|
If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Anne Carson. I wouldn’t cook. I would make my boyfriend do the cooking. He is a much better cook than I am. I’d probably have him do a charcuterie board, a salad with his homemade dressing (he makes the best dressing), and seafood chowder, with lobster of course. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? That I don’t have the self discipline to sit down and ever actually finish anything substantial. I wouldn’t say this fear has been combated. It’s alive and well. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Vasya Petrovna from The Winternight Trilogy What books are on your nightstand? “Adventures in Tandem Nursing” by Hilary Flower “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em dash. It helps make sense of the way my mind works—too many thoughts going on all at once that are constantly interrupting one another. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Too many to count. I’ve always been a slow reader. I like to take my time. As with every aspect of my life, I abhor being rushed. I started most of the books I was supposed to read, but never finished them as quickly as I was expected too. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Coffee If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both. Writing something new is always exhilarating. Revising it is exhausting. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Believing that nothing you write is, or will ever be good enough. Which is what I feel about my writing all the time. I don’t really have a solution, except to just keep writing anyway. What is your writing Kryptonite? Having my phone anywhere near me. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? For sure. The human brain can only process so much input. When my life feels calm, I like to read books that are dense and complex, and require all of my attention. But when I’m stressed out and have a lot going on, I like to read books that are easy, and don’t require a lot of effort. For example, when I was studying abroad in France my sophomore year of high school, I felt so tired all the time trying to learn and process a new language everyday all day. This is super embarrassing, but my host family had the Twilight Series in English, so I read all four of them in 3 weeks. I’d read them back in middle school, so there was absolutely no reason for me to re-read them except for the fact that I was homesick, and they were a nice little getaway for my brain. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I suppose they could be a writer, I just don’t know that they would be one I would have any particular interest in reading. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? 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? How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. Maybe it’s not underappreciated, but absolutely everyone should read it, because it’s one of the best novels ever written. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Nothing. In the words of Anne Lamott, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.” How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have one half-finished novel that I’ve been working on, on and off for the past ten years. Parts of it appear in this collection. I hope to finish it someday. What does literary success look like to you? J.K. Rowling. Stephen King. I set the bar low for myself. What’s the best way to market your books? I have absolutely no idea. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Wanting them to feel authentic, but knowing that they probably never will. What did you edit out of this book? Things I was embarrassed about having written. Things that didn’t need to be there. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Well, right now I’m a full time mom with a one year old boy, and a baby girl on the way, and that’s a whole lot of work. I think I’d like to teach writing classes some day, if I ever get to go back to school. I’d also like to do a lot of my own writing. Writing is really the only thing that makes sense to me to do, as far as having a career goes. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Leonard Cohen. Cigarettes for him. Peach jam and a spoon for me. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Running out of ideas. I just do my best anyway. When you put in the time, something always comes. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Leonard Cohen and Anne from Anne of Green Gables. What books are on your nightstand? The Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid, To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and some Mark Strand collections are in another room somewhere. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The space. The words are only there to remind us of the space. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Lots of books. I faked a lot of reading in college, too. Shakespeare was my worst grade in college. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgments? The baby swing. Coffee. The trampoline. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? You are not your writing. It’s just something you do. Take a class or join a writers’ group if you get lazy like me. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energizes me for sure. I like writing when I first wake up. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Thinking poetry is hard and full of rules. It’s the opposite. What is your writing Kryptonite? Talking about ideas before writing them. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? No, there are a million good things to read. I just don’t do it. I love reading work from my sister and the Nearby Universe, my writers’ group. I enjoy reading my students’ work, and I am lucky enough to get paid for that. But in my spare time, I am more likely playing outside with my kids. Like I said, we have a trampoline. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Who doesn’t feel emotions strongly? No, I guess there are people whose energy goes mostly in thinking instead of feeling. Maybe they are plotting strategies for getting more money or power, like politicians. They could be successful in writing books for other people like themselves, strategy books. Or maybe there are thinkers who don’t want kids or lovers or friends or cats, they just want to philosophize all day. They could write books for each other too. Their job is easier: thinking is already in words. But I wouldn’t want to read their poetry. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? My sister, Robin Higham, is always there with encouragement. We talk about ideas and feedback and publishing and all the writerly things. The poet Kelli Allen, who began as my professor, and everyone in my writers’ group have helped with these things too. 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? Voice happens, I guess, but I want each book to have its own flavor, like Nicholas Samaras or Pink Floyd. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I never knew revising so many times could help so much. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Getting my MFA in Creative Writing online at Lindenwood University. I thought I just needed the deadlines, but I learned a lot and grew a lot. About half the pieces in Only Flying were first written in my classes there. “Chapter Twenty-six: The Map,” is an excerpt from the novel I began in the program. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Rush. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? My mom used to whip an egg and add it to ramen for nutrition, but my little sister Robin wouldn’t eat it if she knew it was in there, so my mom told me not to tell her. I did, and she didn’t eat that ramen, and I marvelled at my power. There’s a better story, though, about that 70s song, “Dust in the Wind.” I must have been about five when it came on the radio and I told my parents it was about us, about my baby brother who died the day he was born--Dustin, the wind. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Medicine Woman by Lynn V. Andrews. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I choose the tiger but the salamander chose me. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? It depends on the person. Most of my characters are not based on anyone. My grandma in the book is my real grandma, and she’s the reason I became a writer. But I owe her everything not because of that, but because of how she loved me. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? One complete early readers chapter book, about two little kids in India; ¾ of a literary fantasy novel; ½ a poetry collection of Earthly delights; and one secret idea. What does literary success look like to you? Success in all fields is measured the same way: either you’ve been a guest on Sesame Street or you haven’t. What’s the best way to market your books? My favorite way would be word of mouth. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Not using words like “auburn.” What did you edit out of this book? “Bella is Suzanne,” for Leonard Cohen and my friend from college. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I love teaching. I loved being a gardener, and I loved painting houses. If I could get paid for it, I could be an artist or illustrate children’s books. I was working on a book of poetry for children with my grandmother when she died, her poems and my paintings of animals. I hope to still finish it one day.
If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Grace Paley, and for purposes of dinner, conversation, etc., preferably alive. I’d make borscht, a chicken pie, a salad from our garden. My guiding adjectives would be fresh, substantial, unpretentious. I’d look forward most of all to the post-meal stroll, the pleasure of watching her meet the neighbors’ dogs, the kids on trikes, the singular peach tree on Laughlin Road. I’d want to absorb a bit of her faith and humor and strength in this horrible time, as the powers that be draw us closer toward destruction. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Taking a stupid turn into a swamp. Save, rename, press on. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? When I was 13 and listening to Jackson Browne, I’d hold the album in my hands, study his eyes, his perfect hair. Maybe get back to me on this one. What books are on your nightstand? It’s so tempting to make up a lie here. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicos Philosophicus. No, Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors. The Best American Short Stories 2019. Cornel West’s Black Prophetic Fire. Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask is in the bathroom. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Period. That’s all I want to say about it. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Nearly everything. The only books I remember finishing were Of Mice and Men and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? First, the rake, stirrer of partially desiccated oak leaves, memories. Second, the rolling pin, essential for pie making, which in turn is essential for keeping friends who read my early drafts. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Surprise yourself. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Certainly both. When it is going well, when visions and voices are competing for space in my head and space on the page, it offers a surge of energy. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Over-narration, trying to tell the reader what to feel. Speechifying dialogue. All, I think stem from a lack of trust in readers’ intelligence. What is your writing Kryptonite? Bulleit. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes, often. I read and edit a lot of student writing. Seems every semester I hit a kind of wall – like where do my opinions come from? Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Tough one. Strong emotions can be as much a hindrance as a help, I think. One must care. To paraphrase Heidegger, caring precedes experience. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? So many of my friendships are with fellow writers, too many to list, but I’ve put a few in my acknowledgments. How do they help? In a number of ways, but most important – they offer honest responses to my work, and sometimes very creative suggestions. 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? Separation Anxiety is my third collection of stories. Each is organized by theme, but they have some common elements. Neuroses manifests in work relationships, in families, in romantic encounters. My characters are often in search of identity, stability, courage and love. My stories, as whole, might make a good companion to the DSM-5. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I don’t know that it changed my process. It gave me a boost in confidence. I loved (and still love) doing readings. Perhaps I wrote more 1,000-word pieces with that in mind. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? My first book was published through a contest. I suppose that fee, whatever it was, was well worth it. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Heavily descriptive writers like Nabakov, Conrad and Bellow are difficult for me. My mind wanders. But in the right state of mind, I can be enamored with the richness of the prose. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? In high school I read William Carlos Williams’ Poem As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot It seemed like magic the way the words put the picture in my mind, the way I could feel the movement of the cat in the movement of the lines. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Osprey, aka, river hawk. It circles, it glides, it sees into the depths, and when it strikes there is no hesitation. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Plausible deniability. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Two half-baked novels and half a dozen stories. What does literary success look like to you? I happen to have a long answer for this one: http://losangelesreview.org/daniel-coshnear-the-balanced-life-of-a-successful-writer/ What’s the best way to market your books? Strong reviews, readings, lots of readings, online and god willing, in person. Radio appearances. I wish I could say there is a niche audience for this book. Mental health workers. Mental illness sufferers. Members of families. Short story readers. Worriers. Bedwetters. Comedians. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? The difficulty arises if I dwell on this idea of “opposite sex.” Are we not each a composite of those we have known? We are a concert of voices; the fiction is this thing we call self. That said, I know nothing about dress sizes. What did you edit out of this book?” A couple of stories that seemed too similar to others. A few quirky short pieces that didn’t pertain to the theme. A mock daytime TV drama. An interactive story that presented a formatting nightmare. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Well, I guess I’m doing it. I work at a group home for homeless, mentally ill folks. And I teach. Both at times draw from the wells of the writer in me. When I was a child, I wanted to be Gale Sayers. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I love so many authors it’s hard to narrow it down to one. I’d host a series of dinners, and the first invitee would be Rohinton Mistry, who wrote A Fine Balance, one of my favorite books. I’d serve whatever he prefers. I’d also love to dine with Naguib Mahfouz, author of Midaq Alley, another book I love because of his facility with the omniscient narrator and his ability to illustrate the messiness and unexpectedness of life inherent in the arc of the lives of his characters. I’d serve him stuffed grape leaves and pilaf. Alice Munro (love all her work), Joyce Carol Oates, and Frank Conroy whose book Body and Soul is among my favorites and Andre Dubus III, (loved his book, House of Sand and Fog) would make interesting dinner guests. I’d have to host a never-ending salon to break bread with all the writers I admire. Oh--and Philip Pullman! I’d love to have dinner with him and discuss his Dark Materials double trilogies. He is a children’s book author but his books work on many levels that speak to adults too. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The what-comes-next question. It’s a matter of knowing the character intimately because each one reacts differently to the same set of circumstances, but getting to that point of intimacy with character can be scary. I always start by reading the beginning of the chapter or section that i’m working on and stop the writing day with an unfinished sentence so I have an idea of what comes next. I also do rough outlines. I do writing exercises when my mind is totally blank or blocked. I also write from a different perspective other than the one I’m focused on--to reveal other information about characters or other information that the narrator may not know. Not being disciplined enough is scary but keeping disciplined is a way to combat fears. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? For a long time, I was crushing on Michael Ondaatje because I loved the sapper in The English Patient. I’ve also long loved the stories Issac Bashevis Singer, for his short stories, which I first discovered in The New Yorker. I admire his boldness. Michael Chabon is another literary crush--I’ve read all of his books, beginning with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. What books are on your nightstand? Little Axe, by Lauren Francis Sharma The Death of Bees, by Lisa O’Donnell Half of the Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead What I Can’t Bear Losing, by Gerald Stern Pushcart Prize collections for 2019 and 2018 All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Boerr The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The semi-colon because it’s an elegant way to connect ideas. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? The all-girls Catholic school I attended distributed summer reading lists and required book reports at the beginning of the fall semester. I do remember reading books NOT on the list, such as DH Lawrence’s scandalous Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the Women’s Room, by Marilyn French; and all the science fiction books I could pinch off my older brother’s bookshelves. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My laptop. It’s a workhorse. I appreciate its steadfastness and its sturdiness. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wadsworth Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize me. When I’m always energized when I’m writing and it’s flowing. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Not reading enough. Many aspiring writers these days don’t seem to like reading books or know the greats in the cannon. What is your writing Kryptonite? Not filling the well enough, not getting refreshed and renewed with new ideas from other arts like theater, music, visual arts, and string arts. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes when I’m overtired. I often do craft exercise or tackle a character from a different perspective. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? No. Writing that comes alive is about moving readers. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Susan Muaddu Darraj, author of two story collections and a children’s chapter book series titled Farrah Rocks, is one of my best friends. We bounce story ideas off each other, help each other set writing goals as we navigate the writing life as mothers with child rearing responsibilities and as professional women with full-time jobs. https://susanmuaddidarraj.com/ Jen Michalski is another good friend. We trade stories and workshop them in terms of craft, what’s working, not working. We also look out for opportunities for each other. http://jenmichalski.com/ I consider Tom Jenks of Narrative Magazine online as my mentor. In addition to being his student in his workshop, I’ve been a reader for Narrative Magazine since 2003. 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? Each book stands alone to create a body of work that spans worlds, characters, and cultures. My novel, now in progress, is titled Delia’s Concerto, and chronicles the summer of a 15-year old girl, who is a gifted pianist but nothing about her life is working. A second collection of short stories is completed and explores loss and grief. Another work in progress concerns survivors of the Sikh Holocaust of 1984. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? So far, it hasn’t. Maybe that will change when it comes time to promote the book. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? The Writer’s Studio classes in NY and workshops with Tom Jenks, both after having completed Hopkins. I wouldn’t have understood the Writers’ Studio or workshop classes as well without having completed the work at Johns Hopkins. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Philip Roth. I hated Portnoy’s Complaint. But loved his later book, The Human Stain. What’s the best way to market your books?
What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Trying to write a male character that isn’t passive or feminine. What did you edit out of this book?” Dialogue that wasn’t working. Some verbal bad habits that found their way into the narratives. Unnecessary and imprecise words. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Real estate development or city planner, reusing and transforming defunct properties. I loved writing the real estate, neighborhood, and property stories for the local newspapers and magazines.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I’d love to hear Alejandra Pizarnik read either Árbol de Diana or La tierra más ajena, and to know more about her experiences. I’d offer her tea, coffee, and/or coriander strawberry salad. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I tend to write about difficult experiences, events, and circumstances. I think this is important for a number of reasons. For example, poetry can serve as a companion to a reader, helping us to feel less alone and/or to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Moreover, poets are a sort of historian, ensuring important events, perhaps especially the emotional information surrounding those events, is not lost. We must learn from the past. However, I certainly fear that my more difficult work could evoke painful memories in a reader or listener. For this reason, there are poems I will not read at a reading unless the event has been marketed in a way that the audience clearly understands which topics will arise. Moreover, I am deeply fortunate to have a community of fellow writers to whom I can show my work and with whom I can chat about my concerns. I trust them to be honest about how they receive the poems and how they feel the work may be otherwise received. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Lee Ann Roripaugh. Perhaps more than any other books, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s poetry collections have taught me about the craft of poetry, especially cohesive collections, effective book-length topography, as well as the effects that literature can have on the intersection of our hearts and our minds. I teach her most recent collection, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), in my Asian American Literature class at Nevada State College, and we read some individual poems in my Creative Writing courses, as well. I had the exceptional honor of hosting her for a reading and a generative-writing workshop through my Clark County Poet Laureate programming, and my adoration for her only grew. She is eloquent, brilliant, and generous. What books are on your nightstand? Currently books are cascading from my nightstand, which is a prettier way to say that I have a mess. However, a few of them are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic, Lisa Ciccarello’s At Night, Jake Skeets’ Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. There are also a few proofs of Tolsun Books, a small press for which I am a founder and editor. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I’m currently in love with the em-dash for the ways in which it allows me to shift meter and pacing. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? This isn’t quite the same, but perhaps sometimes our Band sheet music. On occasion, we’d riff and improvise, often much to the conductor’s dismay. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I might thank my saxophone. Long before I became a poet, I learned musicality--phrasing, meter, pacing, and more--by playing the saxophone. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? I have two thoughts. First, I might write, Make time for yourself. Authors’ successful writerly processes vary greatly, so I hesitate to give too much advice. However, I think that if we don’t take some time for ourselves, it can be difficult to exist as creatives. Second, something I tell my Creative Writing students is to try each poem 11 different ways. I learned this from one of my MFA mentors, H.L. Hix. I can’t remember if the exact number was 11, but the message I took from a conversation with him about revisions was to try our work in a variety of ways so that we can learn and grow as writers as well as allow a poem or story to discover its truest version of itself. Does writing energize or exhaust you? It depends. If I can strike a balance between teaching, hiking or swimming, and writing, then writing energizes me. However, if I’ve already spent too much time sitting still in a day, then I need to get up and outside to brainstorm. This said, this, too, is part of my writing process. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think it is important to read often and widely and to spend more time writing than submitting. What is your writing Kryptonite? An empty bag of coffee. I know this is a bit cliche, but I really love light roast coffee. I get in my own way in plenty of other ways, too, such as anxiously prioritizing to-do lists. However, I’m lost without coffee. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes. Well, more specifically, while I was Clark County Poet Laureate, especially during 2020 in the thick of the pandemic, I was often too tired to read. This might sound wild, but even holding up a book was cumbersome. This said, I did listen to audiobooks like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; hearing that novel in Ocean Vuong’s voice was exceptional. 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? I admire books that are deeply cohesive within themselves, such as Roripaugh’s tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, which explores the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, which tracks the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. I like to understand how poems fit together within a book. Otherwise, I might prefer beautiful broadsides of individual poems, for example. All of this is to say that I would like each of my books to gather deeply connected pieces together to make a whole, but I don’t endeavor to have a set of books with clear connections to each other. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? My experience confirmed the importance of cohesion. I want to explore the topography of a book, how poems speak to one another, what themes might be present, how the collection-length narrative may be discovered, however gently that arc might be weaved. Certainly, there are plenty of exceptions, but as I mentioned, many of the collections that move me the most gather poems that are deeply tied to one another. This is something I already knew about myself from reading, editing, and reviewing other poets’ collections, but publishing strengthened my understanding and, therefore, commitment to this aesthetic. Especially today when we can find singular poems or brief suites of verse online, and we can create breathtaking single-poem broadsides, my messy heart-brain yearns to know how poems work together within a book, harmonizing and/or building upon one another. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I get anxious if I can’t travel. Going abroad has been life changing, but I don’t always need to go far. Even a day trip to Mojave Desert Preserve in California helps me make new discoveries and then return to the page more creatively. I loved riding the train from Nevada to Chicago with my husband; I brought my Royal Eldorado typewriter. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I grew into poetry in general. I misunderstood poetry in middle school and high school, probably because of standardized tests or textbooks geared toward them. It thought that poems had singular specific meanings, implied thesis statements, if you will, and this is absolutely incorrect. Part of what makes a poem a poem is that it is difficult to paraphrase. Poems have themes. They can tell us stories. Most certainly, we can learn from them. However, they aren’t emails, memos, or expository essays. That’s not how art works! It is subjective, and the multifaceted nature of a poem is part of what makes poetry beautiful and brilliant. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was very young I dreamt that space aliens took me to their ship and then vacuumed my voice out with our shop-vac. This is a nightmare that I’m still unpacking, but even then, I think it spoke to the importance of communication. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I think I’d like to take this moment to share how deeply I admire both Ugly Duckling Presse’s Lost Literature Series, which is how I discovered the work of Pizarnik, for example, as well as Milkweed Editions Seedbank series of world literature. Here’s a few lines from Milkweed’s “About the Series” page: “just as repositories around the world gather seeds to ensure biodiversity in the future, Seedbank gathers works of literature from around the world that foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world—exposing readers to new, endangered, and forgotten ways of seeing the world.” I am deeply grateful for the important work of Ugly Duckling Presse and Milkweed Editions. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Many. Right now, however, I’m working on a collection of pantoums. I started to be drawn toward them early on in the pandemic. Due to the form’s repetition, they became a way for me to sit with what frightens me most as well as to rediscover even the most seemingly mundane aspects of life. They allow me to hold images and experiences almost within the palms on my hands, to roll them around, to see them from many angles, to contemplate what everything means. Of course, I almost always discover more questions, not answers, and I find comfort in this. What does literary success look like to you? For me, literary success is having a lifestyle that both allows me the time to write as well as to give back to other writers, such as my undergraduate students, the authors we publish at Tolsun Books, the diverse voices my Nevada community champions through workshops and open mics, and/or the authors whose small-press books I review to help spread awareness about their important work. What’s the best way to market your books? There are so many factors. I think finding a publisher that believes in your work and will champion your book is invaluable; astute line edits, a stunning cover design, professional press releases, a timeline that accounts for review copies, and an active relationship with distributors can be deeply important. This said, authors also must work to market their books by sharing the news with their communities, encouraging presales, being available for interviews, reading at events, and more. This may be less about marketing one’s book, but especially because I have mentioned the importance of making time for oneself, I should share this, too: I hope all writers might consider taking on some form of literary stewardship, whether that be editing poetry journals, hosting open mics, leading community storytelling workshops, reviewing small press books, etc. There’s so much that writers can learn from one another. Moreover, I believe in the importance of writing communities and of giving back. On that note, I’d like to express deep gratitude for S.R. and everyone at Unsolicited Press; you folx are exceptional. What did you edit out of this book? There is so much that I edited out of this book. I revised this collection countless times. One poem I removed was a sonnet. Between the rhyme scheme and the iambic pentameter, that metrical foot which mirrors our heartbeats, the form felt too neat and tidy, too perfectly controlled, for a collection that explores, in part, the complexity and unpredictability of grief. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I’m a Lecturer with Nevada State College. I teach classes such as College Success, Creative Writing, and more. This said, if I didn’t write, I’d probably play my saxophone more often; I miss playing out with bands, but there are only so many hours in a day. I’ve also been a barista, a communications and development coordinator for a nature center, a Certified Veterinary Technician, etc. Gathering Broken Light If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? It would definitely be Anne Sexton. I would probably have to order take out, but also, I am I wouldn’t be too concerned with the food. I would, for sure, learn how to make a killer martini and I would keep them flowing. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I don’t think it’s too original, but what scares me is that one day I will just stop writing. I think the best way to stave off this fear is simply to put your ass in the chair and write even when you don’t want to. I am in a lot writing groups and do a lot of generative workshops to make sure I am always giving myself structure and space to write. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? This is kind of an awkward question, but for sure, Terrance Hayes. What books are on your nightstand? Currently Gina Frangello’s memoir Blow Your House Down, Dave Berman’s poetry collection Actual Air, and some books I just bought at Third Man Records in Nashville Pain the Board Game by Sampson Starkweather, Nine Bar Blues by Sheree Renée Thomas, and The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? This is kind of a cliché answer for a poet, but the em dash. Its rules are murky and versatile and I am not a fan of rules. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Probably everything I was assigned, which in retrospect is kind of a shame. As an English teacher, I feel woefully under-read and I had to read a bunch of books I should’ve read before teaching them. I am playing catch up now. I for sure never read all of the Scarlet Letter when I was supposed to. I just couldn’t get through it. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Trikafta, which is the drug that saved my life. Most of the poems in this collection were written when people with Cystic Fibrosis generally died in their 30s or 40s. With this new drug, the prognosis is much more hopeful. Unfortunately, this means I now have to start saving for retirement, but I guess that’s a good thing. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Say what you mean and stop bullshitting. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Usually it energizes me. It’s only exhausting when I can’t do it. Once the writing starts, it’s exciting. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think sometimes people are too hung up on trying to be really deep or “poetic” when they first start writing poetry. They can’t just get out of their own way and just say what they want to say. I think it’s best just to trust your words when they arrive simply and straightforwardly. What is your writing Kryptonite? A lack of time or focus on the wrong priorities. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes. Many, many times. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I mean, I think they could be a “writer,” but I am not sure they could be a really great writer. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? My poetry queens and dear friends, Jessica Piazza and Jill Alexander Essbaum, have not only helped me by being stellar role models but also constantly providing me with much needed validation and guidance. Reading their work and following their journeys has given me a guide for what is possible. I am truly a better writer for having their friendship. Also, Tod Goldberg and Wendy Duren, who I met at the Bennington Writing Seminars, have been a constant source of joy and love and support for me. They are always willing to listen to me and give me advice on my work. Tod has been more than gracious in lending me his brilliance whenever I have needed it. I am also in an accountability group with a group of friends from Bennington College and we meet on zoom a few times a month. This group just helps keep me grounded and connected to the writing. It is a group of really talented and kind people who offer me a wealth of support and resources. I am very grateful to have it. Finally, for over ten years, I have been in a writing group called Brass Tacks with an insanely talented group of poets, including my dear friends Tina Posner and Judy Jensen. If I hadn’t been invited to that group by poet David Meischen, I truly believe I wouldn’t have ever published this book. 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? I don’t think I ever consciously thought about this when putting the collection together. However, I have finished a full length collection and I do think it’s connected to this first one. After that, I am not sure, but for now there are connections. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I don’t think it changed my process of writing too much except that it sort of gave shape and validation to what I was doing. I now think of the poems more of a collective whole or in terms of connections rather than just single poems floating in isolation. When I write now, there is a sort of universe in which my work lives. I think more about how my voice fits into the world. I am not sure I always thought of that before the book was accepted. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I waffle on this issue a lot, but since you can’t put a price tag on connections and friendship, I am going to say spending the money on getting my MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars. I think MFA programs are a lot of money and not always “worth” it in terms of job prospects or things of a practical nature, but for me, I don’t regret spending the money because it gave me a writing life. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I tend to just move on quickly if I don’t like someone’s work. There’s so much out there that I can connect with that I don’t re-visit writers who I don’t connect with very often. But maybe James Joyce. I didn’t appreciate him much until I read Dubliners. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I started writing when I was in fourth grade. I stole a stack of paper from my classroom and I was going to write a novel that was basically a rip off of a novel I had just read. And I guess in that moment, I realized I was so moved by a story that I wanted to write my own. Though, I quickly realized that novels were most likely not in my future and by middle school I switched to poetry. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim. Or really any of Scott Heim’s books. He writes the most heartbreakingly beautiful work. I really want a copy of his poetry collection, but it’s impossible to find. I wish more people would read his work. He deserves all the money and awards. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I have a lamp I love with a frog that looks kind of apathetic. So, I am going to go with an apathetic frog. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Well, my poems are about me and the people who appear in them are real people, though always fictionalized in some way. Poetic license and all. And some of them, I don’t owe anything and some of them I owe everything to. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have one unpublished right now and maybe one half finished. I have a legion of abandoned ideas for collections though. What does literary success look like to you? Creating work that I am proud of mostly. If it also gets out into the world, then that is a nice bonus. What’s the best way to market your books? With poetry, I think it’s mostly word of mouth and doing events/ readings. I guess love it or hate it, social media is helpful. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I don’t really write characters, but I do worry that some of the situations and people that appear in my poems will make the real people annoyed or angry. However, the beauty of poetry is that it allows for a sort of conceptual version of the truth and not a journalistic approach. This usually alleviates the issue. But I guess the hardest part, particularly in this book, was deciding on telling my truth and not caring if people were offended. What did you edit out of this book?” I cut out a lot of poems I liked a lot but weren’t serving the narrative arch of the book. I am not always good at that so many thanks to my friend and fellow poet Tina Posner who really helped me find the story I wanted to tell. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Well, I mostly teach for work, so I guess I would just teach. I can’t really imagine a career I could do well that didn’t involve some kind of writing. Maybe I’d try and be a private investigator-- that type of work always seemed interesting to me.  Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl tells the story of a woman diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis who is trying to navigate life and love in a body that is failing. These poems capture the collision of a reckless past and a foreshortened future with unwavering honesty. They confront the title question thrown at her one terrible night.
 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? My cooking is a work-in-progress. But I would put on an evening pot of coffee for the late great Charles Bowden. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Everything about writing scares me. But accepting fear is essential for any successful creative pursuit. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Desire is the root of suffering. What books are on your nightstand? A mixture of social histories, Buddhist philosophy, environmental studies, and strange novels. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Probably the em dash. I don’t know any better. What books were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Most of them. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The beat-up REI backpack I’ve been rocking since 2002. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Get to work. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Exhausts in the short term, energizes in the long term. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Ego and procrastination. What is your writing Kryptonite? Insomnia. Have you ever gotten writer’s block? Sure. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m so new at this, I don’t really have author friends yet. But someday we should all meet up for espresso. 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? I’ve adopted the view that all works of art are in conversation with one another, either directly or indirectly. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Publishing my first book convinced me that top-to-bottom rewrites are worth the time and uncertainty. I’ve already done it again. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Gas money. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? The reverse occurred with most of the Beat Generation. I still love Ginsberg, though. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Swearing in elementary school. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar? The pronghorn antelope. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? I suppose they would have to tell me that if they ever found out. If their demands are reasonable, I’ll listen. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I wrote my first novel when I was sixteen, from 2007 to 2008. Since then, I’ve been churning out about one project a year. Probably about a dozen unpublished novels, in other words. What does literary success look like to you? Respect from my readers. Maybe also a nice one-bedroom apartment. What’s the best way to market your books? With confidence. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? No matter the character, I always ask: What does this person want, what are the contradictions of that desire, and what are the consequences of those contradictions? Works for everybody. What did you edit out of this book?” This book began as a trilogy, so technically, I edited out two other books to get this one. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? In my early twenties, I survived a brief but memorable career as a behavioral health specialist. I got stabbed at one point. By a child. Snag a Copy of Jay's BookIf you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Kurt Vonnegut, though I’m not certain what I might make him for dinner. I feel like it might be best to bring him to a diner where they still allow smoking. I imagine us having the meatloaf but barely touching it. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I’m obsessed with time. Do I have enough?, am I using mine wisely?, etc., therefore, I fear not having enough time to write, which I most certainly do not. I have to make time, and making time means creating little quiet pockets everywhere and anywhere so I can get words out of my head and into the computer or in my numerous journals and note-taking apps. I used to be much more regimented about dedicated composition time, but at my current stage of life, that’s just not feasible. Another fear of mine is not being able to find where I placed that crumb or nugget or spark amongst all the places I keep my ideas. One running Word doc seems to help with this. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Steve Almond, final answer. I was in Steve’s workshop at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop many years ago, around the same time that I was getting into his writing. The combination of meeting him, learning from him in live time and via his books, created a perfect storm in my writer’s heart. He’s honest and raw, and yet a million times sensitive and mindful of character. His mantra is mercy, and that too has become a recurring thread in my work. What books are on your nightstand? One or two works of fiction, either a literary magazine, collection, or a novel, plus, some super thick non-fiction book about history or a biography or something that I keep there to make myself feel smart. I also have something in Spanish: a textbook, novels, or magazines. I’m always trying to brush up on my second language. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Em dash–isn’t it lovely? I like it because it’s not a comma (my least favorite punctuation mark), and the em dash is itself a slightly longer bit of time. It’s an exhale, a passing thought, a tiny dream. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I’ve been forever trying to read Don Quixote. I assigned it to myself in high school and actually tried to cram it over a weekend because I had procrastinated before an essay exam. To this day, I still have not read it cover to cover. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My bookshelf. Sometimes I just stare it, feel the spines, etc., to remind me that one day I might have a book on that same shelf. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? This art is dying, kid, do everything you possibly can to keep it alive. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize me, most definitely, however getting to the writing itself is exhausting. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Trying to make something perfect, or thinking it will be perfect, in the first round. Just get as much as you can out of your head, and then come back again and again. Revising is where the magic happens. What is your writing Kryptonite? I suffer from a common writer ailment: Too-Many-Projects Syndrome. I’m invariably writing something in my head all day: a novel, short story, screenplay, poem, family history, or Season 1 of a Coming Soon hit Netflix series. Finding the vein is great, but finding too many veins overwhelms the process of creating itself. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I get reader’s block all the time. I’m a painfully slow reader to begin with, so sometimes I grind to a halt and may not pick up the book again for weeks at a time. However, I almost always finish reading every book I pick up. Only very few have I put down and quit reading completely. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Sure. They write User Agreements, Terms of Service, Cancellation Policies, etc. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I consider my mentors my friends, but do they consider me, theirs? This would include Jess Walter, Laura Hendrie, Steve Almond. I’m Twitter pals with Leigh Camacho Roarks, Claire Rudy Foster, Tabitha Blankenbiller, and Deborah Reed, plus, my good friend Larry Feign. I went to MFA school with these aforementioned souls, and I’ve loved watching them evolve as writers. They’ve kept at it, and they’ve grown that skin that only writers have. 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? I’d like to go with connections, but I believe my books might stand on their own. Reason being is I have so many interests and I like to use different voices. I also believe in the audience--they want to be challenged, and being a versatile writer is critical to a thinking audience. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Getting to publication means editing, editing, editing. Becoming a ruthless self-editor who is deft with line edits, but who can also offer objective editorial advice is a skill all its own. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Paying the money for contests, reading fees, workshop attendance, and yes, getting my MFA. It was all worth it, every penny. Writers support other writers--there’s no other way around it. I will gladly pay a fee for someone to read my work. My mentors’ salaries are priceless. Contests, tip jars, bring ‘em on. Oh, and submission services. I worked with Writer’s Relief years ago, and it was entirely worth it. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I came to like authors I never knew before because of friends’ recommendations. Sometimes those recommendations were good, others not so good. I will say Joan Didion was one of those and I was blown away by what I thought I was getting into and what amazement I experienced. I also have had a reverse experience with George Saunders. I worshipped him, even tried to emulate him, for many years, but I’ve had to take a long break and I’m not exactly sure why. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I understood my grandmother’s Spanish. While Spanish wasn’t my first language, it was spoken enough within my family that I could only make some sense of it. For my grandparents, it was their first language, so they used it more often. I remember when I translated what she said, and she was shocked, amazed, and worried--now I knew what she was saying! What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Bless Me Última was the first book that I could not put down. I read it at a time when I was really getting into literature as a young man, plus, it’s kind of like a spiritual handbook for hispanos from New Mexico. It’s widely known, but often overlooked because of its specificity in Chicano literature, however, its themes of love, death, and family are universal. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Spider. I love spiders so much. I protect them and let them be. I always have, and I think they have a magical gift being able to spin webs. There’s also the perfect writer symbolism with their skill--spinning tales. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? I owe thanks to those people upon whom I base my characters. Thanks because I took a little part of them and immortalized it, made it into something. I do, however, think it’s a little like theft, but it’s also a compliment. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? One big one that’s been on ice for years, plus, an ongoing autobiography and an epic family history that may never truly be finished. I also have reams of false starts, inchoate chapters, fragmented stories, and a dustbin of “almosts.” What does literary success look like to you? Truly, one acceptance. That one editor, that one literary port, that one reader. That’s all we need. That’s all I’ve needed. I still remember that first letter telling me my story had a home. That and a teaching gig, a workshop, or a lecture series. Would love to do those some day. What’s the best way to market your books? All means necessary, being mindful of where readers traffic. Social media has its benefits, but I wouldn’t say that’s the end all, be all. A strategic tour and readings, local media outlets, and interviews will be effective, too. I also plan to hire a publicist. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Believing that you know what is truly going on inside their mind and body. I’ve received feedback from editors and readers who have said that my writing (when written as a woman) just didn’t feel like a woman. I’ve pushed myself to truly put myself in my femenine characters’ minds and ask myself: “Would she really think/feel/do or react this way?” When I’ve done that, the results are both rewarding and eye-opening. What did you edit out of this book? The stories in this book are the whittled down versions of often much longer, messy drafts. Each one took many passes before it was just right. “Agony in the Garden,” for example, first started like a novella with extensive backstory and longer scenes, but it ended up being a few flashbacks and one long climactic scene. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I work full time in healthcare, which I’ve done for over 15 years. I like my day job and don’t see myself leaving it, however I do wish to close the book on it before I turn 50. I am also a husband and father, which I consider to be my most important jobs. Fantasy jobs: a showrunner for a T.V. series. That, or be a skinny vegan yoga teacher who lives in Taos, New Mexico and smokes un montón de mota. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
James Baldwin. As a gag dish, I’d present him with hominy grits, which he hated. Then I’d bust out the steak and fixings. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I often fear that the data I’m using may be inaccurate or inadequate. To overcome it, I end up obsessively rechecking everything. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? I so wanted to meet and spend time with Toni Morrison. She would have been a great mentor to me. What books are on your nightstand? Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward; Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel; and Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I keep asking myself why all of the time. So, yes, it’s the question mark. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Probably “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Catcher in the Rye.” What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My trusty reclinable office chair. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? I’d quote Lydia Davis: “Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it’s a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.” Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing memoir content is draining, while sci-fi or speculative writing is thrilling. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Believing that the quality of their work and even their self worth are defined by the number of rejections from writing contests. What is your writing Kryptonite? I’m not sure what this question means. What weakens or undermines my writing? I guess I tend to go too fast, making lots of little typos that cost me dearly during the proofing process. I must slow down and perhaps follow Hemingway’s advice by writing and rewriting each sentence dozens of times, one at a time, until I’m absolutely sure that it is correct. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes. When I become bored with an author’s extensive treatment of the mundane or pornographic violence, I lose the ability to power through and simply put the book aside. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Absolutely, especially when writing nonfiction instructional or technical material. Whoever wrote the dictionary on my bookshelf was probably braindead by the time it was done. Lol. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m a longtime friend of Marita Golden. Her prose is smooth like Agatha Christie’s. The work of both writers, as different as they are, have validated my own tendency to lean toward an elegant style. 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? Each book must live his or her own life, although all them may have similarities in terms of values and style! How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I learned to maintain orderly records and an index as I’m writing. This allows me to easily check the authorities that I’m working on. I also learned to save discarded text, which may find new life somewhere else in the narrative, or in another book or story. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Attending writing conferences that featured published writers on panels that shared their experiences and entertained questions from attendees. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Charles Bukowski and Junot Diaz. I almost threw away their books. I’m sure I discarded Oscar Wao. I still haven’t finished that book but I eventually came to appreciate Diaz’s other work. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? After a LIFE Magazine photojournalist published the frame-by-frame police killing of Billie Furr (an in-law cousin of mine) in the summer of 1967, I began writing protest essays in high school that distrubed my teachers but inspired my classmates. I was only 17 but discovered the power of my written expression. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Spoiler alert, imminent shameless promotion ahead: My own first novel, Brotherhood of the Gods, was not accepted by numerous agents and publishers--perhaps a dozen. I then published it myself. I probably should have continued to pitch it but I didn’t know the business. At any rate, the people who read it loved it. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A moose, a bull moose with huge antlers. Solitary, quiet, but strong. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Their gawdawful racism, bigotry, and foul behavior have provided some wonderful storylines that are filled with conflict and drama. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? OMG! I must have several partially completed stories and about three books. What does literary success look like to you? When a friend genuinely likes an unpublished story I’ve shared. That feels like love. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I would like to have the poet Li Bai over for dinner, and talk about swords, calligraphy, and maybe corvids (I think he would very much like the research that has been done on corvid brain function since the Tang dynasty). Because the conversation is the priority, I believe I would make my standby of unsauced pasta and egg, with the potential addition of Dino Buddies microwaveable chicken nuggets. We could sit on the counter and eat. This is optimal dinner, with optimal human. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The fear of misrepresenting an experience or idea. I don't want to write something in ignorance that contributes to a societal prejudice or that streamlines a complex reality. I try to write, first and foremost, from what I intimately understand. If I'm writing from a perspective, featuring a character, or engaging with an idea that's not coming from my direct experience, I try to do in-depth research so that I'm better able to capture it. I try to continually ask myself whether I'm the best person to tell a given story. I want to be able to create casts of characters that aren't carbon copies of myself. I think that it's important that white writers, especially, research and engage with people and writers of color to write casts that aren't solely white. That might mean cowriting, hiring beta readers, and/or engaging with extensive interview/research processes. But I also understand that there are some experiences and cultural contexts that writers of color, or writers who come from those contexts, are going to be able to capture with an attention that's far richer and more sensitive than I could. While I think it's important for white writers to do better and write better non-white characters, I don't want to try to tell a story that just isn't mine to tell. So I listen and endeavor to seek out non-white perspectives on white people writing characters of color (the Tumblr blog Writing With Color is a really spectacular resource for anyone wanting to write characters of color: featuring mods from a variety of backgrounds talking about ideas ranging from tropes to stay away from to ways of describing skin color/hair texture to accurate representation of non-European cultures). And I'm continually learning from comrades of color who talk about what they, personally, might want to see from white writers -- one opinion does not speak for an entire group of people, but every thought I hear is another piece of data that I can learn from as I put effort into doing better and sharing what I learn with other people in my community. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Ahh. The time-honored & difficult question: life goals or wife goals? It's hard to separate people who are crushes from people who I would like to be, especially considering that many of the people who I thought were crushes before my transition turned out to be gender goals. A combination of both life goals and wife goals is Dominic Seneschal, from Ada Palmer's brilliant sci fi series Terra Ignota. He is a philosopher, genderqueer lad, and swordsman who embodies ideals of quick wit and quick rapier. I also have a crush on Ada Palmer herself -- professor of history? creator of exquisitely detailed fantasy worlds? imaginer of utopian futures? My type entirely. What books are on your nightstand? Looking at my nightstand, I see Alberto Giacometti's "Notes Sur Les Copies" -- a set of journal excerpts and interviews about the artist's views of creative exploration and growth through copying the work of others. I also see a children's edition of Die Beliebtesten Märchen der Gebrüder Grimm with which I'm practicing my German, and a copy of Taliessin Through Logres, a fabulous set of Arthurian epic poems by C.S. Lewis' friend Charles Williams. (The poems are so rich with allusion and labyrinthine stanzas that Lewis published a companion to the work to explain the thick mythological web the text is situated in; certainly the sort of friend I would like to have.) Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Semicolon, hands down. How else can I connect threads of thoughts and associations that extend rhizomically through disciplines when brain go brrrrr and there is the need to convey thematic association and/or refrain from breaking the rhythm and connection of a sentence without adding commas or creating an insufferable, inconceivable run-on? Also, I just like the combination of crispness and fluidity; semicolons look like they would have a good mouth texture were one to eat them like chips. ;;;;;;;;;;;;; What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I was a fool in high school who read every assigned book when it might have been more productive of me to spend that time sketching strip mall architecture or getting into fights behind the bike racks. Liminality, dead people, and lives in paper were home and safety, though; consuming everything in front of me as profligately as I could was a ballast at a time when things were very unstable internally and externally. I've been able to become more productively critical of the media that I consume now that I'm not relying on it so intensely as a survival mechanism, which is positive for myself, my community, and my writing. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The paper Rimbaud head I cut out and pasted on my first notebook in 2016. It fell unperceived from grace, likely at a Jewel Osco somewhere in the Kenosha, Wisconsin area. It may be floating there still. If you're out there, paper Rimbaud head: I salute you. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? "But motive is a matter of belief; you would not want to do anything unless you believed it possible and meaningful. And belief must be belief in the existence of something; that is to say, it concerns what is real. So ultimately, freedom depends on the real." -- The Outsider, Colin Wilson Does writing energize or exhaust you? It depends on the sort of writing, and the time. Poetry is usually more exhausting for me than prose: if I'm writing a poem, it's a concentrated expression of emotion where every line, juxtaposition of word, and presentation of sound, space, and semantic color on the page is subjected to intense scrutiny. Poetry is where a singular and visceral confrontation with the part of myself that feels -- something which I'm still not comfortable with -- takes place. It's all here, all at once, and all being communicated within the space of a few pages; like how a slow motion camera allows visualization of components and movement that might not be visible at faster speeds. That's exhausting, but in a gratifying way. Though I still care about craft and truth when I'm writing prose of some sort -- whether it's fiction or nonfiction or somewhere between the two -- there's more time for the emotion, idea, or dynamic to unfold when what I'm writing is 12, 25, 200 pages. That prosebound process of meeting characters who emerge like Athena, and watching as they claim space to grow and fail, is energizing. I know I've created a story I can be proud of when just thinking about the characters makes me electrically happy, and when considering the components of plot makes me want to hasten to my keyboard even if external circumstances mean that writing right here, right now isn't possible. It's more energizing to engage with emotion and ideal when it's more diffuse. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I can speak to traps that I've fallen into and that people in my writing community have as well, hoping that they apply on a more universal level. A major one is looking to the outside for reasons and affirmations for art. A community of fellow artists and writers who can challenge you and your work is vital. But developing and inhabiting a rich inner world from which comes conviction, joy, and vision for what you do will increase the efficacy of artistic comrades honing and disrupting your work, because they'll have good material to work with. What is your writing Kryptonite? Being in love? I genuinely think so. Beyond extreme circumstances like chronic illness flare-up and hospitalization, or housing instability, whose impediment to writing is more about their limitation of time and energy I can allocate, being in love is the next greatest culprit. I'm 19, and I don't know jackshit about what a committed, healthy partnership should be. I'm also aromantic, so there's a whole process of 1) getting close to a person, 2) attempting to figure out whether the person is interested in a committed intimate relationship more like a Star Trek t'hy'la bond than conventions of romance or friendship, and 3) realizing that they're not and pining after them until I am able to jam the feeling into a few works of art and move beyond it. That is distracting and inconvenient, to say the least. It's full of emotions I do not particularly understand or want to act upon, but which prove very persistent and frequently lead to interludes of staring out the window longingly and listening to my hanahaki playlist instead of typing or scribbling, which is far more important in the end. It's incredibly troublesome, and I'd rather not have crushes or love interests at all. Dear Ghost Writers In the Sky: please consider taking me out of all romantic plotlines for an indefinite period of time, and instead devote my character solely to plotlines involving revenge, betrayal, ethical use of power, and the temptation towards madness that's been ingrained into our culture's view of creative work. Please? Thank you. I'd like to get more writing done. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes. Sometimes. It makes me sad. If I can, I try to find an inspiring bit of library architecture wherever I'm living; architecture built to evoke & house the feelings we have while reading is almost as good as the real thing. Otherwise (and frequently concurrently), I pick up fanfiction about some of the characters I adore most; the themes and tropes of this distinctive cultural world are comforting and I can sink into them even if I can't devote my whole focus to them. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I'm resistant to making statements like this. I've been criticized for how I interact with emotions all my life -- I'm not feeling enough; I'm feeling the wrong things; I'm a robot; I'm unable to dialogue and interact with my emotions. (On one memorable occasion, someone called me a sociopath; in the spirit of Warhol's commercialization and commodification of emotion, I borrowed a button maker from my engineering teacher and made a whole slew of buttons emblazoned with "Marion Deal is my Favorite Sociopath," then handed them out to all the students and teachers I could find at high school.) I'm on the autism spectrum, which modulates and affects how and when I experience emotion; I care a lot about things that many people wouldn't think worthy of anger or tears or going nonverbal, and it's hard for me to figure out the appropriate emotional response to things that people consider intuitive. (Note: it's my responsibility to ensure that my divergence doesn't harm others overmuch, and to understand the people in my community around me such that I might support them if I can.) But all this means that I don't think it's accurate or useful to make statements about what feeling an emotion strongly or weakly looks like. Everybody has different barometers by which they judge what "strong emotion" is relative to context including class, gender presentation, cultural background, and the sort of stimulus one might be responding to. I think that good writing comes less from experiencing emotion in a certain way, but rather from understanding how one, individually, interacts with emotion. So too, it emerges from becoming more comfortable with expression in both self & others by overcoming internalized biases about emotions typically considered "negative" or "irrational" when presented by certain people in certain circumstances. (E.g. stereotypes surrounding race or gender like the Angry Black Woman trope, a discomfort with men expressing emotion, or a judgement of intensity/type of emotion in neurodivergent people.) I think of Spock's character arc through the Star Trek original series and movies: he becomes better able to interact with his emotions and those of others by unlearning Vulcan biases towards his own human heritage and his crewmates. He'd be a better writer by the end of Star Trek IV than he was in the first season of The Original Series, I'd wager. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I'm friends with an absolutely absurd (and absurdist) short story writer, Markus Klimas, who is very discerning and frequently doesn't like, get, or write poetry of his own. Sending poetry to someone who has an active predisposition against poetry is a good challenge. I don't take any dislike of his personally, knowing that I'm shooting predisposed to miss, but it is a delight to have a safe space to have my work completely obliterated. Frequently his criticism, even if I don't wholly agree with his general philosophy towards poetry, helps me get out of a solipsistic isolated system of my own thoughts on the genre and how to articulate through it. Being able to perform at open mics (virtual, these days) with poet friends of mine is also a privilege: seeing words reach and illuminate in real time makes me better because it makes me want to connect to other people with my work, and become more human in the process of doing so. 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? Each book should be able to be read and enjoyed as its own entity, but I am hoping to create a loosely connected extended universe of sorts with my writing. Each book will serve as a raggedy flashlight beam in a surrealist world that contains havens for the dead and haunted, late-nite otherworldly diners at the intersection of traditions and times, languages nonexistent in our world (I am fond of con-langing, the process of constructing my own languages), and wandering artists and ghosts who construct momentary cathedrals with their words and who are forever oscillating between places lit and unlit. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I feel much more confident that the oddments I write down can engage and matter to other people. The first book I published, Cool Talks, Dead I Guess (Bone and Ink Press, 2020), is... certainly bizarre. It's an amalgam of many of my hyperfixations and research topics: the intersection of ritual, obsession, "Greatness," and linguistic invocation, tied together by the continuous presence of the ghost of Jim Morrison. It also comes from an exceedingly personal place: my hyperfixations and fascinations are things I'm emotionally invested in and are a genuine attempt for me to communicate emotions in a way that makes sense to me, even though an infodump about the use of language in Confucian texts isn't listed in most "acceptable expression of emotion" categories. Seeing that someone could take this microcosm of myself that I put on a page and see enough value in it that they want to invest time and money to print it, and then hearing from people I've never met who reach out to tell me how much the book meant to them, has been heartening for me. Now that there's some concrete data that the things I write truly and deeply can in fact connect with other people -- data added to by the publication of Messiah, whose poems came into being when I was just beginning to write and in one of the worst depressive episodes of my life -- I am more confident in writing things oddly, rawly, and truly. I try to listen to myself more in the process, and care less about whether what I'm doing is something that's going to be "understandable," or "accessible," as long as it's true. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I bought a cup of hot tea after a frigid outdoor LARP (Live Action Roleplaying event) at a Denny's when I was maybe 13 that ignited my love for all-nite diners and liminal spaces. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I honestly can't think of one, even though I've returned to this question again and again. I've either liked an author, or I've not, or I've been marginally lukewarm about them. Those states haven't tended to change. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? The Renaissance Faire community that I grew up in has a certain tradition: the Bardic Ring. Rings are passed from generation to generation, along with a title: "the Steadfast," "the Musical," "the Keeper of History." When an artist, storyteller, or performer creates something that truly astonishes and touches another (especially a senior member of the community), the affected party may pass a ring on to the other creator. This might be one that they've worn for generations, or a new ring. When I was 14, I had been performing at the Faire for two years already, as well as writing and performing my art in other locales. A mentor and pillar of the community who I respect immensely stood at an end-of-day meeting, and began talking about a bardic ring she'd worn since she was young: the ring of the Wise Young Storyteller. This ring is traditionally given to someone who displays passion, relative wisdom, and desire to wreak change with creation. She talked about how she'd received it from her mentor, who'd received it from his mentor before him. And then she gave it to me, for the words that I'd been spinning in my performance at the Faire, in my poetry published and performed, and in the dialogues that I'd been sustaining with the community around me. It's a thin circlet of silver -- in her words, "It will bend, but will never break." I wear it proudly every day, a memory of the power my words have, and an impetus to keep the ring and the title in good stewardship until the time comes for me to pass them on. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Last Days of New Paris, by China Miéville. Surrealist artists and their sentient works of art joining forces to fight Nazis and demons in an alternate WWII-torn Paris? Brilliant, ravishing, labyrinthine. Precisely the sort of absurdity, worldbuilding, and stylistic boldness I crave. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? As a person, I think I am a flock of monstrous, many-eyed crows flapping around in a human suit, but as a writer I'm the fishman from Guillermo del Toro's film "The Shape of Water." What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? I don't think I owe them anything. I consider it a personal imperative to treat every character with compassion, even if they're despicable. But that obligation towards compassion and the attempt to illustrate truth extends to anyone I would meet: human, nonhuman, fictional, or otherwise. This isn't a compassion that means nonviolence or a mandate to avoid harm at all costs. Sometimes harm is necessary: both to humans and characters. Sometimes truth is about what's needed for the character, not what directly mirrors the person/people who the character is based on. I've not heard of a valid construct of absolute truth yet, so though I'm bound by my own experience and biases, I'm doing my best to write characters that are true to themselves, or my view of them, whose accuracy is rooted in my compassion for both the characters and the people they're based on. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have three major unpublished longform books: a surrealist novel set in a Paris of the Dead, a memoir/fever dream/treatise on language and philosophy, and a poetry book which attempts to capture the architecture and layout of a cathedral in poetic form. The surrealist novel delves into legacy, history, and perceptions of Greatness through prose, poetry, and maps, documents, and security footage of a meticulously mapped otherworld. The memoir is comprised of a constructed language (created by me), prose-poems, thoughts on philosophy of language, and photography. Another fantastical novel exploring what it means to be coming of age during a time of revolution is in the works. If you, dear reader, know anyone who'd be interested in the interdisciplinary amalgams above... send them to me! What does literary success look like to you? I want to be able to write every day, engage with the study and creation of words as my mode of making a living, and know -- at least every once and a while -- that my work has reflected, challenged, touched, or engaged with people, individually, or a People, structurally, in a fashion that makes things better. What’s the best way to market your books? I'm grateful to have a supportive artistic community ranging from my fellow actors at the Bristol Renaissance Faire to a set of poets in Paris. I promote through my social media accounts -- there's a lot of great people and artists in the indie lit scene who have a presence on Instagram, and being able to connect with them and their goodness of spirit is not only professionally positive, but personally fantastic. Having a central website -- as I do, www.mariondeal.com -- is also a fabulous place to refer people after readings, via business cards, or after other associated artistic events like performance art. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? My first thought about this question is... *shrug, error 404, gender not found* I'm genderfluid, masculine leaning. I grew up socially presenting and being responded to as a young woman, so that's the degree of social response to gender that I have the most experience with. My experience in the past year and a half, though, has included being responded to either as a man (with masks and presentation cues, I can "pass" as "male," though that's not always my goal), gender = ???? (a response of what-the-fuck in everyday life that I prize), or a transmasculine/gender-non-conforming person in queer spaces. The idea of "the opposite sex" really doesn't apply here, but I do try to represent characters like me -- people who occupy spaces between the binary masculine and feminine, trans men, butch women -- alongside people who don’t occupy those gender spaces. When I write people who don't necessarily conform to my gender identity or identities that I've been perceived as (like trans women, or cis men), I try to rely upon the experience of my close friends and chosen family who've shared some of their inner worlds and experiences/experiments with how they're perceived in various scenarios. Trying to take that data into account, and sharing my work with people I trust who can challenge or suggest details to make those characters richer and more accurate, is a different process than writing from my own gender experience. It involves methodical listening and research, collecting and collating vast amounts of data, and asking people questions about their stories and experience, all things which are among my favorite pursuits. I'd say that's the most important thing about writing characters from gender identities who don't align with mine. It is difficult, but it doesn't feel draining most of the time. What did you edit out of this book? These are all poems I wrote in high school. They are some of the first poems I wrote, and some of the first poems I workshopped with enough positive response that I felt confident in being "Someone Who Writes." That being said, these poems came from a whole fray of paper and herd of notebooks. There are a lot of truly heinous pieces in those notebooks; mournful self-indulgent poems about loneliness and prairie flora, me experimenting with center-justified text (gasp!) and forms that patently did not work, me writing poems that were cheap Rimbaud, Morrison, and Neruda knock-offs. I don't begrudge myself those poems. They were necessary for me to grow as a poet and to get the confidence in my work as a vector for emotion that's kept me writing three years later. Sometimes I find a line or a stanza in the flotsam of that time that I can cannibalize and use in a poem even now. But I am certainly not going to air the outtakes for public consumption. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I'd be an academic -- which is something I'm working towards, though I'm still an undergraduate. I'm hoping to be able to knit a golden braid of psycholinguistics, poetics, translation, and Buddhist philosophy. My research, at least right now, focuses on emergent systems and the use of language in ritual and revolution; specifically the use of poetry in 19th-century French anarchism & queer spaces. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I would love to cook dinner for Richard Bruatigan and I think that I would make him dandelion soup. I want to bug him about his book, Please Plant this Book. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Getting started. My biggest fear begins and ends with the words, “is this idea good enough?” How I combat my fear is by looking for other media which aligns to what I’m trying to do; I look for similar pieces and people and then I just start working. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Robert Langden from Dan Brown’s novel series; I have wanted to become Robert my whole life--it’s the closest thing I have to a crush. What books are on your nightstand? Astoria by Malena Morling and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The semicolon, it is the most aesthetically pleasing piece of punctuation. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? To Kill a Mockingbird. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? South Mountain for being my home for so many months. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? True genius is just hard work. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize, I can write for 40 days and 40 nights without stopping to eat or drink. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Thinking that you have nothing to say. Everyone has a voice--learning how to wield it is the hard part. What is your writing Kryptonite? The fear of needing to get everything published. The fear of wasting my time. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes, it took me 9 years to read Jonathon Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. I could never make it past the first chapter. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, writing is not always about sudden inspiration--passion comes in all shapes and sizes. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I had some very influential mentors circle in and out of my life over the years and the best advice they ever gave me was to at least write something that I’m interested in. That helped me form a style and voice that was unique to me and helped shape my later work, especially. 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? I think that if I wrote another book in this vein I would want them to be interconnected. I think John may have more to say about his little slice of heaven in the Southwest. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Well, it wasn’t so much the publishing but my commitment to publishing. Turning writing into an actual 9-5 job for the course of 6-8 months really helped me change the way that I think about creative writing and the art of writing. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? The $8 it cost me to get Malena Morling’s Astoria at bookmans--her book changed my understanding of what lyric and descriptive poetry could be. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Jonathon Safran Foer What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? The first time I cussed in school. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Beasts of No Nation As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? An agave plant What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Well, I based my character off myself and James Woods in the movie Salvador; so, I guess I owe myself a beer and James Woods a movie ticket. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Three, and three that will never see the light of day. What does literary success look like to you? Finding the perfect home for your work. What’s the best way to market your books? Readings and alumni networks. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Getting the motivation right. Understanding their needs in relation to their desires. What did you edit out of this book?” Jeez, half the poems maybe. I found myself writing better versions of the pieces already in there and decided to go with the new work instead. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Well, I’m a teacher so there’s that. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I’d love to cook for Flannery O’Connor, though would worry about her dry comments regarding my lack of skill. Cornbread, sweet potatoes and chicken. Coconut cream pie, my Grandma Rose’s recipe. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The fear of time. Nothing about my writing process is linear or structured, so it takes great amounts of time to complete a story or project. The only way to combat this fear is to accept it and to keep writing. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Chekhov What books are on your nightstand? Blue Nights by Joan Didion; Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout; Love Poems by Pablo Neruda; The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The question mark; literature and stories should ask us questions about ourselves and lives. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Ha! I don’t remember. If it was assigned, I most likely read it. Was one of those students. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My many little notebooks that I kept with me with jotted down observations, odd thoughts, and some of my children’s notes and drawings when they were younger. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? I write to discover what I know. Flannery O’Connor Does writing energize or exhaust you? Mostly it exhausts me. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I believe the most common one is the grand one that also trapped me - wanting to publish before your work is ready. What is your writing Kryptonite? When I allow the outside world’s opinion of what life should look like to come before my own. Have you ever gotten writer’s block? I’m not sure if it’s writer’s block or writer’s doubt, but I’ve certainly had those moments. My remedy is to get something on the page, even if it’s a few sentences or thoughts, or to work on edits. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I met Kelly Simmons, author of Wives of Billie’s Mountain and a number of short stories, at Queens University of Charlotte when we were earning our MFA’s. Kelly’s insight and tireless eye have been a constant part of my writing process. Kelly’s continuous support was crucial to the publication of this novella, and she’s a kick-ass kind of friend. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? My first writing class. It was a general fiction class, an eight week course, a couple hundred dollars. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? W.G. Sebald and Richard Yates. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? When I was young, we’d go to my father’s softball games (he was on three teams). I had been playing with a black kid around my age and I remember an adult, not sure who he was, telling me I shouldn’t be playing with him. This adult was trying to use language to influence a child. But that didn’t make sense to me and I kept on playing. We don’t have to let other people’s language have power over us. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Third Man by Graham Greene As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? A bird, one that soars high and can see the view from far above, capturing the full picture. What does literary success look like to you? Readers taking something of emotional value from what I have written. What’s the best way to market your books? In a perfect world hire a publicist! What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Many authors write authentically and beautifully about characters of their opposite sex. I find most everything about it quite difficult. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I’d be a dress designer or a therapist. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I’d roast a chicken for Guillaume Apollinaire. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? It used to be the blank page. Now, I enjoy the creative act too much to be afraid of it. If the result sucks, then so be it, I’ll try again. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? The brilliant Mary Ellen Solt. What books are on your nightstand? Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The hyphen, because it can break as well as unite. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? The Catcher in the Rye: Too whiny! What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The stars. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Get over yourself and write! Does writing energize or exhaust you? Definitely, energizes. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I wish I knew! What is your writing Kryptonite? The myriad little responsibilities and obligations of adult life. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I can’t say that I have. There’s just too much good stuff out there. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I don’t think writers are any more or less sensitive than anyone else. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? The validation from wonderful poets such as Michael Sikkema, Megan Burns, and Derek Beaulieu, who have all published my work at one time or another, has been invaluable to me. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? It relaxed me a bit and gave me confidence to continue to try new things in my writing. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? The money I spent to purchase a copy of Emmett Williams’ Anthology of Concrete Poetry. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I struggled with Pound for a while when I was young. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I remember reading The Hobbit as a boy one summer evening. Dusk was falling. I was outside on the patio and utterly transported. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Fiasco by Lem As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? The firefly, for sure. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? As a poet focused on issues of language, I don't really create characters.do this. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Too many! What does literary success look like to you? For me, literary success is simply being able to contribute to the world of literature. I am honored and humbled to have been given the opportunity to publish a number of poetry collections. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? As a poet focused on issues of language, I don't really do this. What did you edit out of this book?” The bad poems, I hope. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I’d like to make homemade pasta for Joan Didion. I can see her influence in my meandering sentences, my sense of place, and the way I want my readers to feel my words as much as read them. I don’t know if she likes pasta, but the alchemy of making dough out of flour, oil, and egg, then the meditative repetition of rolling and cutting it is the sort of zen prep work that would feel appropriate for the moment. I’d serve it in a cacio e pepe style with a big, bold red wine because everything’s better with a glass of assertive Bordeaux. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Like many authors, the blank page is my biggest enemy. Getting started is always the hardest part for me, especially when I don’t have an external deadline to hit. My writing group is a great antidote to that. For the past three years or so, a group of five women and I have met every other week (virtually, lately) to read and critique each other’s work. The impetus to have something to share with them gets me past that blank page barrier, and their supportive feedback keeps me going. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? This changes constantly! It seems that every time I read a new book, I fall briefly in love with that author and those characters. But one writer I’ve admired since grad school is Lidia Yuknavitch. Her book, The Chronology of Water, was the first non-traditional narrative I’d ever read and I immediately felt at home there. Before I read her work, I was pursuing a poetry concentration, but reading Yuknavitch showed me that there didn’t have to be firm lines, or any lines at all, between poetry and prose. It broke open those false boundaries in my own work, and it’s never been the same. What books are on your nightstand? Ask me on any given week and that’ll change! Because I cover books for Good Housekeeping, I’m always reading something new and exciting. But these are my 2020 favorites (so far!): “Every Bone A Prayer” by Ashley Bloom “The Death of Vivek Oji” by Akwaeke Emezi “Anxious People” by Fredrik Backman “Deacon King Kong” by James McBride “True Story” by Kate Reed Petty” “Memorial” by Bryan Washington “Luster” by Raven Leilani “The Disaster Tourist” by Yun Ko-eun Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the em dash. I tend to write very long, meandering sentences and I daisy chain clauses together in precisely the way that would drive my high school English teacher up a wall sideways. The em dash lets me write like I think: circuitously. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I was a big nerd in high school (still am!) and would never have skipped a reading assignment. I went to a very small Catholic all-girls high school, and there weren’t many options for different classes. My senior year, I actually took both AP and regular English, because I just couldn’t get enough. That said, I absolutely hated A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I did read it, because we had to, but I could never think of anything incisive to say about it because I couldn’t get my brain into it. I tried to read it again a few years ago, and still can’t. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I’d thank the field behind my parents’ house, as it existed in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, before the developers came and started building cul de sacs there. Back then, you could look out from the little concrete patio and stare all the way to the treeline, easily a half-mile away. That field was my oasis as a child. I spent weeks of hours wandering through the buttercups that seemed to grow shoulder-high, picking Queen Anne’s lace flowers and coming home coated in pollen that made my eyes swell into golf balls. When I think of solitude, I remember how I could escape my child-sized problems, the ones that took over my entire insular world, by losing myself in a place where I never saw anyone but me. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? The same quote I have on one of my favorite notebooks, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” So many of us are stymied by fear, and we only create our best work when we push past it or work through it. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Both! I tend to do my creative work in spurts; I won’t write for ages and ages, and then it all pours out of me at once. That burst is like its own adrenaline, but I’m always completely spent when it’s over. I liken it to mania: You’re on top of the world while it’s happening, but the crash from that height is a hard one. What are common traps for aspiring writers? I think a lot of starting writers misinterpret the old adage, “Write what you know.” Because of the way our education system is structured, most of us are only exposed to a very narrow canon, and it’s overwhelmingly white, cis, straight, and male. I think that’s beginning to change, but it wasn’t until my MFA that I began to read more widely and deeply about experiences that weren’t my own and that led me to think more broadly about what my writing could be, and could tackle. That lack of exposure leads to a lot of early writers’ books being very homogenous, with characters, narrative structures, settings, and even plot points that don’t step outside the realm of the expected. Many of my students also just don’t know where to start. It’s daunting, first getting started in the literary world and the way the system works just isn’t taught. That leads to a lot of confusion and a lot of missteps, especially for writers who don’t come from traditional MFA or creative writing education backgrounds. What is your writing Kryptonite? That little voice inside my head that says, “You shouldn’t be sharing this.” I write a lot of deeply personal narratives, and share a lot of very intimate details that can be scary to put out into the world. If I think too much about what my readers will think, I can’t get as honest or as raw as that sort of story requires. I have to cast off my natural inclination toward shame and realize that my story is as worthy of stepping into the sunlight as anyone else’s. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? If you mean have I ever had a hard time reading, I have not. There are times when I’m only inclined to read memoir, or fiction, or certain genres. But because reading is part of my job, I don’t have the luxury of not being able to read. Even if I’m having a hard time getting into a book, I owe it to the author and to my own readers to push through it and interrogate why I’m having that experience and whether it’s a fault in the writing itself or an internal problem. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, of course. I think anyone can be a writer who wants to be. I’m not in the business of gatekeeping who has “what it takes” to be a writer. If you’re inclined to write, you’re a writer. Period. I know lots of writers who consider themselves highly emotive people, and I know writers who are deeply pragmatic, logic-driven people who would consider themselves more thinkers than feelers. I think those who are more logic-driven than emotive write different kinds of books than those of us who are deeply in our feelings, but I think the only “requirement” for being a writer, if there is such a thing, is the drive to do so. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I have so many writer friends, and like all of my friends, they all challenge me to be the best version of myself, both on and off the page. Kira Jane Buxton, Lisa Konoplisky, and Rebecca Wallwork are three amazing women who I met at Vortext, a writing retreat at Hedgebrook. They challenge me to think outside the box and write fearlessly. Keisha Thorpe, Brianna Johnson, Adina Zerwig, Jess Jarin, and Lisa Lutwyche were members of my MFA cohort at Goddard College who helped lift me up as I established my voice, and continue to be vital parts of my support system. Megan Giller, Elizabeth Michaelson, Kate Knowles, and Julia Evanczuk are my writing group warriors who keep me honest and accountable to my writing, even when I’m inclined to let it take a backseat. And Kenny Fries, Reiko Rizzuto, Douglas Martin, and Nicola Morris all helped me develop and refine my first book when it was in its infancy at Goddard College, and I’m forever grateful for their guidance, as well. There are so many others, but those are the ones that come most readily to mind. 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? I think each of my books, and my creative work that’s appeared elsewhere, all live independently, but that readers can get a more cohesive picture of who I am as a writer by reading more of it. There are common themes that emerge within all of my creative work, like the impact of organized religion, family dynamics, geography and culture, and socioeconomic strictures on a person’s development, as well as body politics, mental health, and the unreliability of memory. I do think much of my work has a lot in common stylistically, as well, but everything I write more or less stands alone. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I wouldn’t say publishing it changed the process of writing, but it did open my eyes to how the business of publishing works and what I wanted out of my publishing team. I think I approached the pitching process more intentionally with my second book, and looked for different things in my second publisher than I did with my first. That’s not to say that publishing my first book was a bad experience, far from it. But now that I cover books and the publishing industry as a journalist, my eyes were more open about my options than they were when I had less information to work with. This time, I wanted a more collaborative, mission-driven process and I think I was more cognizant of the type of publisher that would best serve a book of this style, now that I know more about the avenues I could have taken. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? I started bullet journaling a couple of years ago, and it’s been a game-changer for my workflow and organization. I’ve always been a big list-maker, but bullet journaling helps me keep track of tasks, events, and notes in a way that’s really effective for the way my brain works. I’m a very competitive person, even with myself, so having a method to track my progress in everything from writing, to reading, to exercising and meditating, keeps me on track. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I don’t know that I’ve ever disliked an author, whole-cloth. I will say, it took me some time to appreciate deep fantasy and sci-fi, since I naturally gravitate more toward realism and literary fiction. But the more I read genre fiction, the more I appreciated it. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I was bullied a lot as a kid, and some of the words the “mean girls” tossed off at me have seared themselves into my brain and significantly influenced the way I move through the world, even as an adult. Kids can be unspeakably cruel because they don’t yet have the ability to grasp just how much of an impact their words can have, so they don’t temper themselves the same way adults do (or should). I was a very shy, very anxious kid, and I both yearned to be seen and considered by my peers and to disappear into the background entirely. So when bullies showed me that not only did they see me, but they took issue with it, that made an indelible mark. I remember one incident in particular, in which I overheard a gaggle of my fellow cheerleaders whispering about me. I remember pacing the hallway afterward, my heart in my throat, thinking to myself, “I’ll never be able to forget this.” It felt like something had irrevocably changed, not only in my relationship with these girls, but in the way I thought about myself. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Aren’t most of them? I think “Every Bone a Prayer” by Ashley Bloom deserves more buzz than it’s getting, at least at the time I’m writing this. Her language is so searing and her story so imaginative and, at the same time, disturbingly familiar that it’s stuck with me even months after reading it. Sarah Manguso’s “The Two Kinds of Decay” also broke me open when I first read it in 2011, and helped me recognize aberrations in my own body and tendencies in my writing that I hadn’t previously been able to name, so hers is another one that I think should be more universally beloved. It’s hard to say what’s under-appreciated, because I suspect the book-loving circles I move in are talking about books and authors that the wider world wouldn’t recognize. We’re all so siloed in our own little echo chambers, that it’s almost impossible to break out of our own and into others’. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I think I’d be a fox; a little wiley, rather shy, and more comfortable scampering through the underbrush than strutting out in the open air. I’m a bit of scavenger, often a redhead, and only occasionally domesticated. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Insight into the human condition, I think. Every person in my life, and person I’ve come across even briefly, for that matter, has taught me something about how people live and breathe and move through the world. I’m constantly observing others for what drives them, what breaks them, what makes them cry or laugh, what makes them tick. What they’re hungry for, and what happens they don’t get it. I find mannerisms, physical and mental quirks, personality aberrations, even storylines in the people I come across, like we all do. We all create the world for one another, and I wouldn’t be able to turn that into story without them. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? More than I can count! Every year, I participate in National Novel-Writing Month, and have for the past 10 years. So right there, that’s at least 10 manuscripts I’ve powered through and (for the most part) never looked at again. I always take November as a chance to experiment on the page, with genres, forms, and styles that I wouldn’t normally attempt. Because those novels aren’t necessarily aiming for publication, there isn’t as much pressure to make them, well, readable. But I am about ⅔ of the way through my third book that I do want to publish eventually, and I probably have at least 50 pieces in various draft stages, too. What does literary success look like to you? Success is a marker that’s always moving, and one I’ve actively tried to stop measuring for myself. It’s such a false idol for me, because I’ve found that every time I achieve a new career milestone, there’s another one right over the next crest. I could say that I want to write a book that appears on the NYT bestseller list, that I’d like a starred Kirkus review, or an excerpt in the New Yorker, but would I be satisfied if I hit those goals? Probably not. For right now, continuing to produce creative work that finds a home on someone’s shelf is success to me. What’s the best way to market your books? My work is generally a hybrid of poetry and personal essay, so I think readers who enjoy memoir and disjointed poetic narratives will likely find something to resonate in my work, too. The most recent comp authors would probably be Carmen Maria Machado, Juliana Spahr, Jeannie Vanasco, and perhaps Sophie Mackintosh. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I think writing any character who has lived experience that’s different from my own is challenging, because it requires me to step outside my own skin and imagine what it must feel like in someone else’s. I don’t believe that gender is a binary, and I think there are very few aspects of a character that are necessarily tied to their gender. I try to approach all characters with two central questions: What do they want and what do they need? Once I find those, I try to stay very honest to those motivations, regardless of where they fall on the gender spectrum. What did you edit out of this book? Typos, I hope! This book came together in fits and starts, and those weren’t at all linear. It was sort of like putting together a puzzle, where I had all of the pieces there on the floor and had to determine where they fit best. And because it was a nonlinear process, there were a few times where character descriptions, anecdotes, or inconsistencies appeared that had to be resolved. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I ask myself that question all the time, given the instability of media. I’d always be a writer, since it’s both my career and my hobby, but I’m also an educator. I spent some time as a full-time professor at Canisius College and currently teach as an adjunct professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, and teaching innervates my writing in a way that nothing else does. Seeing my students’ work evolve, sharing the ins and outs of the media and writing world with them, and talking about writing and reporting gives me such life. It feels like a responsibility in a way, as someone who has found some degree of success in it, to pass on the lessons I’ve learned to those who will come after me. I’d love to get back to teaching full-time someday. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I would want to cook dinner for James Baldwin and it would be baked ziti since that is a speciality of mine. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears?For me, it’s really about time and energy and how to harness both for writing project and I often fear I never have enough of either to complete the projects I have in mind. I have both chronic pain and illness and as a result, my bandwidth is limited. I do also have to work, and so sometimes there is little motivation or ability leftover for my own independent projects. I know sometimes writers feel a lot of pressure to not only “write everyday” by dedicate X hours and create X amount of words on the page by the end of that time block and to stick to a schedule. I just don’t have that privilege between my health issues and other needs. So, I have liberated myself by carving out time when it works for me to write and not pressuring myself to keep up with what society tells me I need to do and be. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Right now, I am crushing big time on Baldwin. But I’ve been enamored with Audre Lorde for the better part of two decades. She not only gives me glimpses of what I would strive to be as a poet and essayists, but as a better human being. What books are on your nightstand? Currently I am reading Another Country, which is a novel by James Baldwin, a book of short stories by Anne Beatie, and a book of collected poems by Mary Ruefle (Trances of the Blast) Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Without a doubt, the em dash. Admittedly I don’t use it very often in most of my poetry, but I use it frequently in my prose and especially in my personal essays. I like it because I like it it allows me to form long and complex sentences that are not run-ons and how it lets me make side notes and observations within a given sentence. People who are familiar with my work definitely note it as a characteristic of my literary “style.” What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I did not read Crime and Punishment all the way through as at the time the topic was so dark and disturbing for me and it gave me nightmares. So I skimmed it and used the Cliff Notes to fill in what I needed. However, I did read it on my own shortly after I completed college in my early twenties and I list it among my favorite all-time novels. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I think it would be a tie between my bed and my bathtub. I am not the most Zen person, but being able to have a good night’s sleep or take a deep nap can be amazingly restorative. But more than that, once the weather cools down, I love taking long Epsom salt baths once a week. I light candles and play some of my favorite music and just soak, think and allow myself to feel my feelings. It’s a cheap and easy way to pamper and I find it helps clear my head and relax me in a way few things can. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? I would borrow from George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you could have been.” I don’t think that actually applies to everything, but I think it can for writing. Does writing energize or exhaust you?I think it can do either (or both simultaneously) depending on the type of writing I am doing, the circumstances under which I am writing and what else is going on in my life. If I am writing something for work or school that does not speak to my soul or inspire me, it can sometimes be like pulling teeth to put words on the page. It becomes a slog. Also, if I am having a pain flare, writing under tedious circumstances or in forms or about subjects that do not interest me, can exacerbate my fatigue. But if I am writing about something I love or in the form that I love (in other words, creatively), it can completely energize me. In fact, writing freely about the things I care about and in the forms that matter most to me or are most natural to me, act like an elixir for me. What are common traps for aspiring writers?I think a common trap is that people get caught up in the sexiness or romantic view of what it means to be a writer, and also sometimes have impractical perceptions of how it will pan out. The truth is, writing is hard work and a lot of it isn’t sexy or romantic. It is lonely and publishing can be an uphill battle full of rejections. While some people can and do find wild success with it, the vast majority do not. I make my income writing, but it took a long time and my income is extremely modest. If you are serious about being a writer, you need to understand that it really needs to be about loving it and doing it because you need to, and not because you have illusions of wealth and granduer. Because that rarely happens. What is your writing Kryptonite?I definitely tend to write very long, sometimes meandering sentences (hence my love for the em dash). While I can appreciate my own proclivities, I realize I can get carried away. My editors will often spend most of their time cutting up my long sentences into shorter ones. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes, and I get it quite often nowadays. I often find that after I finish a book--particularly one that I really loved--it’s hard for me to switch gears and take up another book right away. I seem to still want to live in the world of the book I just left behind. Sometimes if a book doesn’t immediately capture my attention in the first few pages, I find that I am more reluctant to pick it up again until it hits its stride with me. However, I make a point of persisting until I am absorbed in that book as well. Or, if it still doesn’t appeal to me, I look for one that does. I used to force myself through books even if I couldn’t stand them. But I rarely do that anymore. Luckily, it’s very rare that a book I am reading doesn’t eventually pique my interest by the time I am a quarter of a way into it. 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? I write in many different genres and so not everything I write is connected except by a greater thread that underscores my interest in justice. My poems do seem to follow similar themes: love, sex and illness/death tend to be their primary concerns. Many of my essays also explore a lot of the same topics: my family, my own past traumas and conflicts, and how to try to create a brighter future for myself and others. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?While I am an admitted Luddite, I have to admit getting my first laptop in college really catapulted my writing to another level, even in just the way it enabled me to write more--so I’d have to say that was my best buy. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?While I thought Hemingway was just okay, I grew to appreciate him more as I read more of him. When I read the “Fire Next Time” my freshman year of college, I couldn’t get into it (I think I was too young/immature to appreciate it), but now I adore Baldwin, having become acquainted with his work later on in life through his shorter essays and fiction. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?If you had asked me this question a couple of years ago, I might have said a wolf, simply because I love their loyalty and sense of wildness while still being relatable. However, I now think it would be my black cat Cokey. He’s been with me almost all my adult life and so has been nearby as I’ve created almost all of my writings. He’s been a constant source of support and compassion, of love and loyalty. Many times, he’s laying next to me while I write. I also like the subversion of the stereotype of the black cat as bad luck: he’s brought me nothing but love. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have four unfinished books right now that have yet to be published but I hope will be one day. What does literary success look like to you?To some extent I feel like I have already achieved what I considered my baseline for literary success in that I support myself solely through either my writing or teaching writing. I have a long list of publication credentials in reputable online media outlets, literary journals and other publications. I mostly happy with what I am doing with my life and stood by my principles. However, I would love to have some of my books published to completely fulfill my ideas of success. What’s the best way to market your books?I think identifying audiences that my book would appeal to and approaching them is an especially effective method, such as finding those who like similar works. I am big about interfacing with the media--conducting interviews and guest posts on blogs and journals--as well as putting myself out there with the public. This doesn’t just include formal readings at bookstores, but book clubs, etc. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?I think whenever writing a character that is of a demographic one is not a part of, that one needs to be very careful about that and sensitive to the fact that one cannot appropriate firsthand experiences that aren’t one’s own. However, I do think that is more critical when depicting demographics that have been historically marginalized--so women, people of color and the disabled, etc. As a woman, I have less qualms about depicting white (cis) male characters due to this power disparity. That being said, I tend to write my fiction mainly through the lens of female characters.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Thomas Wolfe—often confused with Tom Wolfe. I used to work at the Wolfe Memorial in Asheville. Admittedly, I’ve read more biographies on Wolfe than I have his fiction. He had a voracious appetite. I would love to cook him three New York strips, ten pounds of potatoes and a basket of cornbread and just watch him go to work.
What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears?Not writing causes a lot of anxiety. I combat it by writing. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Lady Brett Ashley What books are on your nightstand? Currently, Jeni McFarland’s The House of Deep Water, A. Scott Berg’s Wilson, Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness, Frances Justine Post’s Beast and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The semicolon is my favorite punctuation mark; Michael Parker’s essay “Catch and Release: What We Can Learn From the Semicolon (Even If We Choose Never to Use it In a Sentence),” changed everything for me. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I played by the rules. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? All the coffee mugs that joined me during my writing sessions. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? As long as you’re writing, you’re doing it right. Does writing energize or exhaust you?Energize What are common traps for aspiring writers?Everyone’s unique in their delusions. What is your writing Kryptonite?When my 2-year-old daughter refuses to sleep. And the NBA playoffs. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?Absolutely; but emotions help. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?Most of my writer buddies come from my time in grad school at the University of Houston, but I’ve also kept in touch with a few writers I met at summer workshops. Zach Powers, Aja Gabel and JP Gritton are a few friends that recently celebrated their debut novels. I’ve also got plenty of folks who are working toward publication. All the writers I’m friends with know how to sit down and write. That’s admirable. 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?Stand alone. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?It confirmed that I have no idea where commas go. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Ha! What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?In the 11th grade I read The Great Gatsby. I hated The Great Gatsby. And so by extension I hated Fitzgerald. Then as an English major at the University of Florida I had to revisit the novel a few times for a few different classes. And it came up again in graduate school and now I pretty much read the novel every few years because if I don’t I start to miss it. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?My love for language began with music. When I was around ten or eleven, I started writing down the lyrics of my favorite songs and taping them to my bedroom door. And soon thereafter I started writing new lyrics to the songs’ music. This would have been in the mid-90s. So the bands I was listening to were The Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Rancid, Green Day and Bush. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?John Williams’ Stoner is pretty damn great. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?My 16-year-old dog, Patapouf. He’s some kind of spitz-mix that my wife rescued from the pound. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters?Every character I create probably has traits from at least three or four different people I know or have met. I’m not sure what I owe them. Maybe a beer? How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?Three. In my freshman year of college I wrote a knock-off version of Catch-22. After college I wrote this strange book that was kind of like The Sopranos meets Catch-22. By graduate school I let go of Catch-22 as an influence and wrote a novel that I may have workshopped to death. I think I wrote about 20 drafts of that thing. By the end, I could hardly recognize it. What does literary success look like to you?Being able to continue to write and publish novels. What’s the best way to market your books?This is my first novel, so I’m still trying to figure that out. In college I played in a band and we learned early on if you didn’t promote your shows you’d play to empty rooms...or to your one buddy and die-hard fan Chase. (Thank you Chase for coming to all our shows!) Most people are busy, so reading an unknown author might not be on the top of their wish list. Meaning, as awkward and strange as it is you’ve got to find as many ways to get your book out there. For me that’s been through writing essays, working on a book trailer and doing some visual art projects that I plan to release before the book comes out. Hell, I might even kick it old school and hand out flyers like we did before shows. Otherwise you’re just playing to an empty room. And God does that suck. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?I don’t know. I’ve always had a lot of female friends and I’ve always read female authors. That’s not to say I understand what it’s like to live in this world as a woman. I kind of just think of all of my characters as lonely, complicated people trying to connect wherever and however they can. It also helps to share your work with members of the opposite sex. They’ll let you know if something you wrote is way off. What did you edit out of this book?”About 25,000 words. There was a subplot about a mailman at one point. The Lenny character had a much more prominent role in earlier drafts. I explored the Burnett family in greater detail in a previous round. Oh, and I let Uncle Al and Bethany ramble for far too long in past versions. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work?I’d like to be next Ken Burns, though I suppose that too involves writing. Oh well!  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Lin Manuel-Miranda. I’d spare him my cooking and order delivery, though. I overcook everything. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? As I reflect, I think the most consistent recurring fear is being wrong/misstating something and either not realizing it or not being able to correct it. I combat this not-so-irrational fear in two primary ways: by checking and revising facts/phrasings, and by reassuring myself “I’m human. If something is wrong, I won’t die. It’ll just feel awful for a while.” Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Did I say Lin Manuel-Miranda already? Oopsie. Repeat answer. Love him. (Hamil-geek here.) What books are on your nightstand? Psychology books because there’s so much to learn in the field of psychology/mental health. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the dash. It’s rebellious, bold, versatile, and less formal than a colon. To me, the dash reads like people speak. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I was a really good student. Yet I've always read slowly. So I did a few CliffNote versions. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My laptop. “Computer, thank you for coming back after dying twice during the process of finishing MeaningFULL.” If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Passion + Persistence = Possible. Does writing energize or exhaust you? ENERGIZES ME! What are common traps for aspiring writers? Giving up. What is your writing Kryptonite? Imposter Syndrome. Sometimes it freezes me. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? I threw out MeaningFULL at least once. At least. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes. It depends on how we define writer. If we mean “someone who writes,” then the person could find a niche that doesn't require them to convey strong emotions. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m friends with a number of people who have published articles or books. Every bit of feedback helped me become a better writer--whether from a published author or not. 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? I haven’t decided yet if this might become a series. I wonder what readers would like to see, and welcome suggestions. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? I changed my writing process a great deal since I had previously done primarily academic writing. Conversational stories were foreign to me and required a mentor. Some narratives came from recorded interviews and transcripts, which helped capture the storyteller’s voices. Other stories required editing only. Either way, the process evolved and was quite collaborative. This book changed nearly everything about how I write, and I’m grateful. It's what I wanted to read years ago. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? Money spent for a mentor helped me to be a better writer. Consultation with lawyers taught me about publication. And if MeaningFULL helps people, then it all was the best money I ever spent as a writer. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? It’s been years since I read for pleasure, and I refuse to say anything negative about any author I have read while trying to grow and learn as a clinician. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? My parents had a plaque in the house with this Calvin Coolidge saying, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence…” Once I knew what persistence meant, I watched for how persistence showed up in the world. That passage has influenced me ever since. Most recently as a therapist, I see how important the way I say something is; it can have real influence in how people can recognize their best choices. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Ethan Frome. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Chunk the Groundhog (check YouTube). Day after day after day, he shows up. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? I owe them gratitude for their generosity, protection of their identities (where appropriate), and honor. From the bottom of my heart, I’m touched they trusted me with their life-experiences. What does literary success look like to you? Reaching and positively impacting people is literary success to me. Would I love some nice reviews, to earn an award, or to make a list? Heck yes. But when I started this journey, I promised to do my best to reach and impact the most people I could with this book and the messages contained in it. And that will be enough. What’s the best way to market your books? Let me be direct here: “Readers, if you enjoy MeaningFULL or if it means something to you, please tell your friends about it and share it on social media.” Those are the best ways to spread the word. What did you edit out of this book? I tried to give enough pain to feel for and with the storyteller, but not get mired down in the heavy content. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Eating Disorders Specialist in private practice in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. To learn more about my practice, visit www.TherapyHelps.Us About Alli's Book! MeaningFULL: 23 Life-Changing Stories of Conquering Dieting, Weight, & Body Image Issues is a blend of motivational self-help, memoir, psychology, and health and wellness. Alli Spotts-De Lazzer is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, an expert in eating and body image issues, and a woman on the other side of her own decades-long struggle with food and body.
 Available for purchase wherever books are sold. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Kurt Vonnegut, though I have a feeling we’d skip dinner and cut straight to the bottle of whisky. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The scariest stage in my writing is transporting a good concept onto the page, and into good, compelling writing. There are endless ideas for stories floating around in my mind – the question is always: which ones will translate well into fiction, and which ones will result in a great waste of time? And while it’s impossible to tell in the moment, the way that I always overcome that block is by remembering that there is no wasted time. If I write 9 terrible stories for every decent one, my one good story isn’t the best despite those other stories – it’s the best because of them, and the time that I spent writing all ten. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? It’s a kind of man-crush, but I’d have to go with George Orwell. His reckless idealism and embedment in the Spanish Civil War screams of the same kind of lust for adventure and stupidity that led me to jump on a 36-foot sailboat for Cape Horn. That, and 1984 might have been the first book I ever really, truly read. What books are on your nightstand? Right now, it’s The Overstory by Richard Powers and Awakening Osiris – the Egyptian “Book of the Dead.” Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love the double dash. Bordering a non-essential clause with “—” is a habit I’ve yet to break, and I often have to go back through my writing and limit myself to one dash-distinguished clause per page. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. I just read the sparknotes (and sped-read them, at that.) I regretted it so much later in life that I went back to read it, and then I read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath AND East of Eden (which is a behemoth of a book). What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My thermos. It followed me across three continents, and more journeys and adventures than I care to recount. While I was scrapping by during the first year of my PhD, it was how I drank my coffee slowly at coffee houses – ensuring that I could wring a good 6-8 hours out of a single 16-ounce cappuccino, without having to buy more (I am the bane of every cafe manager’s existence). If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? There are probably enough inspirational quotes for aspiring writers on twitter and Instagram. I’d probably just write what I’ve found to be true – “abandon comfort.” People adjust to their circumstances, and there’s no paved road forward. You just have to carve your own path. During the first year of my PhD, I lived off of 50 GBPs a week. Before that, I lived out of my car – travelling the country and working part-time jobs in 10 different states. I’m not saying you have to be prepared to starve in order to succeed – just that, when you find what works for you, trust it, and roll with it. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing fiction energizes me. Writing almost everything else drains me. (Except for this Q&A, of course.) When I’m in the middle of creating and writing a good story or scene, it becomes a force of its own. I’ll lie awake at night thinking about my characters and their journey. I’ll walk right past a giraffe in the road without looking up, I’m so engrossed in their world. And yet, it’s invigorating. Writing, and getting into flow, is one of the most life-affirming experiences that I’ve ever practiced. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Believing in the artist mythos. Creative geniuses don’t exist in a vacuum. Originality and craft comes from practice, experience, and study. I always told my students that writing is only 33% practice. The other 67% is reading, work-shopping, and research. What is your writing Kryptonite? I often get inside my own head about flow. If all I have in a day is one hour to sit down and write, I’ll sometimes convince myself that it’s not worth it. That, unless I’m able to dedicate the entire day to writing, and getting into a flow, than it might as well be a waste. The truth is, however, that writing anything is better than writing nothing at all. Even answering these questions is better practice than forfeiting an afternoon to menial tasks and busy work Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Oh, definitely. Readers block can be tricky, because reading on some level feels like a luxury, or a past-time. If you take the morning to read, you’re wasting time that could be better spent writing or working or being productive. The reality, of course, is that reading is a crucial part of writing. And that, sometimes the best way to break through writers block is simply to read. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Absolutely. See my previous comment about the artist mythos. Artists often aren’t as they’ve been portrayed by romanticists, or the eccentric “creatives” who wander production houses/advertising firms/etc. More often than not, the individuals who propagate those myths have serious insecurities about their own creative process. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? My best “author” friends were my peers and supervisors during my PhD. And I believe it is essential to surround yourself with writers, creatives, or storytellers of any form – to learn, to listen, and to talk through your own ideas. But you don’t necessarily have to be “friends” with them. Relationships are complex, and while I thrive in creative environments, etc. I often find myself connecting more with non-writers about non-writerly things. The key, as with all things, is balance. If you’re in an MFA, and the only people you surround yourself with are writers, you’ll exist in an academic bubble. But if you have no writers in your life, you’re probably not challenging yourself or work-shopping your writing like you should be. 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? A little bit of both, I think. From the Land of Genesis was actually the catalyst for my idea behind Hell or High Seas, the documentary that set me sailing for Cape Horn two years straight. While FTLOG explores a variety of narratives from various veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Hell or High Seas is a deeper, more involved investigation of a single non-combat veteran, former-navy-rescue-swimmer Taylor Grieger. The two compliment each other, I believe, and moving forward I might build on those themes. But I’m also working on projects that are completely outside of the military experience, and I’m really looking forward to fleshing those out. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Publishing my first book has been really helpful in terms of affirmation. It took over two years from when I completed From the Land of Genesis to when heard back from my first publisher. After two years of crickets, I got offers from three different publishers… within the same week! Before that week, I was really struggling with self-doubt and whether I should abandon my efforts to publish FTLOG and just move on to my next book. And I did move on from FTLOG, and I began writing for the documentary and for magazines about our journey, and I started writing a memoir of our sailing journey around Cape Horn. But I didn’t stop querying agents or submitting to publishers. So I learned that you don’t have to give up on one book in order to move on to the next. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? When I got accepted to the post-graduate creative writing program in Glasgow, Scotland, I received a scholarship that covered my tuition for the first year. It was a gamble, because accommodation alone in downtown Glasgow was going to cost more than I’d ever had in my bank account. But I sold my car, bought a one-way flight, and signed a year-long lease with graduate-student housing. It took me three months to find a job bartending in Glasgow, and even afterwards I was only earning minimum wage. I scraped by that first year, working weekends, teaching undergrad courses, and completing mandatory courses for my masters of research course. Then I received a studentship with an additional living stipend to complete my PhD. Those three years ended up being the most formative in my life. So I think the best money I ever spent was that one-way flight to Scotland. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Oh, there are plenty of those. Shakespeare and Chaucer, to start. Then there was Hemingway, who I despised at first, then idolized, then eventually settled on the middle-ground of respect. Steinbeck was another I grew to love. Stephen King I grew to admire, though I think I was only ever put-off by the genre of horror and not really his style as a writer. Countless short story authors. I think the trick is to give them a chance. Once you get into the rhythm and style of their writing—especially the more traditional, historical authors—the craft itself falls to the side and you’re able to absorb and appreciate the message and themes at the core. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? It must’ve been my junior year of high school, when I started taking my English assignments seriously. We learned the ethos, pathos, and logos of arguments, and at that time I thought the powers of persuasion were limitless. It didn’t take long for that view to falter, and so I returned to writing stories to expand the mind, rather than trying to change it. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? Probably “Treats” by Laura Williams. I bought the book from a small, independent publisher based out of Glasgow that has since gone out of business, and I bought it for about five quid. I really didn’t expect to like it, and then I was instantly pulled in by the humor, wit, and sharpness of tone. The book itself was a collection of vignettes and flash fiction, and I can’t tell you what half of them were about, but I remember savouring the entire book. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I had to ask my fiancé about this one, since I don’t know much about spirit animals or avatars. She said my spirit animal is a brown bear, though I was kind of hoping she’d say “turtle duck,” in reference to The Legend of Korra cartoon series. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? More than most authors, I imagine. My situation is unique, since most of the inspiration for my characters and their experiences are drawn directly from interviews that I conducted with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. To them, I owe my sincerest gratitude: for being who they are, for enlist to serve on our behalf, and for sitting down to help me, and all of you, better understand what they’ve endured, and how their difficulties in transitioning home have been disregarded and misunderstood by the public at large. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Fortunately, just two. One of which I wrote while I was in middle-school (yes, it’s a 600-page handwritten fantasy novel). The other is underway, and the rest are still incubating. What does literary success look like to you? Being able to tell meaningful stories as my career. What’s the best way to market your books? No idea. I imagine, most of the time, that’s the publisher’s responsibility. I think as an author, maybe the best marketing technique is to be kind and gracious, to express gratitude to the people who have supported you, and to be proud and confident in – not bashful of – your book. A large part of your early audience is going to be your community. And the best way to reach your community is to serve them. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? Not allowing my own biases or diction to slip into the prose. But, honestly, it’s no different than writing any character that’s from a different background or culture than yourself. As an author, you must constantly be exercising empathy, immersed in backstory, and reminded of the subtle cues that give yourself away. What did you edit out of this book?” More than half of the stories that I wrote. That, and a lot of clichés and adjectives. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Anything that allowed me to create. Stories, ideally, in whatever medium I could. But if not film / writing / radio, I’d probably be an architect or craftsman of some kind. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
I’d have to say Edgar Allen Poe, because he had so much tragedy and sadness in his life, and I think I’d like to provide him with a moment of warmth and kindness. No better way of doing that than with good food. I’d probably cook him some nice Hungarian goulash, if only because it’s delicious and hearty and he likely wouldn’t have had it before. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The inner critic is merciless. Makes you wonder if everything you’re doing is crap. I keep thinking about that scene in Funny Farm (starring Chevy Chase) in which his character hands a copy of his novel manuscript to his wife to read, and she reads it and then starts crying. My wife is my first and best editor, and so that reaction is something I dread, almost irrationally. Plus, some of my ideas are a bit out there and are largely execution-dependent. I get past it by recognizing that I have to be true to my own imagination and aesthetic, and just doing it--if I blow it, I either start over or fix it. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? This is probably a somewhat obscure reference, but the most recent crush I had on a character was Mrs. Singh, Ray Singh’s mother in The Lovely Bones. She’s a peripheral character, not really that important to the plot, but she’s a beautiful, elegant character who carries herself with incredible grace even as her life is falling apart. What books are on your nightstand? Too many—one at a time would be better, but I like to sample and flit. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Karen Russell’s story collection Vampires In The Lemon Grove, the reissued Miracleman series by Alan Moore (a revisionist super-hero series wherein the titular character ends up setting up a theocracy with himself as God), and Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s collected edition of Monstress (a fantasy comic that is very dark and strange and features talking cats). This will probably tell you a lot about me. Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? I get ideas from so many places—sometimes it’s things my wife tells me about her work day, or my interactions with students and/or other faculty. My son, who is what you’d call high-functioning on the autism spectrum but who will probably have close to a normal life, has given me tons of material to work with—“The Sound Of His Voice” was directly inspired by some of the early intervention we did with him, and my current novel project is largely inspired by him and the life I want/foresee for him, but transformed into subte science-fictiony terms . And sometimes it’s a combination of a great many things—“Minutes Of The Pine Valley Residents’ Board” came about at a time when I was a committee secretary (a pretty typical service activity for new professors) and was also very actively annoyed by my neighbors’ children (seriously, I was thinking of setting up glue traps for them on my back porch). Really, they can come from anywhere. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I try to avoid too much fancy punctuation simply because it feels too much like diagramming sentencings to me. So while I do like the semicolon and the em dash, I’d have to say the period, because there’s nothing like a simple, short, declarative sentence that falls like a hammer blow. Case in point, from Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”: “The man himself lay on the bed.” It’s creepy, and there’s a finality to it because it confirms what we were already led to believe. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? The Grapes Of Wrath. Sorry, Mrs. Thome. I did read it as an adult…and still didn’t care for it. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My height-adjustable swivel chair. Not only am I tall and so need the increased height, but sometimes when I get stuck on a particular passage I spin around in it like a small child. Helps clear the noggin. Why do you write? The first 5 words that come to mind. Go. To exorcise my bountiful demons. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Two words: “Commit Yourself.” This is what sets publishing writers apart from those who merely call themselves writers and have umpteen unfinished manuscripts in their desk drawers or flash drives. You really do have to commit to a project fully and wholeheartedly, even when enthusiasm for it wanes (it will), even when you think what you’re writing is absolute shit (some of it is), when it seems too daunting (it often is). You have to power through and finish a draft first, even a shitty one, then go back and make it less shitty, then hit it again and actually make it good. Each draft teaches you how to write the next one—you have to let it.  If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
Without question Hunter S. Thompson, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind I can’t cook and would be cool with a couple burgers and a lot of beers. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? The editing process has got to be the worst. It’s like looking under the rug at all the crap you overlooked. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Does Elektra from Marvel Comics count? What books are on your nightstand? The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Mario Puzo’s The Sicilian. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The question mark. Just because it makes the reader unsure if what they are reading should even matter. It’s almost like the writer and reader are attached by handcuffs. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? 1984 by George Orwell What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The inanimate carbon rod. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? Do whatever the hell you want. Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize. What are common traps for aspiring writers? The Internet, noisy neighbors, and the worst of them all….overthinking. What is your writing Kryptonite? In terms of process, it will always be writing a beginning. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes and no. It’s more that I’ve written myself into a corner and need some time to figure out how to escape. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? I’m sure they can. But it must be a whole lot harder. But try and think of those serial killers walking amongst us. They can put on a smile too. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? My friend, author Benjamin DeVos, who basically told me to submit my poetry. But other inspirational creatives that write in other forms are: - musicians Jon Carlucci and Phill Lien - rapper Internal Rhyme - writers Angelo Ciccio and Adam Mitropoulos. 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? I think the style and themes are the overall connection. Besides that they simply stand on their own. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? The very first book I wrote (which was not, and never will be, published) was me trying too hard. Overthinking, and adding in bits of nonsense that I wrote off as “flavor” or “style”. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? With the very first check I got from writing I put gas in my car. I guess that. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? If I disliked them, they pretty much never entered my life again. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Probably around the time I got into hip hop. Everything from the use of graffiti to rap itself. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? The Rum Diaries by Hunter S. Thompson. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Probably a tortoise. Maybe like that one in the old Guinness ads. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? A beer or two. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have 2 novels and 4 poetry collections. What does literary success look like to you? Freedom. What’s the best way to market your books? When I figure it out I’ll get back to you. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I try not to think about it and just write. What did you edit out of this book?” I think there was a suicidal poem that I deleted. Who wants that? If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Probably still have my current job and be a weekend bartender. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I would choose Parijaat, a Nepali author (Blue Mimosa). I would make aloo paratha (potato stuffed roti). What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Not saying something important in an original, crystal clear way. I also feel like anytime I am not writing, I am thinking about writing again while being scared of the process at the same time. I read good poems, edit my poems that have been rejected, and most often, I look for submission calls and one theme or another triggers me to write. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Currently, Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my most favorite character. Her flaws, strength, ordinariness and endurance moves me. What books are on your nightstand? Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” and Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas” Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? I think the sources of inspiration keep changing yet remaining the same for me. Politics, life events, (after motherhood) big questions about raising children, and some signs from the universe give me ideas for poems. Sometimes, it is as clear as a conversation with a neighbor about her recently deceased mother, a mute man in the grocery store begging for cash, or a news headline about a pedophile abusing children in Nepal. Listening to the universe inspires me. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I like commas because they can link the unexpected together sometimes. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I don’t have one. But, I was told everyone cries upon reading this lyric book Gauri and my tears didn’t come. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? My Macbook. My husband gave it to me as a gift after our second child was born. I have composed, edited, and submitted most of my poems while having it on my lap. My corner in the couch where I sit with my Mac are definitely on my acknowledgement list. Why do you write? The first 5 words that come to mind. Go. To feel and record life If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? The way you remember the world matters.  KATHMANDU is available for preorder on August 1, 2020 and releases on September 8, 2020. Copies are available directly through the publisher or wherever books are sold. An ebook is available directly from Amazon.
 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I would begin by preparing brunch for Maya Angelou. I have eaten her quiche lorraine, and I would like to return her kindness. When I was a girl, my parents brought me with them to an epic loft party in San Francisco that lasted for three days with musicians, poets, artists, and activists. We celebrated all day, slept at night, and it would kick off again the next morning like a train with different stops. During the party she read from And Still I Rise. I should say, she sang it. Witnessing her recite, dance, and cook made me believe that growing up to be a woman could be a phenomenal thing. She danced with me, and whispered “If I was still teaching dance, I would teach you for free!” The words we say to each other can do tremendous good. Their ripple effect can go on, long beyond the living. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? Writing is a practice. I write everyday, and am not afraid to do it. Turning writing into something for other humans to read is more challenging. That’s when fear can creep in. I can be afraid of how my writing might be received. Do I want people to know this about me? Is it something that should be shared? I can’t reason with fear. Fear would always win. Instead, I tell myself that fear may, or may not, be accurate. Avoiding taking risks would prevent me from experiencing the unknown. Write anyway, I tell myself, even if you are afraid. Especially if you are afraid. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Crush is exactly the word. When it comes to writers, my crushability is polyamorous. I don’t always know how to act around writers I’ve crushed on literarily. I kissed Sonia Sanchez’s hair once at a book signing. Inappropriate. I’ve taken selfies with Eileen Myles and Patricia Smith because it turned out we had friends in common. Not so bad. When Donika Kelly complimented my shoes after a reading I swooned right in front of her partner. Relax. I almost levitated during a reading by Terrance Hayes, Ocean Vuong, and Rita Dove. Pure enthusiasm. When Nikky Finney and Natalie Diaz read at AWP I positioned myself in front of the podium. Face the music. I hugged Naomi Shihab Nye after one of her readings. Necessary. How to deal with a literary crush? Remind yourself — just because you’ve read someone does not mean you know them. It just means that a total stranger was able to reach you in a very personal way. What books are on your nightstand? Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard has been a kind of torah for me. I’ve dreamed many nights with Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems, Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, Eileen Myles’ I Must be Living Twice, and Mary Oliver’s Devotions close at hand. I like to read different things simultaneously. Poetry and prose. The current stack is Camille Dungy’s Black Nature, Arecelis Girmay’s Teeth, Billy Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms, and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. The books are mixed with notebooks, one arm’s distance from my pillow. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? I love this question. It makes me think of Aracelis Girmay and the ampersand. It belongs to her. She also used dots like bullet holes in The Black Maria which was painful and visceral. Girmay made me reconsider what punctuation can do emotionally, and, also, graphically. I love the hand-slash-space-making-movement of a good em dash. S.A. Sukop turned me on to em dashes. An em dash is a gesture that the Orisha Ogun would make while dancing. It slices the line without stopping the flow. It is more assertive than a comma. If I had to choose just one, I’d settle on the simplicity of the period for its finality. It is a hole, a circle, and the end. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? In high school I learned that literature was the materia prima for theater, music, and social change. My English teacher, Peter Sawaya, was also my Theater teacher. Once he taught a rock poetry class where we analyzed lyrics. John Prince asked us to blow up our TVs and eat peaches. Find the simple pleasures. Create a home to nourish your family on things that you all make. That’s what I did with my kids. Home became an antidote to the world outside where women and children were not often taken seriously, and where racism and patriarchy were consistently troubling. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? Blue ink. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Write. I want to read you.” Does writing energize or exhaust you? Writing humbles and excites me. Stepping up to the page is like accepting a dance with the eldest salsero on the dance floor, and knowing you have to fully commit to keep up. Listen in 360 degrees. Flow. Editing is more laborious, and can be exhausting. When the work is finally done, and it reaches readers, it re-energizes me again. Re-energizes sounds too mechanical. It feels more like glow. Writing is the glow left inside my body after the words come through. What are common traps for aspiring writers? There are myriad traps. Self sabotage. Lack of time. When I was a young artist, I made a bonfire and burned a stack of diaries as tall as my body. I turned my voice into ash. This event inspired the last poem in the collection “esh.” At the time, I was afraid that writing was distracting me from being a serious dancer. I’d bought into the limiting notion that I could not do more than one thing. The burning was an act of violence against my creative self. I burnt the languages and collages I’d made on the train riding from home to rehearsal and back again. Now, I know better. Don’t start fires, especially not inside yourself. Many years later, a friend taught me a new word. “You are a polymath,” he said. Over time, I have relaxed into my multiplicity. What I could not burn out of me became a defining trait. What is your writing Kryptonite? That would be time. The pull between living and making a living. My creative life has always had to coexist with the responsibilities of being independent, and heading a household. I’ve been the trunk of the tree. This next phase of my life will include more time to write, and more of my sustainability derived from writing related pursuits. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes. I will put a book down and leave it, but I’m learning to give books a chance. Be patient with them. Once I set down Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things until my daughter told me it was one of her favorites. My daughter is a bibliophile, and one of my favorite writers. I trust her opinion, so I picked it up again and read it with new eyes. The icky orangedrink lemondrink man made the book one of my all time favorites. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Emotions are powerful, disobedient things. Strong feelings can make for empathy, care, and good storytelling. Like many writers and artists, I have a rich emotional life. Writing and performance have given me an outlet to express strong emotions in a fruitful way. Meditation practice has also been centering for me. I was raised in an immigrant household where you were supposed to be strong and not let anything stop you, much less feelings. My friend Michelle Talley taught me that one can’t rationalize emotions into submission. They are what they are. Feel them. Find the message. They are important information. I’ve learned how to move around inside them, and let them flow through me. Your emotions are there for a reason, and can help guide you toward a more fulfilling life. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Glenis Redmond had a catalytic effect on my writing life. I met her in the state capitol when I was doing advocacy work. I don’t know how a poet wound up at an arts advocacy conference, but there she was. She had us harvesting words from gemstones and trees in her workshop. She wanted to make us rich with language. After class, she came over to me and said, “so, you are a poet.” I always had been, but I was undercover. She saw me, and said something. That sparked a pivot in my life, and we’ve stayed in contact ever since. Gayle Brandeis has been a catalytic force in my writing life. I worked with her during my MFA studies. After graduation, she pushed me into the ring and published my work. She is an outstanding teacher. As an educator myself, I know great teachers when I see them. I have learned a tremendous amount from her as a writer, activist, mother, and a mentor. Adrian Cepeda has been my poetry buddy for the past five years. We read and provide editorial support for each other, and are in each other’s writing corner. Deena Metzger is a writer, and auntie, who reminds me of the bigger picture of writing and living. I sit in her writing circle each month with writers who are my elders. This helps me imagine a life in writing over time, and how I can grow into myself as a small elder. In her presence, I feel I am sitting at her feet and learning how to age as a writer and facilitator. 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? My mother is a visual artist who worked in series, so I know what that looks like. You knead the materials for years until you have had enough, or you get excited by something else, and then you shift. I pay attention to what wants to come through me. I’ve written about family and parenting, teaching and learning, immigration and migration, polylingualism and diaspora. My imagination wants to trouble overly simplistic narratives about family, identity, nationalism, and belonging that never fit me or mine. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? Putting together this poetry collection placed a microscope on a specific period of my life. Selecting and sequencing the work was an existential process that revealed a larger journey. Each poem is its own experience, but, together, I noticed the story of a single mother raising her kids, and herself, in an intercultural, multifaith, transnational family. My daughter told me she saw the book as a story of radical truth and self acceptance. I can see that. It is a book I needed to get out of me to welcome the next phase of living. Dance and writing use different materials, but they are similar. The process of choreographing a full length concert resembles the making of a book. You take what you have been making, and spread it out. You listen to what the different works might want to say to each other. In dance, a standard mainstage performance lasts 90 minutes. You have two 45 minute acts to fill with work with an intermission in between. In the book, I divided the collection into sections. In performance, you experience the journey of the story with the audience at the same time. In writing, it’s a delayed response from readers that is spread out geographically. Different times. Different spaces. In dance, the art object is your body and you remake the work anew every performance. You can’t hold it and reread it, like you can a book. There are no flipping of pages back and forth. There are no margins to write notes in. I did try something that resembles performance publishing once. It lasted seven days. Placeholder Press published a flashbulb chapbook I made during the pandemic called Endless Bowls of Sky. It was available in print internationally for one week only. People posted photographs of the chapbook on social media, and I got to see the chapbook travel all over the world like I wished I could. It was fun watching people receive their special editions in the mail during quarantine. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? The best money I’ve ever spent as a writer has been every tax dollar invested in our public library system. Public libraries made it possible for me to raise my kids to become literate and curious. They made it possible for me to keep studying and learning. I do daily walking meditations listening to audiobooks on the LA Public Library App. I appreciate the added benefit of hearing writers read their own work. Toni Morrison. Thich Naht Hahn. Kiese Laymon. Sandra Cisneros. Louise Erdrich. Amazing. My son is a musician and an audio engineer. He was able to turn Even the Milky Way is Undocumented into a sound object — an audiobook. I hope that listeners enjoy the print and audio versions, and I’m happy that the audiobook will make the work more accessible. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Participating in theater taught me that language has power. Once I was cast as Alice in a school production of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I remember looking out across the checkerboard stage at a boy pretending to be a Caterpillar smoking a hookah. “Who are you?” he asked. My voice left my body and floated out into the space. The audience was listening. Rows and rows of blue plastic chairs with human beings inside them, listening. That was my first memory of ever feeling like I was heard as a child. It is so important to listen to kids. The arts can do that. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? I am a dragon. It chose me. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Their forgiveness. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I try to finish what I begin. I have a list of book ideas written in blue light on the inside of my skull. I keep track of them in my sleep. I’m slow, but persistent. The next one up is a collection of essays that is nearly done. I can’t wait for them to live next to each other inside of one book. What does literary success look like to you? Literary success means living a life nourished by reading and writing, and being able to participate in the world of publishing and performance as a creator and collaborator. It means having writing in the center of my creative process, what I do for a living, and my activism and public service. Literary success means being able to speak to these times and be heard, to help other people find and use their own voices, and to generate better futures for our children, grandchildren, and the planet. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? I don’t see genders as opposites. I prefer the notion of gender identity as personally inscribed along a spectrum. Do it your own way. That is true to my experience. I have never felt that I quite performed my gender correctly. I learned this at six when I was called a tom boy because I wanted to play ball during recess. Once a grandfather gave me a Barbie. I cried. I exchanged it for a football and was happy again. Gender norms have always seemed a bit absurd to me. I am the kind of woman who likes to move, sweat, think, and play. I aim to write compassionately about all living things. My writing has focused on the worlds of women and children. My son appears as a male character in Milky Way. I write about his sound. His form. He is depicted as a possibility, as beloved, as a loving brother, as a person in danger of racist violence, and as an inventor of music. My father also has a cameo in the book. He walks across the page with a granny smith apple. There are male spectres in the book. They have ghostly presence. I don’t like corruption and our future depends on disrupting dominant hierarchies. In “Naked Congress” I ask the senate to undress. I use a similar approach in an essay about my paternal grandmother where I introduce the dead members of the House Un-American Activities Committee in a courtroom scene. I wanted to dispel the negative spectre that McCarthyism and xenophobia staged around my family, and countless innocent people. I wrote about their bodies, their pencils, their coffee, and their XY chromosomes. These white men were empowered by Jim Crow, and were not held accountable for the damage they did through any process of reconciliation. In this case, I didn’t care much what the characters might think of my depictions of them. I did hope that my grandma would find it funny. I laughed while I typed. It was a kind of literary vengeance. What did you edit out of this book?” The seed prayers and meditations I wrote to myself to help me keep going, and grant my imagination permission to continue. If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? Not writing isn’t an option for me, at least not now. I wrote quietly. Now I write publicly. I will keep on writing, and creating spaces for more people to do so. 
 If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? I think I’d be embarrassed to cook for anyone, actually. I’m not a terrible cook, but my cooking isn’t usually Instagrammable. I guess, though, I’d make coffee and some sort of baked good for Walt Whitman. For some reason, I feel like Walt might like strong coffee and biscuits? What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? I write a lot of things that belong in the political realm that I am way too afraid to even move from my journal to Google Docs. I almost view these journal entries as just me venting… but I wonder if I’ll ever get serious about revising these fragments into something. For now, I’m a little afraid of that process. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? Oh, 100% Carl Phillips. His poems got me into poetry. What books are on your nightstand? Poetry and the Anthropocene by Sam Solnick Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder Real Life by Brandon Taylor Homie by Danez Smith Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval The Museum of Disappearing Sounds by Zoë Skoulding Heaven’s Thieves by Sue Sinclair Favorite punctuation mark? Why? Em dash is my favorite. I was often called out in Grad School for overusing it. I also fell for that rumor that the Em dash was named after Emily Dickenson… I think I even told my comp students that! Then my comp instructor told us that it’s simply the width of an “M.” Let’s see: “M” “—” To my eyes, the Em Dash looks a bit wider than the M. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? I didn’t read much of anything in high school. I didn’t go to class much either… I dropped out. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? I would thank the serpentine stone I keep in my pocket, which is worn with worry. I found it on the beach near where I live. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Roll your cart and plow over the bones of the dead” — William Blake, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” Does writing energize or exhaust you? Energize. What are common traps for aspiring writers? As an aspiring writer, I’m sure I don’t know… maybe worrying too much about acceptances? Or perhaps not reading enough? Probably not writing enough... What is your writing Kryptonite? My phone. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Yes - and that’s when I know it’s time to switch to something else, or just take a break. My conception of what “reading” is, is not limited to traditional texts like books; I think we are always reading the world, and we get tired of it! Meditation helps. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Yes, I think plenty of people are. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I have some poet friends… at lots of different levels. The best thing is sharing work and having the sort of relationship where you can be completely honest in the comments. My cousin Lucretia and I swap poems regularly (she is an undergrad at Columbia College in Chicago) and my friend Josh, who is in the MFA at Oregon State also work on each other's work. It’s very important to me to have some people I trust to work with; and I find working with them to be very generative as well. 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? I think the former. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? This is my first chapbook and I’m very happy that Unsolicited Press thought it was worthy of publication. It’s given me a bit of confidence, just like each acceptance has. One way my process is evolving is that I’m learning to trust my instincts more; sometimes the first idea is the best idea. Sometimes workshopping gets in the way. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? On books. Buy all the books. Subscribe to some journals. It’s never money wasted. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? Some of the older poets… 19th century stuff (mostly) took a very good teacher in grad school to get me to appreciate. I love the British romantics now, and definitely wouldn’t have bothered if not for studying literature with a good teacher. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? I understood from a young age that one way to get ahead was to read and write well. I grew up in a poor family who wasn’t very book-oriented, but I could see that the successful adults around me all had one thing in common: a love of books and writing. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I really love a novel called “Remainder” by Tom McCarthy. I never hear anyone talk about it. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? My spirit animal is 100% my dog, Millie. She is my luck dragon. What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters? Honesty— or a beautiful lie. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? I have a lot of poems. I have a lot of fragments of poems. Not sure how that translates in to books... What does literary success look like to you? Being read and understood. What did you edit out of this book?” The lunes in my chapbook are comprised of fragments from perhaps a dozen longer poems about the same subject. So, I suppose a lot got erased, but I think of each stanza as an excavated piece of the story. Caleb Nichols is the author of 22 Lunes, a poetry chapbook.
If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? Right now I’d probably say Marilynne Robinson. Of course, if you asked me any other day you’d get any other number of answers: Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Michel Faber. But I just read an interview where Marilynne Robinson said something to the effect of, “You have to live with your mind your whole life, so you ought to make it a good place to be,” and I find that such a profound and beautiful and necessary thing. I feel like I would benefit from that. As far as what I’m cooking, I think I know myself well enough to admit I’d fall back on grilling something, steak tacos maybe, or doing that awful thing where I tried to pass off whatever I’d made as something I “just threw together,” even though I hate that. Religieuse for dessert, maybe, though it would probably take me three tries. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? There’s definitely a fear of finality, and the inevitable disappointing reality that what ends up on the page falls short of what began in your soul. In response to this, I’m a devotee of what Anne Lamotte calls “shitty first drafts,” where I’ll do dozens and dozens of passes over a given piece, which more or less tricks my brain into always believing there will be another opportunity to make it less lame. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? There’s a character I’m working on right now who seems to keep echoing my wife. I keep discovering facets of her in the way this character behaves. She’s a fire, for sure. What books are on your nightstand? Right now, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (no relation) and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road seems to always be there, and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence isn’t, but ought to be. Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? Madeleine L’Engle likened the creative process to a pregnancy, and that rings true for me (at least I imagine, having never been pregnant). I’m not sure the point of genesis for any ideas, but I often feel it as something within that gradually takes on size and shape until it’s ready to take its place in the world. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? The em dash—it feels clean, and more organically similar to our natural speech and thought patterns. What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? Frankenstein, which I now teach, ironically. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? The author would like to thank the barstool at his kitchen island, whose backlessness prevented him from getting comfortable to the point of sleepiness while writing and editing these pieces. Why do you write? The first 5 words that come to mind. Go. Because art shapes our lives. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? “Make a place to sit down. Sit down.” From “How to be a Poet” by Wendell Berry Tyler James Russell is the author of TO DROWN A MAN, a collection of poetry available on August 4, 2020.
A Joint Interview with Scott Poole and Rob Carney, Co-Authors of THE LAST TIGER IS SOMEWHERE7/15/2020
If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make? RC: Anne Sexton and grilled cheese. We’d eat standing up in the kitchen. SP: Emily Dickinson and Hemingway. They both have to be there. I want to see those sparks fly. We’d have Whiskey and White Cheddar Cheez-Its for the appetizer. Then, with a nice Sangiovese, I’d make my Chicken Piccata. For dessert, my wife’s coffee brownies. What scares you the most about the writing process? How do you combat your fears? RC: I wouldn’t say “scares” or “fears,” but I can get jumpy and impatient if long stretches go by where I’m not writing anything, and I have no strategy to combat that. It would be nice to have one, but no. SP: I like that I can write on my phone. It’s less intimidating. I dash off a few lines and it’s saved. I can come back to it at a moment’s notice. Later, I'll open it on the computer. Who is your biggest literary crush, author or character? RC: Not a “crush,” but Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein is vivid as hell and deserved a lot better. SP: Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea. “I have seen Lions on the beaches.” That’s a badass catch-phrase. What books are on your nightstand? RC: None. They’re on the floor or shelves or my desk or in my bookbag or somewhere I can’t remember, which is driving me nuts. Mostly, they’re books I’m teaching in my lit. classes. But right now there’s Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich and Paradise Earth by Amy Barker too. SP: I’m always reading many things at once, indulging my love of art, literature, comedy, and science. Cezanne by Alex Danchev. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Okay Fine Whatever by Courtenay Hameister. Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson. Favorite punctuation mark? Why? RC: The question mark. Because questions are more interesting than ready-made answers. SP: Definitely the m-dash. Nothing is sexier at the end of a line — What book were you supposed to read in high school, but never did? RC: Are you kidding, I read them all, and I was shocked when other kids said they didn’t do the homework. I lived in a small town, and my dad and mom were both teachers, and every teacher in my high school knew me. College, of course, was a different story. Freshman year, for instance, I thought Madame Bovary was in a contest all by itself for “Sucks the Most” and couldn’t read more than 40 pages. SP: All of them. I hated reading in high school. I was a jackass that was always telling jokes and getting in trouble because of my mouth. My love of reading flipped 180 when I finally got into a creative writing class in college. Everybody seemed to be reading those V.C. Andrews books in high school. I especially didn’t read those. What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements? RC: I write longhand and type it up later, so “Thanks to all you pens for being so helpful and nearby.” SP: Collections of paper and, by extension, books. I love the smell of it, the possibility of it, where it comes from, how it feels in the hand. Nothing looks better in a room than a stuffed bookshelf. If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write? RC: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” (Robert Frost). SP: “A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am” (Henry Miller). Does writing energize or exhaust you? RC: Can I say it does both? SP: It’s absolutely exhausting to think about doing it. I pretend I’ve been hit by a frying pan when I start — just dumb and willing. Once the first few lines are flowing, it energizes like no other activity and it’s hard to break away. What are common traps for aspiring writers? RC: Too much aspiring and not enough writing. And mistakenly thinking that revision is boring or a burden instead of where the real stuff happens. SP: Word salad. Nothing to hang your hat on. Throw a live rattlesnake in your salad! Write your way out of that! What is your writing Kryptonite? RC: Teaching a 4-4 course load and grading 700 papers. SP: Not writing. Writing begets writing. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? RC: Yes, from being sent long policy changes to long university policies, or anything having to do with tech and tech training. That junk wins the Super Bowl of Boring every time. SP: If I read the first line of a poem and there is no tension, no intrigue, no new information, I have a very hard time finishing it. Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly? RC: Probably, but they’d still have to feel strongly about finishing the work and doing it well. Writers have to be attentive and empathetic, but maybe being strongly emotional can turn your writing into a mess. SP: Sure, look at Henry James and Wallace Stevens. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? RC: Lots, but I’ll stick to just one here: Simmons Buntin. He’s the Editor-in-Chief of Terrain.org, and after I won their poetry contest (which got me started on my collection The Book of Sharks), he asked me to write a guest blog. I told him no thanks. I told him I didn’t know what a blog was exactly, or how to go about writing one, but he wouldn’t let me off the hook until I wrote him something, so I gave up and did, and he liked it. He liked it enough, in fact, to have me keep doing it as a regular feature with its own series name: “Old Roads, New Stories.” That’s the material I subsequently drew from, revised, and turned into my book Accidental Gardens. So I hadn’t planned to, as you say, become a better writer; that’s just what happened because Simmons saw something in me--more than I did--and gave me a place for this new prose work to be published, which was very generous of him. Simmons is the man. SP: I am a very lazy writer, as Rob Carney can attest to. However, I’ve never known a more loyal friend and reader. He always pushes me to stay true to my voice. I can’t thank him enough. 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? RC: Stand alone. But then again, maybe not. Or maybe both, because recently I wrote a sequel poem that brought back a woman from my first book (Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts) named Madame Kafelnikov. The first poem with her was called “If I Hadn’t Drowned in My 30s, She Says, Today I’d Be 73.” And now she’s back after seventeen years in a poem called “Best Healing Witch in Louisiana” (Facts and Figures; Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, 2020). SP: My voice has been my ticket. Without it I’d be sunk. I’m lucky to have discovered it early as a writer. I let the books form as they want, I trust my voice will hold them together. How did publishing your first book change your process of writing? RC: Well, it didn’t change my process as much as it changed, I don’t know, my belief. Like yes, a small audience is out there. Which didn’t mean the writing got easier--how magic would that be?--but I did feel a little more certain about it. SP: I began filling up a folder with poems. Whenever I collected over 50 poems, I’d keep replacing the poems with better ones. I’d take the folder to readings and try stuff out. After a year or so, a book of solid poems would emerge. It began a daily process of living as a poet. I finally had license to just live the life of a poet. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? RC: The entry fee for the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award because I love Jeffers, so winning was a huge honor. Plus, it meant I got to do a reading at Tor House. That was somewhere I’d wanted to go just as a pilgrim someday, so to get to read there? Hallelujah. SP: The first money I made off a reading. I think it was twelve dollars. I had been writing for ten years. I had two kids, a wife, and our household income was like $25,000 a year. I went to Wendy’s and bought a six piece Chicken Tenders. What a victory! What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? RC: When I first read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at age 18, I didn’t see why it was such a big deal. Then I read it again at age 29--at a coffee shop/diner/tavern in Salt Lake City that’s since been razed to make room for this Federal Building that looks like a Star Trek Borg Cube; seriously, it’s the ugliest building in the Mountain West, and not the best message for a democracy to be sending: “Resistance is futile”--anyway, when I read it again a second time, I got it and was laughing so hard I thought I’d drop dead off the bar stool because I was no longer breathing. SP: Shakespeare. I think it will be a life challenge. But I keep returning for more punishment. The writing is so thick, it kicks my ass and leaves me bleeding in the gutter everytime. It’s the only writer where I carefully open the book so it won’t hit me all at once. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? RC: I loved reading. It could make me forget that I was reading. And it took away awareness of time and could even make me cry sometimes (Old Yeller). I’m not sure I thought of that as “power,” but I knew it was amazing. SP: When I wrote my weird thoughts down instead of saying them out loud. Instead of people looking at me like I was a freak, they looked at me with a smile and acceptance. That was absolutely life changing. What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? RC: Anything by V.C. Andrews. Just Kidding. A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle. SP: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? RC: Great White shark. SP: A cinnamon colored micro-poodle. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? RC: Let’s call it three: There’s the book I mentioned earlier, Accidental Gardens. The publisher--Stormbird Press in South Australia--was destroyed (the publisher’s house too) by the continent’s worst-ever wildfires. Total devastation. So many animals dead, ancient rain forests now hanging on precariously. Then add a global pandemic and shutdown, and no wonder the book release is behind schedule. So that’s one. Two is a children’s book with no home yet: What Would You Do with a Mini Canoe? And third--not to jinx it--is I’m working on a collection called Lightning Factories: New and Selected, a hundred poems total. My eighth collection is forthcoming this February, so to think about the big picture after that seems hopefully not too presumptuous. SP: I have two. A novel and a book of poems. The novel was written so I could say I wrote a novel. It was written three years ago, but it’s about a couple stuck inside because it’s too dangerous to go outside. With the current pandemic happening, I didn’t know I’d be living it. If you want to find out how we escape this situation, you’ll have to publish the novel. What does literary success look like to you? RC: Horizontal. And sort of bluish-gray. SP: Not being able to stop rereading a poem I just wrote. What’s the best way to market your books? RC: Maybe this’ll sound too “analog,” but I’m a big believer in radio and think people who listen to NPR are the kind of people who buy books and enjoy hearing authors on the air. SP: Using my public radio connections. Doing readings. Mentioning it on Facebook. Getting a good review in the New York Times Review of Books, Library Journal or one of those. What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? RC: I’m not sure there’s a most difficult thing about having women appear in or speak in my poems. I mean, feeling and voice are feeling and voice regardless. Whatever their gender, if their voices and actions and characterizations aren’t convincing and authentic, then you’re cooked. SP: Not talking about my penis. What did you edit out of this book? RC: Well, I didn’t edit out of as much as edit into. What I mean is, Unsolicited asked me if my essay collection was still available, and I had to say no, but then I suggested a different book instead: new work by me and by my friend Scott Poole, both of us together. I hadn’t asked Scott in advance, and then I had to ask him pronto because Unsolicited wrote me back with an immediate yes. How lucky is that!? Very lucky. So Scott said he was in, and I dove like a scuba diver into his uncollected work and came up with a working Table of Contents we could kick back and forth--emailing and changing and shaping--and this went on for a manic three days, and that was the manuscript. Why so fast? Because we were pleasantly stunned to have an acceptance in advance and didn’t want to disappoint. SP: There were a few news poems that I really liked that just didn’t work outside of the context of the news event that birthed them. Save an Author; Buy a Book |
Popular Topics
All
We Support Indie Bookshops |