An Interview with David John Rosenheim, Author of OWL

If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?  

I’d love to make dinner for Ray Carver. I’d grill up some Chinook Salmon to honor his Pacific Northwest roots, along with some fiddlehead ferns and new potatoes. When I think of Carver, I imagine rivers and forests. We would drink iced tea, assuming he’s still on the wagon.

What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears?

The blank page can be at once calming, exhilarating, and utterly frightening. The prospect of nothing good spilling forth is a constant concern. When the fear is particularly bad, and nothing is flowing, I remember my sister, who said that it’s all part of my process—the blocks, the dross, all of it.

Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? 

I admire pure nature poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. I picture them living in glass and stone houses deep in the woods. I envy what I imagine to be their monastic, Earth-bound lives.

What books are on your nightstand? 

I just bought a new translation of Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil.” I’ve promised myself to read the French alongside the translation, but it’s a challenge. For fiction, I’m currently reading “Trust,” by Hernan Diaz. I have a guilty-ish passion for financial markets, and this is a great literary salve for that interest. One more that just arrived today is Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet.” I’ll be studying this in my dharma group over the next two months.

Favorite punctuation mark? Why?  

The question-mark. But isn’t that everyone’s? The look of it is sensual. Plus, my day job as a coach is to ask the right questions. Also, it serves as a reminder to live in “beginner’s mind” rather than trying to be an expert. It’s a relief.

What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgments? 

The floor beneath my feet. I go to it all day long for grounding and to remind myself to get out of my head.

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

I wish I could say that it energizes me. And often, it does. But I am aware of a point after which a given writing session becomes a slog. I am afraid of that point because that’s when the lines feel forced and uninspired. I should probably push through that point more than I do, but fear and laziness can get in the way.

What are common traps for aspiring writers?

For me, the earliest trap was letting too much ride on critical feedback. My first experience in getting such feedback from a pile of poems I handed to a professor ended in me taking it so badly that I didn’t write again for several years. Learning to take good feedback is a skill that requires practice. On a related topic, getting used to rejections from journals, publishers, or in my early case, record labels, is part of the process. The sooner you can grow a thick skin about rejection, the better. As a teacher told me in coaching school, “yes lives in the land of no.” So go after those no’s!

Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?

I used to think that the suffering and angst of my early adult life were required to write good songs and poems. That is a dangerous myth that many people, including me, have used to justify all sorts of self-damaging behavior to feed the muse. Thankfully, I now find more joy and (hopefully) more craft in writing with more emotional objectivity. Like my Zen practice, the guidance is not to feel less or to suppress emotions but to gain a little space from their immediacy by observing and learning from them. For those who come to writing without a history or temperament of strong emotions, writing may bring them closer to their intimate and difficult truths.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

Yes, and yes. The poetry and albums should stand on their own. There is a sequence of three novels that I’m working on. These should both stand on their own and are also connected.

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

I have an (as of yet) unpublished novel and enough poems for another book or two or three. The novel is vaguely autobiographical. I’ve sketched out two other novels in the same sequence that I’d like to get to. I have a good set of songs that could comprise at least another album. Most of my published work has been in the form of songs. Between the various bands and projects I’ve been in, I’ve released more than ten EPs and LPs. Some of these bands include Hugh, The Weather Band, Culty Smothers, and Winchester Revival.

What does literary success look like to you?

I’d like to keep publishing!

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