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

poet Sharon Suzuki-Martinez

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon's portable writing studio outside

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why? 

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

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

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

Sharon's writing studio inside

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

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

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

poet Karen Paul Holmes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

view from Karen's cottage at Lake Chatuge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LD: Do you believe in writer’s block?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

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

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

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

LD: Do you believe in writer’s block? 

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

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

Poet Kait Burrier

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

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Laura Davis: Beverage of choice? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poet Lindsay Lusby

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

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

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

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

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

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

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

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

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

LD: Beverage of choice?

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

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

Poet Stacy R. Nigliazzo

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

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

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

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poet Samantha Duncan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LD: Beverage of choice?

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

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

Poet Anna B. Sutton

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

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

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

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

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

LD: What writing implement do you wield and why?

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

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

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

LD: Beverage of choice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Kelly McQuain

Poet Kelly McQuain

Kelly McQuain is the author of the newly released VELVET RODEO, selected by poet C. Dale Young for the Bloom Chapbook Prize. His prose has been published in numerous periodicals, and his most recent poems appear in such places as Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Assaracus, Redivider, Kestrel, The Pinch and such anthologies as Between: New Gay Poetry, The Queer South and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. Learn more about Velvet Rodeo on his website. Read one of his poems at BLOOM Literary Journal.

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

Kelly McQuain: My home office is often too cluttered, so I write in coffee shops, on the couch, and on the bed in our TV room. Every time I think of cleaning out the office I think I could be writing instead, and so I write. I have books stacked in all those places, leaning towers of books with papers and old drafts wedged between them. I nest myself in the chaos and I do my best to create. Sometimes I write into the wee hours of the night, and I find words and lines still going through my head as I try to fall asleep. I sometimes get up and write those down. When I’m full-speed on a project, I’ll get up and dive into it when I come downstairs in the morning, sitting with a strong cup of black tea from Taiwan (a neighbor’s gift) or a cup of Earl Gray. Writing is going well if I get to the middle of the afternoon and realize I forgot to eat. For motivation, I remind myself that time is finite—a subject of much of my work. And occasionally a little wine or scotch can grease the wheel. Hemingway reputedly said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” You can't exactly follow that advice and be healthy. I like to temper Hemingway's notion with an idea from Oscar Wilde: “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

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

KM: For poetry, I keep files called Word Soup on the Notes app on my iPad. Phrases, ideas for lines, interesting messages people write me, things I read in books, fortune cookies--all that. Basically it's my version of a word bank. These phrases and notes get scrambled together. When I begin to work on a project, I may have an initial idea, but I like to snowball that idea with whatever randomness gets attracted to it. I print out some word soup and grab a legal pad and free-write. It’s a process of magnetism, as well as teasing out the loose thread of narrative I see in random associations. My home office is often too cluttered, so I write in coffee shops, on the couch, and on the guest bed. I have books stacked in all those places, leaning towers of books with papers and old drafts wedged between them. I nest myself in the chaos and do my best to create.

LD: What color is your writing process? 

KM: It’s kaleidoscopic. With poetry, I play with space and form on the typed page, viewing the poem the way I might a painting. How does this phrase look next to that one? How is the rhythm working to both the eye and the ear?  I like to play with the way white space can create both a mental and vocal caesura. Unfortunately, with a lot of online magazines using templates like WordPress, they sometimes can only print poems where each line begins at a flush left margin. Does that mean poems that have a lot of spacing peculiarities are going to be an endangered species? I think the technology will eventually get better, but for now I sometimes feel straitjacketed in terms of where I can send certain poems. I’m a believer, however, in the idea that a poem dictates its own form. When I write in traditional forms, I like to play with the rules and push them. Form sometimes fractures, becoming a kaleidoscope leading to something new.

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

KM: Sometimes I just know when a poem is finished. Not that it's tied up in a neat bow or anything. Rather, it's a sense I have pushed it as far as possible and I'm now finding myself engaged in a new project. For poems that seem riskier, I have a rotating group of readers I can show a draft to. I'll get one or two opinions of people I really respect. Not people who tell me what I want to hear, but people who will tell me what I need to hear. To be honest, I think trying to please a large workshop can deplete a work of its impulse or make a writer feel pulled in too many directions. Who wants to be drawn and quartered? Once in a while I will participate in a workshop at a conference, but that’s largely for the esprit du corps and to get new ideas for forms and techniques. When it comes to polishing a work myself, I read the piece aloud again and again to see if the phrasing, the beats, the line breaks and the pauses all feel right, since I believe sound goes hand in hand with image.  I do the same thing with writing prose.

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

KM: I remember writing Battlestar Galactica stories in 7th grade study hall with my friend Susan, and writing and drawing my own comics with other friends even before that. A poem in Velvet Rodeo called “Creation Myth” talks about reading my earliest poems in the state capital when I was a kid—twelve, maybe? Thirteen? I had won a state contest and it was a long, cold drive through the West Virginia mountains, where we lived. My whole family went. Those poems are long forgotten, but the fact that my family had faith in me is still remembered.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Writer Matt Pasca

poet Matt Pasca

An award-winning high school English teacher, Matt Pasca’s poetry has appeared in over a dozen journals, including Paterson Literary Review, Georgetown Review and Weave Magazine, as well as nine print anthologies. His first book, A Thousand Doors (2011, JB Stillwater), was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in Poetry.

Laura Davis: What color is your writing process? Do explain.

Matt Pasca: Great question. My writing process most resembles the lavender of summer twilight – that liminal haze between the beating pulse of action/community and surrender to stillness and the songs of insects. There is just enough light to see, and all the richness of experience seeps into the cracks of consciousness. So much discovery waits in that purple runway of goodbye, the letting go of a day, where one’s mind and heart hunker down in wordless privacy. My writing starts when I walk through the door and find them locked in embrace.

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

MP: In rare moments of unplanned or untaken time (i.e., when not full-time teaching, tutoring, parenting, husbanding, exercising, cooking, cleaning, grading, planning, promoting, gigging or speaking) I go straight to random.org and punch the number of writing projects I have going at the time into the website’s number randomizer. It seems absurd, I know, but I’m serious.

For example, the website might spit the number 6 at me, which corresponds to number 6 on a list I keep that might look like this:  1) revise new rough poem, 2) type in work from journal, 3) freewrite in journal, 4) revise almost finished piece, 5) clean up manuscript, 6) work on memoir and 7) fragment play. Like most adults, I make thousands of tiny decisions a day at work and at home. In my opinion, a tired and decision-weary mind is not fit to deal properly with the boon of unplanned time, likely as it is to squander such precious moments trolling Facebook or watching talking heads hurl uninformed opinions at each other. For me, a randomizer is a benevolent taskmaster making me choose between many children, all of whom I love and who require my attention. Once the decision has been made for me, motivation is never an issue. I am insatiable when it comes to craft and creation. No measure of time is large enough.

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

MP: I have two distinct methods of fashioning a poem. In scenario 1, work streams through me, wherever I might be located, into a journal I then flip through weeks later to see whether or not I have written a passage that has “potential.” If so, I type said passage in, revising as I go, then revise five or six more times before emailing it to the talented and honest editors I am lucky to know. This was the case with "Rainer and the Rio Grande", a poem I scrawled down as a quick entry during a flight home from a vacation in New Mexico with my wife and boys. In scenario 2, I rifle through various fragments of phrases and castaway stanzas I have saved in “composting” folders on my computer. I look for connective tissue and begin cutting and pasting, slashing, building and burning, ultimately cobbling together a collage of poetic parts. From there, I follow the previous procedure. This was how I arrived at "Receiving Line", an autobiographical piece about my experience at my father’s wake that I felt compelled to assemble after attending a fourth student’s parent’s service in one school year. Scenario 2, by the way, requires a word about computer usage:  after 28 years, I am still head over heels in love with the kiss of pen to paper, but am equally energized by the aggressive cross-pollinating and paint-splattering Pollock-esque freedom afforded me by technology. A prerequisite, of course, for the process in scenario 2 is that one be willing to slaughter and recast one’s own writing, to not think one’s work too precious. I like to think of myself as a matchmaker who lets the lonely, cologned and perfumed single fragments of my work go out on the town of my hard drive to find each other.

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

MP: I believe in writer’s block as one believes in hepatitis or tuberculosis without having experienced them. I know it is there. I have heard stories and imagine that if writing were my full time profession I’d have contracted a case of “the block” by now. But I also think it’s about approach. Do we wait to be inspired? Do we look for it? Do we look too hard? Do we know too much? National Book Award-winner Colum McCann came to my high school one year and told the assembly, “If you know where you are going when you are writing, there is no point to doing it.” I think I benefit from having no idea where I am headed when I set pen to paper or fingers to keys. Perhaps I benefit, too, from being an intensely visual and intuitive person to whom being spontaneously and/or analytically verbal does NOT come naturally. Writing pulls back the tall red curtain, lets me give words to the cinema of my experience, interpret and subtitle the reels of silent footage running from my brain to my heart, to find out what they know – to put myself between them in their backroom embrace. And playing with language – the music of syllables and sounds along the way – is so enjoyable I imagine I will always write, as I have since I was 11, for the sheer love of it, regardless of professional ambition.

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

MP: I will confess to you now a great and shameful secret – I am an English teacher who rarely finishes books. I have always been this way. I do read a lot and love to read but do so until I am sparked so full of inspiration and motivation that I put the book down and am off, shot down the track, blowing steam from my opened head. All it usually takes is a poem or two, if it’s good work. I am highly flammable.

Writers on the Writing Process: An Interview with Poet Carol Berg

poet Carol Berg

Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or featured in The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Pebble Lake Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Verse Wisconsin. Her poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. Her most recent chapbook, Her Vena Amoris, is available from Red Bird Chapbooks. She blogs here.

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

Carol Berg: I’m part of an on-line group of poets who try to write a poem every day during certain months. A prompt is provided that you can choose to use. I’m also using Diane Lockward’s book The Crafty Poet. So last Tuesday, I started a poem by picking a line from a song, “I know a dirty word,” from Kurt Cobain’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then I scoured the dictionary for words using only those letters. That was time consuming—I think it took me at least two hours or so. I got three journal pages of words and then the next day started crafting the poem. I used the phrase “I know to” to start generating lines. I don’t know how long it took to get a draft—25 minutes maybe? The world doesn't really exist when I’m inside the poem, crafting it. Right now the poem is simmering in a folder. I've visited it today and tinkered with a few words, but I know it’s not finished yet.

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

CB: I keep a journal and sometimes my writing begins by mind-dumping. I need to write out my fears. Other times, if I’m writing a series of poems with a particular speaker, I’ll scour my journal for ideas or an image or some subject matter that I want to explore. There are things I’d like to do in my poems that I see other poets do. For example, I love poems that have dictionary themes to them and about a month ago, I was writing poems in the voice of a woman who dwelled in the caves of Lascaux. So I tried to write a dictionary poem of sorrows through that woman’s voice.

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

CB: I love this question! I think my color is a gray-ish opaque, mainly because I’m so inside my head or inside the words themselves that the process seems foggy. The dictionary is so very black and white. I write with a pencil in a journal so there’s a lot of black and white happening visually there as well. Then when I move to the computer with its blue background the process might change a bit. Things might open up more.
 
LD: How do you decide that you are finished working on a story, essay, or poem?

CB: There was a Facebook photo going around where it said something like, “I do my best revising after I submit a poem.” Sometimes this is very true of me: I get so excited about my poems that I send them out too quickly. Other times, the ending is pretty final to me. This is a very intuitive part of the process. It’s a feeling about the poem—either you feel that it is finished or you still want to prod it a bit. Poke at it in the middle and see where it jiggles.
 
LD: How do you motivate yourself to write? Chocolates? Self-flagellation? Drugs?

CB: It’s pure pleasure. Nothing else I do mentally gives me as much feeling of understanding about myself and the world. Not to mention the surprises that come, either new ideas about myself or a new way of seeing things in the world, and I've done that. I wrote that new thing. Pretty powerful stuff, really.

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