on the show including Rob Lowe, Richard Schiff, Bradley Whitford, Dulé Hill, and Janel Moloney. There's a lot of dorky riffing going on, but also fascintingly in-depth discussions on topics such as veterans, American history, sexism in television and politics, racism, and anti-Antisemitism (Malina is Jewish and invited a rabbi on the show a couple times, so I've learned a lot about Judaism). Plus, an added bonus for literary-types: these two guys are incredibly intelligent word nerds and they love inventing goofy terms specific to the podcast (there's a glossary on their FAQ page). If you've never seen West Wing, it's on Netflix so you could have fun listening while you watch (though it's hard not to binge-watch). Definitely subscribe!
Suggest First Listen: 1.10: In Excelsis Deo with Richard Schiff, who breaks down thinking about how moving the story for this episode was.

Pod Save America: I've only listened to a few of episodes of this podcast, mostly because it's more straight current events and I find I need a little pop culture with my news. However, podcasters Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor do make this an informational and passionate listen. Their mission, as describved on their website reads, "We couldn’t find a place to talk about politics the way actual human beings talk. So we decided to create one." While they are three white guys talking about politics, they make a point to bring on more marginalized voices, such as the first episode when they interview Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, the two architects of the Women's March on Washington. This podcast is a great example of white folks using their privilege to elevate the voices of minorities. They were inspired to start this podcasts after DT won the election and they realized that it's hard to find good, solid reporting out there right now. They do a great job of being fair and balanced and demonstrating ways to thinking critically about how you take in media under a fascist regime.
Suggested First Listen: Start at the beginning to get some context about what inspired them to start this podcast in the first place.

Still Processing: This podcast is my everything right now. Produced by the New York Times, Still Processing is described as a "culture conversation with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham," both of whom are NYT columnists and really funny cool people. They are also Black and they speak to current events through that lens. They discuss pretty much everything from Beyoncé to Trump to the Oscars to Ru Paul's Drag Race, all from their perspectives and experiences as People of Color. This podcast has made me think about why it is so hard to have discussions about race in America. I grew up in a really white part of Pittsburgh. When I moved to San Francisco, I expected to make more friends with people of all backgrounds because it's supposed to be super-diverse and one of the least-segregated cities in America. That hasn't happened, so I still have very few close friends who are Black. (Part of that is my fault for not seeking them out in Black spaces, and part of that is how institutional racism works: keeping Black folks and white folks living in separate neighborhoods leads to more cultural misunderstandings, prejudice, and discrimination.) I am learning so much about Black culture because Wortham and Morris intelligently and lovingly share their personal experiences being Black. If you want to be an ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, add this podcast to your rotation.
Suggested First Listen: It's a tie! I love love love episode 3 "Identity Is a Hoax, People!" where they interview RuPaul about identity politics. I also love love love episode 5 "Our Journey to the ‘Blacksonian’". Seriously, this episode honestly healed a little bit of white guilt for me. Listen, right now.

I hope you enjoy these podcasts! Tell me what you think in the comments and feel free to share the podcasts that are helping you #resist.

What Nourishes Us

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 19:57:00 +0000

My therapist dumped me a couple of years ago.

It sucked and I mention it only because it's important to realize that when getting help with our mental health, sometimes people aren't a good fit. For a long time, I felt like it was "my fault" that she stopped treating me, but looking back I realize that she wasn't capable of helping me. I needed a different kind of help, more support to help with my chronic forgetfulness, social anxiety, and agoraphobia. She couldn't do that for me.

However, she did give me one piece of advice that stuck with me. We were discussing how regular exercise and healthy eating habits could positively affect my mental health. I balked, getting defensive, saying that I've never been good at taking care of myself that way, and that I'd never be good at it.

She paused and said to me, "Laura, it's like you don't believe you deserve to take in what nourishes you."

The poetry of this sentiment floored me. My mind began sifting through the layers of meaning as the tears began building. I felt seen and vulnerable and scared. What did it mean that I didn't believe I deserved to be nourished? Why did I run myself down without refueling? Why did I take in the crap of the world and expect to keep going?

Since then I've found a new therapist who has really helped me dig into some of these issues. For me the reasons I didn't want to nourish myself stemmed trauma caused by a sexual assault, my experiences with religion, realizing I'm queer, and some other things. I still struggle with these issues along with perfectionism and negative self-talk. Not only did I not believe I deserved to eat healthily, I also didn't believe I deserved kindness, forgiveness, and even love. But I do. We all do. I learned/am still learning that.

During the election, I found myself feeling how I did before: strung out, fearful, completely drained of energy and motivation. When Trump was elected, I feared I would fall into an even deeper depression. Being pregnant forced me to confront these feelings right away; I couldn't risk falling back into the deep depression I felt before. It wasn't just me on the line now. I wasn't just nourishing myself. I'm so grateful that my experience of motherhood has helped me realize I need to take care of myself too. I feel like the opposite is often true for many parents, especially mothers.

Spending time with these guys feeds my spirit!

When I scroll through my Facebook feed or talk to friends or to Sal, I recognize this look of burnout, of fear, of building depression and near-constant anxiety. It started me thinking about nourishment again.

Then I read an article on Medium entitled "How to #StayOutraged" Without Losing Your Mind: Self-Care Lessons for The Resistance" by lawyer and feminist Mirah Curzer. In this piece, Cruzer discusses how important self-care is as an activist. Getting good sleep, eating well, exercising, seeing a therapist, being in nature, and spending time with people we love are all incredibly important acts that must be included in your activism:

"...this stuff is even more important when you’re living under the strain of an oppressive government. You need a strong foundation from which to fight, so take care of the basics."

Healthy snacks = Activism!

I must point out that these "basics" are not so basic to everyone. Having the time to take care of oneself is a privilege. I'm grateful every day that I can afford healthy food, have time to go for a walk, have good health insurance, and have a great therapist. But rather than feeling guilty because so many people don't have the ability to do this kind of self-care, I do it anyway. That's how we leverage our privilege, whatever it may be.

Consider your own privilege when taking care of yourself and feel grateful when you do. Gratitude is how we fight off the guilt of privilege. Make it a part of your activism. Radically love yourself. Radically nourish yourself.

So, what are some things you can do to take care of yourself? This is simple. Regular hygiene, a good night's sleep, and eating your vegetables is a great start. Also, praise yourself when you do these things. Why? Because we make ourselves feel like shit when we don't, so why not do the opposite and pat ourselves on the back when we do?

You can also do little things like listen to music that feeds our souls, read poetry and novels that inspire us, take a few minutes to do a mindfulness exercise, or complement ourselves. These are all big parts of self-care.

Need some more specific examples? Here's what I've been doing:

Cooking healthy & delicious meals for myself and Sal
Drinking half-caff coffee so I can sleep well at night
Taking my medications and seeing my therapist
Reaching out to friends and family for social interaction
Spending time just playing with my son
Going to a support group for new moms
Keeping my home clean and organized so I feel sane
Reading poetry about motherhood
Reading Senator John Lewis' autobiographical trilogy March

Seriously, BUY THESE BOOKS.

That last one is truly inspiring. Looking at the adversity that Black Americans faced for centuries and learning more about the Civil Rights Movement really fed my spirit. They literally faced death when they marched. Many people today still face death when they march. My privilege very much insulates from these dangers, but that just makes me more grateful and inspired. I think we can all learn from and be inspired by our Civil Rights Leaders, leaders in the fight for LGBT rights, Workers' Rights - whatever speaks to you.

So what are you doing to take care of yourself? Or what do you want to be doing? What do you aspire to do? What nourishes you? Start with the basics and build from there. Let's crowdsource a list of self-care ideas and inspire one another!

The Last 599 Days

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 21:17:00 +0000

I haven't updated my blog in 1 year, 7 months, 2 weeks, and 5 days. So much has happened—in the world and in my world—since then.

When you haven't spoken to a friend in a while, it makes it more difficult to call them. It's a strange paradox that you have more to say to someone you talk to all the time, but it's true. The difference is context: someone you talk to every day knows what is going on in your life. They ask questions about the book you are reading and how your kid's piano recital went, and vice versa.

Last year I had a number of personal and health problems. I only posted three times last year, so let's play catch-up real quick. Here's a list of things that have happened since my last post:

I lost several large freelance writing & teaching contracts.
I suffered from severe depression and anxiety including a suicidal period last January & February.
I finished a skills class in dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT).
I finished a partial hospitalization program (PHP) last March.
I finished an intensive outpatient program (IOP) last April & May.
It took 8 months of trying, but I got pregnant last April.
I worked my ass off over the summer to get mentally and physically healthier.
I got gestational diabetes in October 2016.
I gave birth to a son in December 2016. His online name is Jello.
Jello was born with fluid in his lungs, which meant he had to stay in the NICU for 4 days including Christmas Day. He is fine now.
Sal and I have been holed up for all of January 2017 keeping Jello alive and learning how to be parents.

Looking back at this list it's no wonder I only updated this blog three times. 2016 has been a fucking hard year. The political climate toward the end of 2016 also took a toll on my mental health, but thankfully the pregnancy forced me to take better care of myself than I would have otherwise.

So basically I've spent the better part of the last year learning and practicing life skills and coping skills to manage my anxiety. I'm on new medication that keeps me from going off the deep end and enables me to actually use the skills rather than just be stuck in bed all day.

We don't like to talk about mental health in this country. However, with the election of Donald Trump to office, many people have begun to feel the kind of intense anxiety that I have dealt with on a daily basis most of my life. It occurred to me last night that I have skills that might help people deal with their anxiety. That's why I'm back.

I'm also back because writing is what saves me.

I have a lot of ideas on how to use this space for #TheResistance as well. I hope to start an interview series on the intersection of art and activism. I might feature guest posts by other writers, artists, and activists who are helping us #resist the current administration. I will write like a motherfucker for you. That is my goal.

My son has been sleeping for two hours. I have a few thank you notes to send. There is a bowl of cottage cheese and pineapple on my coffee table waiting for me to eat it. Life calls. More soon.

My Summer Digs

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 15:00:00 +0000

this is where the poemagic happens, folks. at least, i hope it will be.

Clearly I Need to Visit the Middle States

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:03:00 +0000

Create Your Own Visited States Map

Poet Seeks Cohort for Collaboration, Improvisation, and General Shenanigans

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 23:45:00 +0000

I'm currently reading (well, listening to the audiobook of) Amy Poehler's memoir Yes Please. I already loved her, and now my love has reached new depths thanks to her honest, heartfelt prose, hilarious take on everything, and exceptionally useful life advice.

She talks a lot about improv comedy and comedy writing. I find these subjects endlessly fascinating. I watch quite a bit of television, and I'm intrigued by the TV-script-writing process. In Poehler's experience, writing is a collaboration with a silly-sports-like quality and an anything-goes attitude. Funny people gather around and pound out a script as fast as possible. Sometimes they start by throwing out jokes, each one trying the best the preceding until one wins. Improvisation is also a collaborative game of sorts that takes the writing process and makes it live through its physical embodiment on stage.

I did a bit of both back in high school drama club. I still love improv games, but haven't played any in a while. I almost never write collaboratively nowadays. All of this got me thinking - why don't poets do more of this? Seriously, why not?

Poets used to be performing storytellers, minstrels and bards who roamed the countryside singing and reciting heroic ballads and epic poems. Modern literary movements, such as the Beats and Slam Poetry, have incorporated performance into their artistic milieu. And with regard to poetic improvisation, the Dadaists pioneered found poetry and automatic group writing a la the exquisite corpse. I'm certain there are other current movements that have improvisational and performance-oriented facets, I just don't know about them. And much of what I'm saying here is just my train of though, not a well-researched examination.

Another aspect of these kinds of movements involves the formation of poetry guilds - groups of poets who worked with and alongside one another, often united by social and/or artistic cause. They bolster each other, promote one another's work, read together, writing together, live together, socialize together.

I want one. A poetry cohort. Specifically, a cohort of local poets who want to get together regularly and do things like write together (parallel and collaboratively), go to readings, host readings, host salons, experiment with other forms of art, experiment with media (I really want to write a show about poets for YouTube), and pretty much be up for all kinds of poetic tomfoolery!

If you're interested in forming a poetry cohort with me, then comment here, shoot me an email, send a singing telegram, contact me telepathically, or send an owl. Then let's get together (yeah yeah yeah!) and do poetry. We'll figure out what "do poetry" means as we go.

I'm considering putting an ad on Craigslist...

List of Miscellaneous Musings

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 06:15:00 +0000

I have sent 41 submissions in 2014: 18 pending, 14 form rejections, 7 personal rejections, and 2 acceptances. My goal for the year is 50. I might surpass it, I might not.

Here is one of my acceptances: two blackout poems at Luna Luna.

Poets on the Coast was this past weekend. It was lovely and I wrote quite a few poems, one that's pretty much finished.

The 11th issue of Weave Magazine is out. It's awesome.

I continue to work on the manuscript of blackout poems. I recently wrote ten more.

Tonight's dinner: popcorn.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Jessica Piazza

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:30:00 +0000

taken by photographer: Rich Prugh

Jessica Piazza is the author of two full-length poetry collections with Red Hen Press: Interrobang (winner of the AROHO 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize and the 2013 Balcones Poetry Prize) and Obliterations (with Heather Aimee O'Neill, forthcoming) as well as a chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press.) She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She co-founded Bat City Review and Gold Line Press and is a contributing editor for The Offending Adam and a screener for the National Poetry Series. She teaches for the Writing Program at USC and the online MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture. Put us there. And that other place you like.

Jessica Piazza: I think I can write anywhere, but I've probably done my best work out in the world; in coffee shops and that sort of thing. I like the white noise. I like remembering I’m not alone in the world, and that these words will eventually belong to people who aren’t me. I like the expectation that I am somewhere for the sole purpose of doing work and I will not go home until I’ve done some.

Of course, like for so many of us, the Internet kicks my ass and distracts me. But there’s a coffee shop called Conservatory for Coffee, Tea & Cocoa in Culver City where there’s no WIFI during busy hours, and that’s really helpful as a buffer against procrastination. (Though I wasn’t able to write my dissertation chapters there! The Internet is key for research in my world.) But anyway, it’s a tiny place with these burlap sacks and barrels with amazing coffee beans and such, and it smells good in there. Also, the chairs and café tables and cramped space are actually a little uncomfortable and – is it just me? – I feel like being slightly uncomfortable in a work space actually helps me be productive. I don’t get too placated or drowsy because of the environment, which makes me remember why I’m there and what I’m supposed to be doing.

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

JP: There was a fun one I did a while back that went pretty quickly, despite a multi-layered creation process. It was a piece for The Book of Scented Things, an anthology project from The Literary House Press. Contributors were sent a tiny vial of a perfume and asked to use it as an inspiration for a poem. The perfume they sent me was called Ophelia, which couldn’t be more perfect for several reasons. The obvious one is, well, Shakespeare! But the other is that I was working on a chapbook at the time, a series of ekphrastic poems based on famous visual artworks, and I love Millias’ painting “Ophelia”. I thought it would be an interesting crossover to write a poem that would work for both the anthology and the chapbook, so I researched the perfume online to discover what the notes were, and tries to incorporate some of that information into the poem about the painting. It was especially fun to try to find a place for the scent notes I loved in the perfume like orange, musk and lily. (And I ended up wearing that perfume at my wedding a few months later, which is pretty cool.) It was fun to use so many bits of inspiration (the art, the perfume, Hamlet) and synthesize them into one piece, especially by turning the different sensory images on their heads, as when I used the orange scent from the perfume to describe the light in the painting. Anyway the painting is resplendent with flora and so getting some of that scent/image synesthesia going was pretty easy.

The anthology will be out really soon, and the chapbook – This is not a sky – is now available for pre-order from Black Lawrence Press.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

The implement I try to wield the most often is bravery. I’m not kidding. Sure, it’s not physical, but it’s the single tool that most helps me write.

If you want to get literal, though, I can only write on a computer. I know that sounds super uncreative and not artsy at all. In fact, I have fantastic daydreams of scribbling in a beautiful journal in fantastic and serene settings. But the truth is I have the worst handwriting on earth, and when I try to write stuff by hand I can’t even read it back most of the time. Also, because I so often write in form, moving stuff around is kind of key to my process. I am not a huge reviser of my poetry after the fact; my process is a very intricate and time-consuming process of revision as I write. Once I have a fully crafted piece it generally doesn’t undergo too much change, especially not when it’s a metrical or formal poem, but that’s because by then I will have spent a lot of creative energy getting it right in the first place. And without the computer this process is a mess. On paper I basically end up with pages of scribbles and arrows and a hot mess I can’t make anything of.

So, I guess you can say that much like the rules of formal poetry itself, the organization that the computer offers me allows my craziness to find a proper shape.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

JP: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I won a poetry contest in fourth grade. It was a holocaust poetry contest, in fact, and my poem went like this (from what I can recall):

The bad ones come bringing destruction and death
and freely the black spiders roam

For love is gone in this dreary place
concentration camp is now your home.

Jewish people, anyone different,
Why are you killed needlessly?

Because of one man, one’s man’s evil,
You are never the same, you shall see.

But there is one small glimmer of hope
that can’t be seen easily.

If all prejudiced people would learn to love
then everyone would be free.

Deep, right? Who knew that a fourth grader had all the answers to solving the tragedy of genocide? HA! But I remember being really proud of the black spiders image for the swastika, which I though looked like a spider. I think that was seriously my first time being excited about imagery.

LD: Beverage of choice? In life or writing?

JP: Okay, well, obviously coffee. Can’t duck the cliché. And wine, to keep it going. A tart and crisp white or a not-sweet red. And lately also a cocktail of St. Germaine with cucumber, mint and club soda; it’s lovely. But ultimately, water. If I’m not hydrated I can’t do anything. My husband makes fun of me for this; he thinks I believe water cures all things…kind of like the father in “my Big Fat Greek Wedding” who sprays Windex on everything. On a side note, the actor who plays that father is the actual father of my fellow Red Hen Press poet Brendan Constantine. And so the word comes full circle.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Sharon Suzuki-Martinez

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 15:30:00 +0000

poet Sharon Suzuki-Martinez

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez is the author of The Way of All Flux (New Rivers Press, 2012). She grew up in Hawaii and now lives in Tempe, Arizona where she created/curates The Poet’s Playlist. She also blogs about weird animals and the poet’s life at Sharon Planet.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture.

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez: To write, I have to be able to look out a window or be outside. The random flitting of wildlife facilitates my poetic flights of fancy. To do this, I have a portable writing studio: a TV tray table and a folding chair. My little office camps out amidst my cluttered kitchen most of the time, but wanders all over the house and outside.

LD: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in?

SS: Most often, I’ll hear an interesting line in my head or I’ll misread a sign or a headline on the Internet, so I scribble it down or type it into my cellphone along with notes for directions I’d like the poem to move in. I tend to write and revise in short bursts, but spend long periods of time thinking about the development of a poem.

Sharon's portable writing studio outside

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

SS: For the last half a year, I’ve only used Pentel EnerGel pens, 0.7 mm black ink. It’s so perfectly designed, all other pens annoy and distract me from what I am trying to write. Before then, for all the poems in my book, I only wrote with husky, colorful Pilot Dr. Grip pens.

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a poem?

SS: Each poem starts out as a seed that has floated into my hands from parts unknown. I take this seed of a haunting phrase, feeling, or experience and cultivate/revise it to sprout, leaf, bud, flower, and fruit. In other words, I know the poem is done when it feels like it has grown into something able to delight and nourish the reader. A finished poem must also be a transformation almost unrecognizable from the initial seed of inspiration.

Sharon's writing studio inside

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Cafe rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

SS: Sometimes I can’t stop listening to or hearing a particular song in my head and this song won’t go away until I write it a poem. I think that songs, like all obsessions, possess us and then release us as new creative expression, as art. I invite poets to explore this and other ideas about poetry and music on my The Poet’s Playlist website. Otherwise, when I write I prefer silence or white noise. My favorite writing white noises are the Rainy Café and Hypnotoad.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Karen Paul Holmes

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 18:18:00 +0000

poet Karen Paul Holmes

Karen Paul Holmes is the author of the poetry collection Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books, 2014). Credits include Poetry East, Atlanta Review, POEM, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and the Southern Poetry Anthology Vol 5: Georgia (Texas Review Press). In 2012, she received an Elizabeth George Foundation grant.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture. Put us there. And that other place you like. Or just send a real picture.

Karen Holmes: I write the best at my cottage on Lake Chatuge on the border of Georgia and North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The place practically hangs over the lake, so the almost-floor-to-ceiling windows make me feel a bit like I’m on a cruise ship (but without the mojitos and Macarena). Just lake and sky and mountains forever.

LD: What is your favorite exercise that gets the words flowing?

KH: I like it when a workshop leader provides a bank of words that must be used in a poem (such as “son, ripple, candle, wound, stitch, peach”). For me, one or more of the words almost always sets up a whole series of images and memories, and the poem begins to flow. I’ve written some of my best poems this way. I often delete many of the “required” words in the editing process, but they were important in inspiring the poem.

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

KH: Lately, lightning strikes but I haven’t been jotting down the ideas, so they leave me as quickly as they came, unfortunately. The last time I tried to write new poems, I was at the beach for a writing retreat, which normally inspires me. Knowing I had to break my inertia, I went to my old idea file and started eeking out a few poems I’d been meaning to write for a while. I’d describe that process as trying to wring water out of a slightly damp washcloth. But (thank goodness there’s a but), the very last poem I wrote did pour put of me like a fireman’s hose. My sister had called to tell me she had breast cancer, and that night I wrote a short, intense prose poem about it. When I took the poem to my critique group, they loved it and had few editing suggestions. I wish I had not had that particular reason to be inspired, but I am happy with the poem and think it will speak to others. I really do believe the creative spark comes from somewhere other than ourselves. I’ve often looked at old notes I've written (usually lines for a poem or metaphor ideas) and do not even remember writing them.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

view from Karen's cottage at Lake Chatuge

KH: Computer! (Laptop, specifically). Although sometimes, like when sitting on the dock, I write with pen in a notebook. But as soon as possible, I dash to the keyboard to start moving things around and experimenting with line breaks, alternate word choices, order, etc. Also, the Internet helps with research to add detail to poems. For example, I learned a lot about knots (there’s one called a “monkey’s fist!”) to help with my book’s titular poem, “Untying the Knot.”

I’m basically a lazy person. Without a computer as a tool, my poems would probably languish unfinished. I also just have to see my poems printed out, pretty early in the composition process—to really read them more carefully and see what they look like on the page. When a poem seems complete, I often use the laptop’s recording feature to record myself reading it, because that also helps me edit.

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a story, essay, or poem?

KH: Finished? Is that a word that applies to a poem? I do consider some poems finished, but never are they exempt from tweaking a word or comma or line break if I haven’t looked at them in a while and something suddenly jumps out at me. When a poem doesn't feel finished and I’m stuck, I do one of a few things: 1. Bring it to my critique group, 2. Put it in a folder called “needs work” and forget about it for a while, 3. Go back to the stanza or line that’s bothering me and work on it until I have that “ah, that’s the solution” feeling. It’s a sort of feeling more than an intellectual thing. I recently pulled one out that seemed hopelessly sucky and had been sitting unlooked at for a year. But I liked the topic (an anonymous young couple had paid my 86-year-old mother’s check at a restaurant), so I edited the heck out of it and took it to critique. They loved the idea but suggested a reordering of stanzas. I did that, submitted it, and got it accepted into an anthology on aging (while many of my favorite “finished” poems continue to get rejected!). Time and fresh eyes can revitalize a stuck poem.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Writer Bernadette Geyer

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Writer, Bernadette Geyer

Bernadette Geyer is a freelance writer and editor in Berlin, Germany. Her poetry collection, The Scabbard of Her Throat, was published by The Word Works in 2013. Geyer’s poems have appeared in Oxford American, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Her non-fiction has been published in Border Crossing, Freelance Writer's Report, and Go World Travel.

Laura Davis: How often do you write and for how long? What time of day?

Bernadette Geyer: I try to write every day, Monday through Friday. Primarily, this is because I am now working as a full-time freelancer and if I don’t write, I don’t make any money. As for “what” I write every day, that fluctuates wildly: one day I may be working on a non-fiction article I want to pitch to a travel magazine, while another day I may be writing translations of poems. I have a novel idea that I am also working on when there is no one else in the house – which is rare, because both my husband and I are self-employed and share a home office. Because we have an 8-year-old, I work primarily while she is at school – between 8:00am and about 3:30pm. That gives me a pretty decent chunk of time to work on my writing every day, be it fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translations, or blog posts. Of course, about 1/3 of the time is also spent doing the administrative-type stuff that all writers have to deal with – finding markets for the writing, tracking submissions, updating the web site, etc.

LD: How long have you been writing?

BG: I loved to write in middle school, where I started by writing Nancy Drew-type stories. I still have those. I would bring a pencil and lined paper out to recess with me, find a place to sit, and work on my stories. Sometimes, I remember classmates passing around the pages as soon as I finished them. Once, a neighbor gave me 50 cents for letting her read one of my stories. I wish I could remember which neighbor that was because, that probably gave me my first taste of connecting with a reader. In high school, I started writing poetry, and even had a poem published in a little regional publication for high school students. One of my English teachers – Mr. S. – really encouraged my writing. I tried everything in high school – short stories, plays, poetry, essays. I remember loving it all. When I went to college, I continued writing poetry – both for English classes as well as for personal enjoyment – but it wasn’t until after I’d graduated and started down a career path in the “business world,” that I really started to look at my creative writing as a genuine craft that I could continue. While I do not have an MFA, I have taken many workshops and attended writing retreats as a way to further my own creative writing.

LD: How do you motivate yourself to write?

BG: Trying to make money is a great motivation for most of the writing (and editing) that I am doing at this point in time. I am also the toughest boss I’ve ever had, so there’s not really any trouble with motivating myself to write. Seriously, if I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t want me as a boss.

My ongoing to-do list includes a page full of the ideas I’ve thought of for articles or essays. Each morning, I sit down and look through the whole to-do list and pick out 2-3 items I will accomplish that day. At least one of those items will involve some type of writing. Once I have my day’s goals written down, I start working. Butt in chair, writing. That’s what it takes.

LD: Do you believe in “writer’s block”?

BG: I do believe that writers can get “stuck” during the course of a project. I think that is why, for me, it is good that I have many potential projects to work on at any given time. When I feel like I’ve gotten “blocked” from progressing on a particular project, I just switch to something different for a while. That usually gives me time and space to re-set and to let my brain relax so that it can open itself up to new ways of thinking that can get me through a blockage point. It’s like if you are driving down a road and you have your eyes firmly set on the ground directly in front of your car, but suddenly there’s a fallen tree across the road. You have to stop, take your eyes off the road directly in front of you, and look around for another way of getting where you are going. Or, maybe you realize that that’s not really where you needed to go anyway.

LD: Beverage of choice?

BG: Coffee in the morning. Once lunchtime hits, water for the rest of the afternoon. I am a no-frills creature of habit when I am working at my desk, but sometimes (if I’m feeling impetuous) I will add a slice of lemon or lime to my water.

When I occasionally go out by myself somewhere to read and write in the evening, I will always go for red wine. I have a favorite wine bar just down the block – old wooden tables, dark painted walls, candles flickering on every table, small bowls of olives and cheese for sale, and great windows to gaze through.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Rae Gouirand

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry and the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award for Poetry.

Laura Davis: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work at it?

Rae Gouirand: In the manuscript of my second collection, which just started circulating, there is a body of ‘spliced’ poems that (sort of) comb together parallel blocks of text in an attempt to align (and preserve) their relative unresolved tensions (see The Inflectionist Review, issue 2 for sample poems). I think of the form as suggesting an alternative to the superimposing or burying of layers of 'meaning' or 'story' beneath one another. (In my mind, they’re relationship poems, partially because they’re threaded through this book about love and the limits of figurative thinking.)

These pieces sprung from frustration, as much does: I found that I had a number of story moments that I wanted to make visible within the manuscript without turning them into subjects. That’s difficult to do in a poem. Poetic forms and the orders of language itself pressurize content. The problem seemed inseparable to me from a basic problem of life: the pressure to account for experience or perspective in ways that relate directly to one’s story and its level of ‘coherence.’ What is coherence, and what do I really believe about it? What can I see in my creative process that I would count as coherence that might, at a reader’s first encounter, seem anything but? I came to these questions (regarding these poems) through working—not before or after—while on a residency on the Big Island of Hawaii last summer. It was a really odd window for my work—I was the only working artist in a resort community of volunteers and guests, and I was in the middle of really intense correspondences with three really important people in my life, and my laptop kept getting rained on and my days were punctuated by big social meals in a way that was challenging for my concentration—overall I was thinking a lot about discontinuities, and eventually realized I was feeling (in the work) what I was thinking. At the start of that residency I had this string of days that didn’t feel like work days until I realized I’d been shaking out this new way to see the work. Once I saw the alignment, it was mine to lean into, and I could come to full speed mentally. I appreciate those moments—they’re why I feel comfortable saying that I do think writing can be taught, at least inasmuch as we can formalize the work of expanding our imaginations for 1) what words can do 2) what forms we might claim and 3) what decisionmaking we might give up as artists in the name of letting the work teach us what it wants to. It always wants something from us.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

RG: I have a folder of stories I composed in second grade while trying to master cursive, and I can remember writing poems and plays in middle school—I was enormously lucky to have a public education (in Pittsburgh) that involved tons of arts programming both in and out of school. Growing up I was very seriously pitched toward the arts—theater and visual art and instrumental music, especially—and thank heavens for how great my local resources were for studying music because that was really my life and my primary language until I was about 20. I was writing steadily, and feeling ambitious about particular pieces I wanted to write, by high school. The summer before my senior year of high school I attended a governor’s school for the arts, which provided me with six weeks of intensive college-level workshops and sent me home hungry to keep writing alongside adults who would take my interest seriously. Thanks to scholarships I received from my local arts center, I spent my senior year of high school studying with local poets and playwrights. So I was in it pretty early.

I don’t remember ever not feeling good about having written—writing, like any of the other essential ways I live, has always felt right when I’ve shown up and dropped in. I do remember the first time I wrote a poem that felt like it had sprung from some part of me that had access to a kind of superior intelligence that wasn’t necessarily synonymous with ‘me,’ and that was about three weeks into my time in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. I’d been thinking for a couple weeks about another process, actually—the process by which sand becomes pearl, and how I related to the idea of nacre—and after one false start, one Sunday afternoon I sat down and wrote a ton of lines that very quickly rearranged themselves into a poem that knew exactly how it wanted to take shape. That poem is called “You Form;” it was first published in Seneca Review years later, and then my first book in 2011, and will be reprinted next year in an anthology of poetry for teens that is coming out titled Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (which I’m especially excited about because it’s sort of about the relationship between storytelling and sexuality and I’m so glad there are going to be hot poems in that book). The experience of writing that poem, of riding that wave of instinct, knocked down every internal wall I had left around my writing. I wrote my guts out for the rest of my time in the program.

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Café rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

RG: Not silence. At least not usually. I enjoy patterned sound, which I think comes from my early focus on an instrument—my first experience of flow as a young person came from running scales and arpeggios and etudes for hours and hours and I think geometries like that are about the most holy things on this planet. So, no surprise that the fact of that is palpable in a lot of my work: I write toward feel. I have been listening to the scores for Philip Glass’ three operas lots this year—I find his slow progressions incredibly good to write to—but I also do a lot of listening to songs on loop. I can listen to a single song for two or three hours and appreciate it the whole way to the end when I’m working. I can’t concentrate if I can make out anyone’s conversation so I am often spotted with headphones when I’m working out the world. I’m that girl people have to shout at when I’m concentrating. It’s always been an incredible thrill for me—that feeling of internal speed that I can find when I’m off on my own planet. I sort of imagine it’s like what dogs experience when the leash comes off.

LD: Do you believe in writer’s block?

RG: No. I believe in resistance. In my experience, if one commits firmly to making space for the making of new words every day, whether or not they’re ‘feeling it’ heading into the matter, one learns where words (and ‘feeling it’) live—which is almost always through whatever we’ve ourselves put between ourselves and the act of writing. ‘Writer’s block’ often means one needs to shift projects, or write from a different place in one’s voice—but if you’re a writer, you know in your gut that you need to write to live wholly, and that there’s no substitute for it, and that not doing it will make you pretty crazy. I’m turned off by what I think is the very lazy rhetoric surrounding our cultural notion of ‘inspiration.’ If you’ve ever practiced anything, you know how practice works. You show up and you do it. The doing it gets you there. Yeah, sometimes we get excited by stimulating environments or others’ work—but we can’t pretend that inspiration comes from outside us. No. We meet our own attention.

I do think there are times that are for reading, but I don’t know that a writer can really completely separate writing and reading, either. Writing is intensely internal reading, a scrying attempt at one’s unwritten work. Reading is a kind of stretching or imagining of the spaces one might write into.

LD: What do you like to read before you write? Or after? Or during?

RG: Stein, Winterson, Dickinson, Carson, really mindblowing essays or tough prose, new pages by my brilliant students. Right now I am reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines alongside an anthology of conceptual writing by women, two books about thinking and political logic that my therapist loaned to me, a scholarly work on queer autobiography that took me forever to track down, volumes of poetry by Sina Queyras and Tanya Olsen (two ffierce poets whose work I am thrilled to have stumbled my way into this spring), and the newest chapbook in Sarah McCarry’s brilliant Guillotine series. In general, the more I am reading, the more I am writing, but I don’t make a point of writing in moment-to-moment conversation with texts or structuring the time I spend writing and/or reading each day. I’m usually reading at least half a dozen things at a time. Right now I’m working on almost that many things—the beginnings of a third collection of poetry, a collection of linked autobiographical essays, something that’s looking more and more like an opera about women’s letters, a long photo essay about the handwriting samples I have kept during my lifetime, and a couple other things. I love how all of it just gets harder and harder, in the best ways.

Pick a Form, Any Form

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 17:21:00 +0000

When I am stuck in a rut creatively, I turn to poetry forms. The limits they offer work like any writing prompt - they give a writer rules to follow, instructions, boundaries, in which they can play with language. Much like a child in need of discipline, a poetic form can give a writer safe terrain in which to experiment.

I steer away from rhyming forms, as well as strictly metered forms. They are hard to do well without careening toward greeting-card-esque treacle. And honestly, I have trouble understanding meter - I spend too much time sounding out words, counting beats on my fingers when I can just rely on my own natural sense of language's rhythm and music. So I opt for poems with repeating lines (Pantoum or Villanelle) or repeating words (my favorite, the Sestina), or poems that employ a syllabic or word count (Tanka). I also really like found forms, like the Cento or OULIPO.

Here are some of my favorite websites for poetic forms. I encourage you to try your hand at forms, from the ancient and lengthy to modern and minimal. Two of my latest favorites are the Palindrome and the Blitz.

Shadow Poetry: A Poet's Writing Resource - lots of great traditional and invented forms.
Robert Lee Brewer's List of Poetry Forms - an interesting mix.
Shot Glass Journal's Glossary of Poetic Forms - no examples, but lots of these are shorter forms.
American Academy of Poet's Poetic Forms & Techniques - an in-depth look at many classic forms.
Poetry Foundation's Glossary - a searchable database of forms.
The Poet's Garret - offers lots of variations on classic forms.
Wikipedia - always worth reading up on the history of a particular form.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Natalie Giarratano

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Natalie Giarratano’s first collection of poems, Leaving Clean, won the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Isthmus Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and TYPO, among others. She co-edits Pilot Light and teaches writing at American University.

Laura Davis: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

Natalie Giarratano: When it comes to writing, I’m a hunter/gatherer. I will hang onto random bits of conversation, quotes from literature, films or TV shows, random thoughts/images that pop into my brain, news stories, songs, research on topics in which I’m interested, which range from Leadbelly to serial killers, and so on. I will hang on until I have to let them go on the page. Usually that is in the summer when I have more time to focus on my writing, as I’m not teaching then. All this is to say that I write sporadically on the page, but I’m always thinking and collecting towards a poem or poems with these scraps. And sometimes the scraps end up being unnecessary, a means to an end, or are altered so much as to become unrecognizable. This I love. My most recently published poem, “Big Thicket Blues,” took about a year to write, from scraps of ideas to a long poem that felt complete in its eight sections.

LD: What is your favorite exercise that gets the words flowing?

NG: To get the words flowing, I find that taking on a persona or trying to address a specific person helps. I tend to write a lot of social/political poetry, so I might address Saddam Hussein or Dick Cheney or Gilgamesh or my great grandmothers. I don’t always stick with that perspective/address, but it narrows the field so I can focus more—which has been important in writing a poem a day when fresh, fruitful ideas might be more difficult to come by. But before I get to any of that, here’s what I have to complete: breakfast, coffee, feed play with, and walk the dog, catch up on news, clean the house if it needs it, read poetry or fiction or essays or news stories. Then I can get to the writing process. Then I can settle my mind enough with the outside world (or rile it up enough, depending on the occasion) to move inward.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

I specifically asked for a journal in which to write poems when I was eleven. Not even sure what prompted that. I didn’t read much, if any, poetry; though I was a voracious reader of fiction; I loved me some Beverly Cleary. However, it was Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which is so full of detailed description—some, I know, would argue that it’s tedious or overwrought—that made me think, wow. This is what I want to do. I want to create worlds for others to be lost in. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that with my poetry, but it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I felt confident in the poems I was writing. The poem that I think was the turning point for me is titled “Forms of Forgetfulness”—I had been trying to write about my falling away from Catholicism and violence always humming under the surface in my immediate family for a long time; in this poem, subject and form work in subtle ways and mood is captured well without seeming like a rant—those I’m really good at!

LD: How do you motivate yourself to write? Chocolates? Self-flagellation? Coffee on an IV drip?

NG: I motivate myself to write by having other people hold me accountable. I guess that’s not really “self-motivation.” I am able to have that when I call upon it, but I’m a person who works well under a deadline. For the past couple of summers I’ve participated in a poem-a-day throughout the month of June with poet friends; we exchange poems and self-deprecation every day. I think this process makes me realize I could write routinely if I truly wanted; I could find the time while hunting/gathering. Also, after I’ve written my poem for the day, I have been known to reward myself with episodes of my favorite TV show (currently Game of Thrones).

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a story, essay, or poem?

NG: This is probably corny to say, but the poem tells me when it’s finished. I don’t really decide anything but to listen to it (or ignore it, which only works for a while). Music in a poem is really important to me, so I do work a long time on getting the words and lines to sound “right” (more listening). But form is fickle. For example, I recently worked for months on a series of poems about the life and music of Leadbelly. I was obsessed with him, with researching and writing about him (even though others have already done so and much better than I, especially Tyehimba Jess in leadbelly: poems, which I highly recommend). I ended up with seven fairly biographical poems written mostly in fragments—something I had done previously with “Big Thicket Blues.” However, I somehow got the idea that the sonnet form would better complement the subject matter; so then I spent a few more months turning these seven fragmented poems into a crown of sonnets (loose sonnets—I’m not a big fan of end rhyme). Just when I thought I was finished with them, I realized that the poems did not want to be about Leadbelly, at least not only about Leadbelly. I broke them back up into fragments. This time, though, I created 25 plus fragments that I arranged in brackets throughout my second manuscript, not just seven fragmented poems. Phew. But I had to write the sonnets to get back to the fragments again, which were much richer and more about the artist than Leadbelly alone. Though I do feel guilty for abandoning him.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Diane Lockward

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Diane Lockward is the author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop (Wind Publications, 2013) and three poetry books, most recently Temptation by Water. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture.

Diane Lockward: My usual writing place is the kitchen table. Best time is morning when it’s quiet and my brain is most alert and creative. While my table serves as a place to eat, it also serves as the repository of stacks of books, journals, and yellow legal pads, all of which I really mean to straighten out but never quite do. From my spot at the table, I look out through a sliding glass door onto my backyard which is nice and woodsy. I have pretty flowerpots on the patio, a rock garden, birdbaths, and birdfeeders. In summer I get all kinds of birds—my favorites are the goldfinches who occasionally fly into a poem. This is a peaceful, quiet spot, conducive to daydreaming which sometimes is conducive to a poem.

LD: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in? Warm-up exercise? Daydreaming?

DL: If I’m fired up with an idea, if that’s what leads me to the table, I just begin writing. But if, as is more often the case, I have to go in search of an idea, I often begin with some reading from either a poetry collection or a journal. I read until a line, image, or word evokes some kind of response from me. Once I’ve got that response, I begin writing. If that method doesn’t work, I might use the “palimpsest” method, that is, I take a poem and add a new poem on top of it, going line by line following the structure of the original. This method is instructive and often leads to a real poem—one which usually bears no resemblance at all to the original. The resemblance disappears with multiple revisions. I also enjoy prompts and find them stimulating, so I sometimes pull out a book of them and choose one to get me going.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

DL: I like a Paper Mate ballpoint pen, black ink, medium point. I like the way it rolls on the paper, very smoothly, unlike a pencil which sort of grates against the paper and makes a little shuffling noise. I always begin a poem on a yellow legal pad. Something official about that. I never compose on the computer. I go to the computer only after several handwritten drafts have been done. I do a lot of revision on those early drafts which, by the way, is done with a red pen. When I feel like the poem is getting close to a real poem, that it just might be a keeper, I want to see what it looks like when typed up. Once the poem is on the computer, I begin to think about line lengths, line breaks, and stanza breaks. I print out a hard copy and spend days and weeks doing more revisions. Each new revision gets paper clipped onto the top of the growing pile of drafts. But it all begins with a pen and a piece of yellow lined paper.

LD How do you decide that you are finished working on a poem?

DL: After I’ve done several drafts, I record myself reading the poem. This is part of my revision process. I can hear rhythm, sagging syllables, unnecessary repetitions. If my mind starts to wander while I’m recording or playing back, I know I need to enliven things at the spot where that began to happen. When I’m satisfied with the way the poem looks on the page, when I like what the poem says and how it says it, I again record myself reading the poem. Do I like its music? Have I chosen the best possible words? Does the poem, even after dozens of revisions, still hold my interest? If the answer to each of these questions is Yes, then I’m probably done. Probably. I put the poem aside for at least a week, let myself forget about it. Then I take it out again. Record and listen again. Do I still like it? Did I this time spot something I’d missed before, something that needs to be fixed? If so, I make the repair. I again put the poem aside and repeat the process. Once I can record and listen and feel compelled by the poem and not hear or see anything that needs fixing, I’m done. As you can tell, I’m big on revisions. For me, that’s where the real writing takes place. But sometimes I go too far. When I begin to suck the life out of the poem, when I rob it of its surprises, I need to go back a draft or two and resuscitate the poem, find its heart again, get it beating again.

LD: Do you believe in writer’s block?

No. I believe in laziness. I believe in dry days. I believe in sometimes just not feeling like showing up at the desk (or in my case, the kitchen table). And often I don’t show up. I can go days, even weeks without writing new work. I’d rather be working on new stuff every day, but I know myself well enough by now to acknowledge that I’m just not a daily kind of poet. I do something related to poetry every single day, but sometimes it’s reading, typing up drafts, making submissions, going to a reading, listening to poetry recordings by other poets, working on my monthly Poetry Newsletter, writing a blog post for Blogalicious, or responding to interview questions. I like to think of the fallow days as days of hunting and gathering.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Writer Rachel Dacus

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

photo credit: Jim MacKinnon

Rachel Dacus is the author of Gods of Water and Air, a collection of poetry, prose, and drama. Her poetry collections are Earth Lessons and Femme au Chapeau. Her writing has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture. Put us there. And that other place you like. Or just send a real picture.

Rachel Dacus: I’m in a field, a plum tree has just started dropping its fruit on the grass, some edible, some smashed by careless feet or paws. The birds have pecked many, but I pick up an unblemished one and bite into it, the juice running down my hand. I look up at mare’s tail clouds and a feeling strikes me blowing by and riffling. Another plum falls. I think about ripeness and ruin. I go and sit in the swing and dictate into my phone. Like that on the luckiest days. On others, with coffee, in bed, not quite awake, noodling around with word sounds and wispy sense. Clouds in the brain.

LD: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in? Warm-up exercise? Daydreaming? Any rituals that involve smelling a drawer of fruit?

RD: Apparently, from my previous answer, fruit can be involved. But not necessarily. I just daydream, having set aside time for writing – usually in the morning, when the boundary between the dream state and the intellectual one is shifty and broad, allowing for incursions from either army.

LD: How often do you write and for how long? What time of day?

RD: I write every day, most often in the morning, middle of the day, and at night. Really. I like to start my business day with poetry, and after a few hours of working at my day job stuff, dive back into whatever I was working on. I’m also writing a novel, so it depends what I most need to work on, and that’s what I might work on after dinner. Breaks help me do a lot of work in any given day. Most days I don’t have this much time, but on the best, I do and make the most of it.

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

RD: I started writing poems in response to reading Emily Dickinson. I know that seems like a rash idea, treading in such overworked territory, but I couldn't help feeling a little like Emily’s BFF. Like only she and I understand each other’s secrets. Arrogance, I know, but that’s what happened. So recently, I read another ED poem (I dip into the book cautiously because a line can hit me like a bullet), and this line leaped on me and wrestled me to the ground.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

RD: I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. The first piece I was proud of was a Halloween short story written in third grade. I was asked to read it out to my class and got huge laughter. Getting laughs hooked me on writing. Just think – a thing I made out of my imagination made people laugh! What could be better. Of course, the next story fell entirely flat. I was inducted into the writing profession at age eight, skinning my knees on the reality of my first workshop critique, but the blood couldn't detract from the high, so I was hooked by early success.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Kait Burrier

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Poet Kait Burrier

Kait Burrier writes poetry, drama, journalism, and to-do lists. Her work has been thrown from balconies, spat from rooftops, hidden in mesas, performed in the U.S. and abroad, and published online and in print, most recently in SwanDive Publishing Company’s Everyday Escape Poems. See what she’s up to at kaitburrier.com.

Laura Davis: Beverage of choice?

Kait Burrier: a.m.: black coffee; p.m.: bourbon, rocks.

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Cafe rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

KB: I hopped a bus to New York City the day after completing my MFA, and I love the soundscape here! I find sound and physicality to be symbiotic in poetry, and it’s easy to translate the buzz of my surroundings into the rhythm of my work, especially somewhere public, like a café, a bar, a park bench, or the train. My revision process demands less chaos and more focus. Most of my creative projects have corresponding playlists that I listen to at home. I've also taken to recording myself on Garage Band while developing a cadence. It’s a good exercise for exploring a new voice, too; I’ll record myself reading a single text while listening to different songs through headphones and the delivery always varies. Occasionally, though, I do like to work at the twilight hours of morning, when even the Internet and the alley cats are still.

LD: What is your favorite exercise that gets the words flowing?

KB: Unearthing a fresh narrative in an existing text through erasure, found word, and cut up poetry stimulates me into generating new work. Sometimes, I’ll explore a topic that has a lot of room for investigation, like astrophysics or the arctic, and allow my imagination to fill in the blanks with free association. I’m also partial to Dadaist and Surrealist games, and have been known to begin rounds of Exquisite Corpse on bar napkins.

LD: What’s the strangest object you've ever used to write a poem with and/or upon?

KB: Oh, I’m sure it’s gotten weird before. I’ll use napkins, apps, legal pads, note cards, sidewalk chalk, whatever. Let’s see. Memorably, I was assigned to write out a map poem in a workshop during Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. I went to campus early to buy a Moleskine at the bookstore only to find there wasn't a campus bookstore. There was, however, plenty of sycamore bark shed on the sidewalks. I found a sturdy, clean piece and, using colored sharpies, inscribed a short, cartographic love poem. It survived a week in Colorado and a drive to Wyoming, but I don’t know what happened to it. I like to imagine it as a little poetry boat floating the Platte, or riding a breeze back to the Flatirons.

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a poem?

I could revise forever and ever. My poems are basically complete once they've been accepted for publication. That’s not to say that I only find my poetry valid upon publication, but that I tend to step away from, revisit, and edit my work endlessly until someone else insists it’s finished. Time lends perspective. Old poems have served me well as a prompt, as a sort of creative artifact that I either want to explore for inspiration or to polish up—cut this stanza, change that line break. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever truly finish a

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Writer Sivan Butler-Rotholz

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Sivan Butler-Rotholz is the founder of Reviving Herstory, the Contributing Editor of the Saturday Poetry Series on As It Ought To Be, and a columnist for the iPinion Syndicate. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is a professor, writer, editor, comic artist, and attorney emerita.

Laura Davis: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

Sivan Butler-Rotholz: I have been working on my first novel since November 1, 2013. The idea had been percolating in my mind for quite some time, and a creative writing student of mine challenged me to participate in National Novel Writing Month, so I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. During that dedicated month the words flew from my fingertips like wildfire. Some days took more effort than others, but I wrote every day and met the 50,000-word goal by month’s end.

There is something very freeing about a challenge such as NaNoWriMo. I believe that, as writers, we wear two hats: our creating hat and our editing hat. Because I had a goal based on word count alone, I did not allow myself to put on my editing hat whatsoever during the month of November. The goal was to write, write, write. I knew that, after the month ended, I would have years to edit and rewrite as needed. So I gave myself the freedom to write whatever came to me—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Every good writer revises; I think aiming for perfection from the outset can have a crippling effect on writers. Such an approach may be the beast known as “writer’s block.”

After November ended, I gave myself some time away from writing the book. Because my novel is historical fiction, I am working on the novel even when I am only researching. So after November I read a lot—history books about the period in which my novel takes place (the era of King David), and also some great books on process. I’m a poet by training, so I had to give myself a crash course in what makes good fiction writing. In April I signed up for another NaNoWriMo challenge—Camp NaNoWriMo—which is a less-structured version of National Novel Writing Month. I did not meet my goal in April, but I had a major breakthrough with the book that was invaluable. Currently I’m in it again, doing Camp NaNoWriMo for the month of July.

Writing a novel, I am discovering, is a long and involved process. It is like a long-term relationship, whereas writing a poem can be more like a cherished fling. I hope to finish the novel in the next year or two, and hope that what I am learning now will translate into my ability to complete a novel every couple of years.

The work of writing a novel is ongoing and variable. Sometimes I write as if struck by divine inspiration or as if taking dictation for Martians. Other times I write not a single word, and instead let the lives of the characters and the landscape of the novel unfold in my mind. Whenever anyone asks me how the novel is going I tell them it’s coming along great. Whether I am writing daily or haven’t put my fingers to the keyboard in months, I always feel that the novel and I are moving forward. When people tell me they can’t wait to read it, I respond, “Me too!”

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a story, essay, or poem?

SBR: Ahhh, this is such an interesting question! For me, it is a gut feeling. After I have read, edited, read, revised, read, tweaked, and repeated these steps ad nausea, there comes a moment when I give it a read through and find that I don’t have any more changes to make. Then I may put it aside, come back, and apply the process again. Eventually it just feels done. It is, absolutely, a gut reaction.

I am a perfectionist, so anything I write has seen a lot of personal scrutiny before my instincts tell me it’s finished. For me it’s done done when I send it out into the world—when I submit an opinion editorial piece to the iPinion Syndicate, when I hit the “schedule” button on an entry in the Saturday Poetry Series that I edit for As It Ought To Be, when I finish a blog post for Reviving Herstory, when I submit poems for publication, etc. Even then, sometimes I revise after submission or posting. Most infuriating is when I notice a typo in an already published piece. Nothing drives me more bananas than that.

All that being said, the thing I always think of when I consider the question of whether piece of writing is “finished” is this: I heard a story about Yusef Komunyakaa. That his personal copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book is marked up with his newest edits. That when he gives readings from this book, he is reading newer, revised versions of poems that already won the Pulitzer Prize. I tell this story to my creative writing students when they ask how they know if a poem or story is finished. If Yusef Komunyakaa is still editing his Pulitzer Prize-winning poems, I’m not sure our work is ever finished.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

SBR: I started reciting original poems before I learned to read and write. My mother used to take dictation of the oral poems I composed. I believe that being a poet is something older than this body, this lifetime. It is something more akin to a soul or to the energy that comprises us; something that existed before we did in this earthly body, and something that will continue to go on after we are returned to dust.

I am really blessed in that I have always been encouraged in my writing. First by my family, then in school. I remember little books and poems I wrote in third and fourth grade being chosen as competition winners. My family, teachers, schools, and locales all encouraged me. So I grew up feeling good about my writing. Of course I’ve become more critical of my own work with age and experience, but I’ve always felt really good about being a writer, and I think the expectations I have for myself now only serve to make me a better writer. Now I have my sights set on becoming a New York Times bestselling novelist, and I think it’s a combination of the encouragement I have received throughout my life and my belief that I can do anything I set my mind to that is going to get me there.

LD: How do you motivate yourself to write?

SBR: I do much better with a deadline and some accountability. My most productive writing periods were while working toward my BA and MFA in creative writing, while taking continuing education courses in creative writing, while participating in residencies, and the like. National Novel Writing Month motivates me because I set a goal based on due date and word count; even if I’m only accountable to myself, I work better with even a self-imposed goal and deadline. Most recently a friend and I have started a writing group that meets once a month. Having to submit even a few pages of work to other people once a month ensures that I actually write those few pages. So the answer, for me, is that goal-setting and accountability are my greatest motivating factors.

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Cafe rumblings? White noise?

SBR: Essentially, as a lyricist, I prefer to listen to music with words than without. But I find that music with lyrics inevitably distracts me from my writing. I tried classical music for a while, but it was too calming for me. I need a little pick-me-up when I write. So I listened to Tiger Rag for a long time, but found that I can only listen to music without lyrics for so long. Most recently I discovered that the best writing music for me is Edith Piaf in French. It turns out that lyrics in another language give me the voice and the words that I crave, yet don’t distract me from my writing. This is probably the only time I will ever be thankful to be ignorant of foreign languages.

Aside from music, which I listen to when writing at home, I love to work in cafes. I love the way the hustle and bustle of café life becomes like white noise to me. It is often easier for me to write in a café than at home alone. At home there are too many distractions.

Most important for me, when working from home, is that I be alone. I share my relatively small, open floor plan apartment with my wonderful husband. He is a big fan of my attention. Even if we are both working side-by-side, he is compelled to perpetually interrupt me to show me whatever thing he is excited about at that moment. Needless to say, I get very little work done when my husband is home with me. Lots of love, very little work. So my at-home writing process comes back to Virginia Woolf, and the importance of having a room of one’s own.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Lindsay Lusby

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Poet Lindsay Lusby

Lindsay Lusby’s poetry has been published most recently in The Feminist Wire, Fairy Tale Review, and The Wolf Skin. Her first chapbook, Imago, was published by dancing girl press in 2014. She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Laura Davis: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

Lindsay Lusby: I've always been slow writer (and reader). But since I've embarked on the poem series to which I've most recently committed myself, my word faucet has become particularly slow-dripping. It frustrates me but, at the same time, I'm excited about the poems that have come out of it. This series I'm writing requires a very intricate interweaving of themes, that in turn requires super precise word-choice to maintain the balance I want, and this all leads to essentially revising while I'm writing. If it sounds stilted, that's because it really is. But it seems to be working, so I'll keep on in this vein for as long as it continues to be fruitful.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

LL: I use a combination of three different writing implements for different stages of the process. For composing, I prefer using a manual typewriter. Somehow, the typewriter leaves me feeling less inhibited by my own insecurities while writing. I'm more able to let myself write down what is developing in my head as it happens and explore the different possibilities for where this new poem might lead. I make lists of words, phrases, and bits of the two or more source materials I'm hoping to combine. When I've got a working draft (or at least a fragment that I want to keep), I move to the word processor for revising and finishing the poem. Then, when I feel I have a fairly polished piece, I write it by hand in my notebook that travels around with me. I realize that's probably the reverse order for lots of folks, but this is what (most often) works for me. I also have a habit carrying around my brand-new poems with me like a kind of security blanket.

LD: What color is your writing process. Do explain.

LL: Green. Definitely green. A poem I wrote a few months ago called "Interlude" ends with the line, "in those quiet degrees of shade." That is my mental writing space. Although I'm typically an indoor cat (doing most of my writing in my bedroom), my mental space is usually a green garden sheltered by an overcast sky. It smells like rain-soaked ivy and basil. A comforting green gloom.

LD: Let's talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Cafe rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

LL: I am one of those people who just cannot concentrate on a solitary activity in public spaces. I'm just hyper-aware of everything else going on around me. I think close to utter silence would be the best for me, although sometimes I will venture into purely instrumental music for some background sound. I tend to get distracted by song lyrics though. I must also admit that I am not always faithful to this prescription, but deviation usually leads to lots of frustration with myself and no new writing being accomplished.

LD: Beverage of choice?

LL: I'm a passionate lover of tea—hot or iced, depending on the temperature of the room. Although I do love a classic black tea, when I want to treat myself I go for a cup of ginger peach black tea or spice chai latte. Mmmmmm.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Stacy Nigliazzo

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Poet Stacy R. Nigliazzo

Stacy R. Nigliazzo is an ER nurse. Her debut poetry collection, Scissored Moon, was released by Press 53 last fall, and has been named a finalist for the 2013 Julie Suk Prize (Jacar Press) and the 2014 Texas Institute of Letters First Book Award.

Laura Davis: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in? Warm-up exercise? Daydreaming? Any rituals that involve smelling a drawer of fruit?

Stacy R. Nigliazzo: I generally need some spark of inspiration, otherwise I just sit and stare at a blank page for hours. That spark can originate from anywhere, really. I’ll have a dream, hear an unexpected word (like yaw or polystyrene, for example), or see something intriguing. Then I’ll grab my journal, tie my hair back, and scribble my thoughts. After I've polished my ideas I move to my MacBook. I anguish over every little word until I’m satisfied with the finished product. If I get stuck I generally read Charles Simic—no shortage of inspiration there. Sometimes I burn candles that smell of toasted coconut and hazelnut. The best thing about that is the ribbon of smoke that appears when you blow them out. Very poetic.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

SN: I always start with a mechanical pencil so I can erase when I need to and don’t have to stop for sharpening. My favorite is the Zebra #2 (because it looks like a real pencil).

LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a story, essay, or poem?

SN: I memorize all of my poems while I’m writing them, then mull them over and over in my mind after composition. If I still like the poem after a few days I generally stick with it. Sometimes I’ll agonizingly get stuck on a line, or even on a single word. In that case, I’ll try to put the poem aside for a while to tackle again later. Sometimes it takes forever to find the right fit.

For example, in the poem "Purgatory," it took me two weeks to come up with stranded soul. I think it was complicated by the fact that I had a deadline, and it was my first big publishing opportunity with the American Journal of Nursing. It finally came to me after much sleeplessness and gnashing of teeth while I was desperately scouring my old high school thesaurus, which is silly, as the metaphor seems so intuitive now. I completed the poem with a week to spare, but went ahead and sent it in anyway. I knew I was finished.

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Cafe rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

SN: Yo Yo Ma’s music is a staple when I’m writing (especially his unaccompanied Bach Cello Suites). I also love Emanuel Ax’s piano quartets (Mozart). Whatever I listen to has to be instrumental—no words other than mine allowed. If I’m particularly focused, or at the point where I’m breaking out the old high school thesaurus again, I’ll go for dead silence.

LD: What do you like to read before you write? Or after? Or during?

SN: Charles Simic, of course, and also Neruda’s prose poems. Most recently, Elana Bell’s Eyes, Stones and Carl Adamshick’s Curses and Wishes (both past recipients of the Walt Whitman Award). And, of course, there’s my big stack of back issues of the Bellevue Literary Review. There is absolute perfection in those pages!

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Samantha Duncan

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Poet Samantha Duncan

Samantha Duncan is the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) and Moon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), and she serves as Associate Editor for ELJ Publications. She lives in Houston. Follow her on Twitter, Goodreads and her blog.

Laura Davis: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in? Warm-up exercise? Daydreaming? Any rituals that involve smelling a drawer of fruit?

Samantha Duncan: My writing starts with observance and centers on small ideas evolving into bigger ones. I tend to look for beauty and art in unconventional places and find a lot of it in everyday life, so an idea for a piece may come from a tree in my neighborhood or an exchange I see in a coffee shop. I like to take what’s simple and expand it, perhaps beyond its surface level meaning. My first chapbook, Moon Law, literally came about from a discussion about how life and the law would have to be different on the moon if we colonized it. I took the trajectory of a fairly normal and straightforward relationship between two people and placed it on the moon. That manuscript was the result.

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

SD: My latest poetry chapbook, One Never Eats Four, took a while to come together. If memory serves me correctly, I wrote the individual drafts fairly quickly, then took a long time to do dozens of edits. I submitted most of them individually to journals and a handful were accepted, which was when I started to think about creating a manuscript. Grouping them was the hard part. I tend to be a little obsessively organized, and I think I was initially too fixated on there being a central theme to the collection, when there obviously wasn't. When I finally gave up that vision and turned my focus to multiple related subjects, instead, it quickly got picked up by ELJ Publications. Ideally, I prefer starting with a theme or subject and then writing the manuscript around it; in this instance, the reverse had to occur, as I already had months of material that was demanding to be put together.

LD: How long have you been writing? What’s the first thing you remember feeling good about having written?

SD: I've been writing since I learned how, as a child. I remember mimicking books that I read, starting with picture books (art was never my strong suit, so these were simplistic) and graduating to longer and longer chapter books when I began reading those. Despite writing from an early age, it wasn't until college that I felt I had written something that I liked and was worth publishing. I wrote a short story about a young, accomplished violin player who lost her arm in a car accident and had to navigate a different path for her life. I later expanded it into a novel, but in retrospect, I don’t think I had the skill to give the story what it needed to be great and publication ready. Another project I wrote that I remain proud of today was a short, nonlinear novel called Happy Blue. It was the first time a piece of writing seemed to pour out of me with little effort, and of all the fiction I've written, it’s the only thing I believe I could someday publish if I ever go back and polish it.

LD: How do you motivate yourself to write? Chocolates? Self-flagellation? Coffee on an IV drip?

SD: Since I started publishing my work, it’s become less about cookies and coffee and shiny things. If I find myself procrastinating on work, I think about my published pieces and how they wouldn't have been accepted if I hadn't, at some point, decided to stop staring at a blank screen. We all know people who talk about writing a lot more than they actually write, and I never want to be that person. My end goal is to create and get it out in the world, and I remind myself the only way to make that happen is to sit down, ignore Facebook, and write.

LD: Beverage of choice?

SD: Anything hot. It’s a bit of a writer cliché, but I’m a Starbucks junkie. I have rotating favorites, but my go-to drink is a soy dirty chai. When my Starbucks card has no money on it (a frequent occurrence), I’ll have green tea. That said, I don’t discriminate – I’m also a fan of crappy gas station coffee.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Anna B. Sutton

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Poet Anna B. Sutton

Anna B. Sutton is a poet and publisher from Nashville, TN. Her work has won the Pocataligo Poetry Prize, a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Third Coast, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Pinch, Superstition Review, Weave, and other journals.

Laura Davis: Where do you write? Paint us a word picture. Put us there. And that other place you like. Or just send a real picture.

Anna B. Sutton: Where I write has been a source of a lot of strife—not for any other reason than that I am out of shape and pushing 30. For years, especially during graduate school, I chose to write on my laptop in bed, either leaning back one of those pillows with arms—boyfriend pillows?—or sitting up cross-legged. Turns out this is the exact wrong thing to do for your back. Let this be a lesson to all you writers out there. After years of hunching over my laptop on a soft surface, I developed sciatica, which I had previously only associated with the elderly folk that my mother and I delivered Meals on Wheels to when I was growing up. But there I was, 26, unable to lift my laundry basket or really even my head. The plus side of developing sciatica is that they give you a bunch of the best kinds of drugs—heavy duty painkillers, muscle relaxers. The down side is the fact that you have to face your own weakness and mortality on a very immediate and visceral level. For those of you who don’t know, sciatica is when, over time, you train your lower back muscles to clench around the bundle of nerves at the base of your spine. It takes many months of drugs and hot and cold therapy and downward facing dog to work it out. So after that, I spent a ridiculous amount of money on an office chair, sold my laptop so that I wouldn't be further tempted to hunker down in the sultry embrace of my bed, and now I write on a desktop at a desk pushed up against a huge wall of windows. And that’s working out pretty well, but what I wouldn't give for an eight hour marathon day of writing in bed. (see photo below)

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

AS: My process is always two-fold. Generally, I get a line or image stuck in my head and the first draft of the poem—if I’m able to get to writing quickly enough—just sort of tumbles out. I can write a first draft in a matter of minutes. The second part of the process is where all the hemming and hawing and circling around a phrase comes in. Once I begin to revise that first draft, I can stare at the page for days, weeks, sometimes returning to a poem for years—change a word, change it back; add a line that sometimes accidentally opens up an entirely new meaning that has to be explored; erase and rewrite stanzas; format, reformat… When I was in my MFA program, workshop would get me really fired up for revisions and I could knock them out within a week. These days, left to my own devices, I’d say it takes me about four months on average to feel like a poem is “ready.” Of course, there are always those moments of pure magic, like when I wrote a recent poem called “Conservation.” I wrote it quickly at Vermont Studio Center, after having read some really heartbreaking articles about whooping cranes. I wrote it quickly, it felt finished, and I tagged it onto a few submissions I sent out, just to see what might happen. Almost immediately, Pinch picked it up for publication and I am so thrilled about that. I love their journal and it’s very rare that we get to give birth to a complete idea.

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

AS: I’m a computer girl, all the way. As much as I hate staring at a screen, I really love the deftness of a word processor. My initial process is so quick and fluid, and I’m a fast typer—Mavis Beacon taught me well. I've tried to hand-write because a lot of my writer friends say it allows them to connect more to the words, but to me it just feels clunky. My hand can’t keep up with my head. And when it comes to revisions—copy, paste, undo, redo—these commands are all essential to me. Plus, using a computer to write has allowed me to save terrible drafts that I revisit and reshape years later; drafts that would have no doubt been buried had I written them by hand in a notebook.

LD: Let’s talk about your writing soundscape. Do you listen to music? Café rumblings? White noise? Utter silence?

AS: I envy people who can listen to music while they write, or write in a coffee shop. I would love to feed from that energy. Unfortunately, I go into a sort of Tommy trance (See me, feel me, touch me, heal me, not fat guy in a little coat) and need absolute silence. I also really need to be alone, which means no fun writing parties and also causes some problems now that I’m living with my boyfriend. We've devised a “curtain system” to block off the sun room where I write, but even so, just knowing someone is somewhere nearby can often prevent me from opening up entirely. Plus, I tend to read aloud as I write, and if anyone is around, I become pretty self-conscious about mumbling to myself. I think all of this points to the fact that I need to feel safe enough when I write to open up parts of me that I keep pretty tightly sealed otherwise.

LD: Beverage of choice?

AS: All beverages, great and small. In my life outside of writing, I’m the kind of person who can end up with four different glasses at brunch: water, coffee, juice, cocktail. But it’s not the case when I’m at work on a poem. This is another instance where I wish I could do what many writers I love do—write poetry while drinking a big glass of red wine or a few fingers of bourbon—but I just get distracted. Similarly, too much coffee and I get buzzy and anxious and start writing terrible poems about how NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY PAIN. Now, I try to stick with tea. Right this moment, I’m sipping on some iced red chai—naturally decaf, y’all! Oh god, drinking decaf tea alone with sciatica. Maybe I am elderly after all.

Photo below: Here is my very expensive chair and very cheap computer, then, from the lower left and moving clockwise: 1.) A few lit mags I've received in the mail lately, including the new Tar River Poetry, which I am just thrilled to have a poem in. 2.) A Hallmark bag filled with actual spells from Sarah Messer, a former professor/current boss at One Pause/cheesemaker/life mentor. We haven’t found the right place for all of them, yet. Plus, unlike most houses in Wilmington, where I lived for three years and met Sarah, our current home in Winston-Salem is decidedly not haunted. 3.) A picture of a few of my favorite fellow writers, taken at Chicago AWP, likely while very hungover. We all look pretty cute, though. 4.) Fried and True, which I’m about to review for my blog in an effort to actually have a blog/because my boyfriend loves nothing more than fried chicken—not even me, not by far. 5.) Two monkey candle holders from my grandmother than are super weird and possibly my favorite things in the world. They’re wearing Victorian era powder blue tails and tawny top hats, because why not? 6.) old lady tea.

This Is Not Unfinished Draft Fifteen

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 01:33:00 +0000

Every word is a struggle when you don't want to write. The white rectangle in which you type, the blinking vertical line, they seem to say, "And? Now what? That all you got?" with every word, every hesitation.

Number of unfinished blog post drafts: 14

You write word lists while listening to audiobooks or watch television. First, you flip to a new pair of lined pages in your Moleskin, and write the alphabet down the left-hand side. As words pop up in the story, you press the pen against the page and remind yourself how it feels to put letters together to form sounds. Certain letters fill up quickly: S, D and R. Others like J or Q take longer. When you watch The West Wing, the J words come more quickly: jurisprudence, judges, justice, jeopardy.

Number of poems written this year: 32
Breakdown by month: January: 13, February: 5, March: 0, April: 2, May: 9, June: 1.

That's all I got. I don't want this to be draft number 14.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Robert Walicki

noreply@blogger.com (Laura the Poet) — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Robert Walicki 's debut chapbook is A Room Full Of Trees (Redbird Press). His work has appeared in Stone Highway Review, Grasslimb, and others Most recently, he was second runner up in Finishing Line Press' Open Chapbook Competition in 2013, and was awarded finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition (2013).

Laura Davis: How do you begin writing? Do you just dive in? Warm-up exercise? Daydreaming? Any strange rituals involving smelling a drawer of fruit?

Robert Walicki: It begins almost unconsciously, a sort of energy builds up inside my imaginative self and I feel at that point, i'm ready to write a poem. The best ones I still feel come together rather quickly although the longer I write,I feel that this can vary. When the juices begin to flow so to speak, I often don't even know what I'm writing about,but most times I have some idea or goal, although the end result is rarely what I had originally set out to accomplish,which is ok. I've learned to trust the muse.

LD: How often do you write and for how long? What time of day?

RW: Mostly at night or early morning,when I feel I can control extraneous noises. As far as frequency is concerned,I try to write something every day. This might not be a finished poem, but editing drafts of poems, free-writes, or working on manuscripts, I think qualifies. This is one of,if not the most important rule that poets should abide by. I push myself personally in my writing, trying to find ways to make the poem better,but I think it's also important to give yourself permission to write the occasional unnecessary or even "bad" poem.Some of my personal favorite poems began as a joke or as a trivial exercise.I think for me, when I write from the unconscious self, the poem has more emotional truth in it.

LD: Describe the process of making a recent poem or story. Lightning? Slow-dripping faucet? How long did you work on it?

RW: I generally write fairly quickly,usually within an hour or at worst a couple days. However long it takes,when I am in my process, I am wrapped up in the world of the poem, usually staying there until the poem's first draft is written. A recent poem of mine called "Pick Up" came from driving past a few teenagers playing basketball at a nearby field. Normally, if I'm writing about a particular place, I rely on memory to fill in the sensory details.For this poem, I felt the need to go back to this field, touch the rusty chained link fence, smell the wet dust of the pitcher's mound. Most of the descriptive detail didn't end up in the poem,but the atmosphere helped authenticate the place for me as I wrote about it,adding personal memories to make it my own.

LD: What’s the strangest object you've ever used to write a poem or a story with and/or upon?

RW: I don't know if this is an answer to your question,but once, a few lines came to me and I didn't have a pen or anyway to write them down,so I used a twig and scrawled the words into dirt and came back to transcribe them onto paper. After this, I thought it would be an interesting idea to write poems this way, on natural or man made objects as found poems and take pictures of them. Perhaps I will someday.

LD: What do you like to read before you write? Or after? Or during?

RW: I have a litany of favorite poets that I read from, whose work I feel spiritually close to: Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, Jason Shinder, Matthew Dickman, Kim Addonizio and Sharon Olds. When I feel blocked creatively, all I need to do sometimes is to read from one of these poets and I'm filled back up again.