12 or 20 (second series) questions with Heather Sellers

Heather Sellers is the author of four collections of poetry, The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press), Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (winner of the Sawtooth Prize), The Present State of the Garden, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone, from BOA Editions.

She is also the author of The Practice of Creative Writing: a guide for students, just out in a fully revised fourth edition. The book contains work by 50 authors and offers a thorough introduction to creative writing across the genres.  Her memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know was Editor’s Choice at The New York Times. Her essays have appeared widely. She directs the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.  Her website is heathersellers.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Georgia Underwater helped me get tenure—that was life-changing, to be sure. And it made me feel valid as a writer, to have a book published.  Also, my mother stopped speaking to me for a time after I published my first book and as painful as that was, the break in contract helped me begin to sort out some important truths about my family.

My recent work, and all of my work, feels like an extension of that first project—I see it all as one big inter-related body of work—in terms of subject matter, theme, and intention. I hope my skills get better with each project.  Lately I’ve been working most intentionally on sentences, rhythm, story-telling crafts, concision and accuracy.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? 

My Ph.D. is in fiction and my first book was a collection of linked short stories. I took as many poetry courses as I could, but in my program, one had to declare a genre, and I declared my work “fiction” mostly because Jerry Stern was not on leave that semester and the poets were and I was a much better reader of fiction than I was of poetry.

We didn’t have “non-fiction” in creative writing then, but my poetry and fiction were absolutely dwelling in that space.   But I did not see genres as wholly separate things, or in a hierarchy.  My first book, self-bound and self-published, by myself, when I was ten years old, contained a short story, a tiny memoir, a one page play and a long poem. I thought every writer worked across the genres. A writer is someone who writes things.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I wouldn’t say fast or slow. I would say “ongoing.” I try to work every day—if I don’t, part of myself seems to turn against myself. I’m more present to the world and those around me if I’m able to write every day. I wish this weren’t the case. But the concentration required is somehow medicine for my poor brain: grounding, focusing, clearing.

Once in awhile, I’ll get down on the page something I really, really like, right out of the gate, and the shaping process hews fairly close to that first “down draft” but usually the first drafts look nothing like the final results. I’m a heavy, hearty, devoted re-writer—rewriting is writing to me. 

I do take a lot of notes on index cards and the backs of envelops and in my phone. I am not great at organizing and then finding these notes when I need them, but I think the act of noting is productive in itself—little breadcrumbs here and there, so I don’t completely lose my way.

I like to read notes by artists and writers, and I love fragments as art objects. And I’m completely surrounded by a sea of notes as I work…notes in books, and printed out drafts and pencils and post-its and lists and outlines and charts. It’s very messy. Writing for me is a layering process.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I know many poets say the poem begins with sound, language, and rhythm.  For me, the poem begins with an image I can’t get out of mind or a juxtaposition I like.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like to read. Not too often. It takes, for me, enormous preparation and planning and revision and rehearsing and energy and it’s incredibly anxiety-producing, too.  Reading the work aloud in front of an audience sure does lay bare what is working and what is not working. Some pieces work really well out loud and maybe most do not. That takes some figuring out, right? But if someone is taking one out to dinner afterwards, it seems important to attempt to give over some kind of experience that is entertaining and meaningful. So I like it and I do think it’s good creative training but it’s definitely more demanding than pleasurable.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m absolutely not a scholar.  I’m not sure I’m trying to answer questions with my writing. I’m more trying to document what I observe truthfully and accurately.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

So many kinds of writers.  So many kinds of roles.  Against “should.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

A good editor is the luckiest thing ever, right? She is your teacher.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

All the advice about outsmarting yourself: You have to figure out how to stay at the desk when you absolutely do not want to, and you have to figure out ways to keep learning your craft so you can improve, and you have to do these things mostly on your own.

You have to be smarter than you are. You have to develop an enormous tolerance for failure. Mostly, you have to stay at the desk.  You have to kind of live there, really.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I am very stay-at-home in my life but very wander-y in my writing pursuits. There is so much fantastic work to read, across genres, and so much technique to learn and practice…irresistible. I don’t think I move among genres, I think they move among me! 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nina Puro, Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House

elegy with burnt spoon & horse chestnuts

thought

there were

tiny coyotes

in the walls.

could feel my lips

but they weren’t attached.

lights harshing

the big rigs

sway in their wind.

snaggletooth girls

with takeout boxes.

little crucibles of heat.

we all have drowsy

recording devices.

chosen names &

families.

amplify the

dregs.

we are so clever.

we keep

coming.

shake my hand,

then count your fingers.

Poet Nina Puro’s debut full-length collection, winner of the 2017 New Issues Poetry Prize, is Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House (Kalamazoo MI: New Issues Press, 2018), a collection of confessional lyric, each imbued with a fierce and fearless restlessness. In Puro’s poems, there is an acknowledgement that every object, every word, is a potential weapon, and one that can be far too easily used against us, and these poems offer both precision and witness, examination and exhaustion, a fiery optimism and a determined heart. How does one survive and not be broken?

I am not sure if what I wanted for myself, once, was a witness. To what happened. To naming what happened. No way to describe. The tyranny of language cannot. To have cut how many cities down, bodies back, plastic rings from soda cans & balconies & receipts. A sky particulate: engraved with fine tracings, latticework or ironwork. A buzzing in the room. I didn’t know where from. Light-specks floated from our feet, as if we were an inauspicious constellation. As if radioactive.

There is the past & there is the past. There is the sound of metal in wind—off-kilter, tonight. A boat with no ocean close. As if it knows something in the low tones, as if warning us in the high. If the ghosts are back. In the close-packed concrete room, I could see the whorls in the girl’s ears, the darkness that hung around her—unnamable damage, something rent—& that was part of it: the witnessing. The way her hair fell in dark wings along the mark the blade left. A gash longer than the length of what we could understand—scale, irrevocability. (“Bare Life”)

Puro’s poems are thick, and impossible; the finest kind of political, in their adherence to speaking of family conflict, silences and trauma; how the world breaks, and how people break, forced to abandon everything or begin again from scratch. “I’m not sure how I decided / to join the living,” Puro writes, to open the poem “Shift Work,” continuing: “but I know / when it began: that winter so long / persimmons lasted until April / & the neighbors hissed until three a.m.” There is darkness here, but one that is examined alongside the light, weaving intricately in, around and through, concurrently writing hopelessness against hope, and the possibility of all that could begin. There are lines that leave marks, and render bone; lines that catch, and carry. There are lines that take what can’t be said, and speak it, such as this fragment from “Top 40”: “A father is a piano full / of bees Gender is a skirt of wet rocks,” or the ending of the poem “elegy with trillium & medical records,” that reads:

if we weren’t

wax I’d remember

how to measure

smoke

kings burned a cigar

then weighed the ash

dozens of holiday weekends

spent speaking only to

the stove.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010) won the Juniper Prize and was published in 2010. Her fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2018. Seuss was raised in rural southwest Michigan.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book came, in many ways, out of the blue. I’d always written poems, really since childhood; it was simply part of my life that seemed as natural as washing the dishes. I didn’t see my capacity to make poems as some special talent given to me by the gods, nor something I came to through school. I was in my mid-30s, with a thriving therapy practice, teaching creative writing now and then, raising my son, when I was approached by the founder of New Issues Press, Herbert Scott, asking me to put together a manuscript. I did, and he accepted it. The publishing landscape was shaped so differently then. There were MFA programs, but fewer. Dare I say that poetry was somewhat less of a product? This is pre-internet, before the time in which things don’t exist unless they appear on a screen. I was pleased by the book—called It Blows You Hollow—and excited by the way in which it made me feel like a “real writer.” Within about a month of its publication, however, my husband left our family. The unexpectedness of the divorce was traumatic for my son and for me. My responsibilities to the book, to getting it out there, getting myself out there, took a hit. The joy of publication got lost in the shuffle.

Those early poems were largely unstudied. In that sense, they’re “innocent” of the literary world.  On the other hand, their crafting is clumsy compared to what is expected now of poems. Since that book, I gave my life over to poetry, became a professor of creative writing, and taught myself everything I could about craft through the reading I did in order to teach. My poems hopefully show that book-learning, but also, I believe they’ve retained their individuality, the nuances of where and who I’m from. They are not the poems of an MFA-trained poet, but a lifelong apprentice.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I never have thought in plots, though I do have a narrative bent in my poems. I have written brief nonfiction, much of which has appeared in Brevity, a magazine I love, but my instinctive proclivities have always been in the direction of the poem, the broken line, poetry’s openness to improvisational moves, and to the lyric “I.” I love the lyric “I” in all its guises. I love what it has the capacity to hold and who it has the space to represent. For me the poem and the lyric gesture were a push-back on invisibility—not just my own, but the invisibility of my people, who I would describe as the rural, Midwestern, working poor.

I also must give a shout out to the good old typewriter, and to typing class in high school. Being able to type fast, to use a tool that offered a shortcut from my imagination to the page, really encouraged me as a poet. Seeing poems in type, knowing I could do a carriage return when I felt like it, to therefore physically feel the line break, was exhilarating. I immediately starting writing with fluidity, to enjamb, to fragment, even though I had no idea what a line break was. I had really read very little about what poems were supposed to be. I don’t think I even called what I wrote “poems.” They were just things I stuck in my dead father’s briefcase. My high school was in the middle of a cow pasture. I just knew I liked how it felt to lay words down on the page.

It was at this time that I met the person who would become my mentor, poet Conrad Hilberry. He was a poet-in-the-schools who would visit rural high schools. He saw promise rather than freakishness in my ramblings, and began to send me books—Diane Wakoski, Alden Nowlan, a Canadian poet. He ultimately helped me get into a good college, where I studied with him, TA’d for him, and worked with him on his own poems. When he retired, I became the poetry professor where he’d taught me—quite a circle. Without that encouragement I never would have known to call a poem a poem. What was extraordinarily lucky was that he taught me about what poems could be, what form could be, without shutting down my own instincts.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My process has evolved over time. My new book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, began as a very distinct project whose core ideas transmogrified over time. Before that, my work was less project-oriented, though books did take on a particular shape as I wrote during a specific life phase.  The poems of Four-Legged Girl, for instance, emerged out of a time in which I was looking back at the years I spent in punk era New York City with my drug addict boyfriend, living in the East Village (pre-gentrification, thank God). I was reconsidering desire in those poems, and the book developed into a kind of treatise on desire, and desirelessness, and a new kind of desire that rose out of those ashes. Writing has always come fast to me; I tend to work on poems or ideas in my head for a time, and then fully immerse myself in generating poems in a concentrated period of time. Then comes a window of opportunity in which I feel I can revise within a period of time in which the emotional sphere of the work is intact, before it wafts away. For the most part, my first drafts contain the improvisational magic of the poem. I don’t want to revise it into submission. But I do work on focusing the language and on how the poem is inhabiting space on the page. Now that I’m working on sonnets, much of my revision energy goes toward compression and enhancing the instinctive music.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

As I said, I lived a bit from poem to poem in my first three books, shaping them into a manuscript once I’d generated a lot of work. My next book began with a very clear inspiration—I woke from a dream with the words “still life” in my head. That led me to research and exploration, and as I wrote the poems around still life painting, other issues were sprung like bear traps—the gaze, and who owns it, art as a kind of gated paradise, and the collision between art and the rural, which is the landscape and people that made me. The manuscript I’m working on now came while I was participating in a residency in Washington. In this case, the inspiration was formal—the sonnet—and sonnets composed with improvisational energy. Knowing that I’m working over time on a larger notion, structure, or idea is helpful to me. The project accompanies me everywhere I go, companion-like. I’m not sure one can live an entire writing life on inspiration alone.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy reading a great deal. There is an obvious energy exchange that can happen in that live environment that one doesn’t experience by being read on the page. I seem gregarious, but I’m shy, and growing shyer by the day, which you wouldn’t know if you came to one of my readings—so readings are a challenge for me. One feels very seen, which is a double-edged blessing, you know? I don’t experience readings as part of my creative process, in that I don’t write for performance; the reading is its own art, and for me, a separate dimension from writing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Poems are mysterious creatures, composed of whatever constitutes the person writing in a particular moment, from the warm mug in your hand to the sound of traffic outside the window to your memory of peaches to the distortions of Trump to Emily Dickinson’s coconut cake recipe. So yes, theory is part of it, insofar as I am reading and thinking about stuff at a given time. I think about the theory of the gaze and other dimensions of film and art theory, Barthes’ work, especially Camera Lucida and how he complicates the fluid significance of photographs. The holistic nature of desire—a phrase stolen from a philosopher friend of mine. Theories of the marginal, the queer. The performance of self. This is just a twist of what interests me, what I turn to in order to approach the real questions that my work raises for me. I’m not sure that I’m trying to answer questions so much as explore them. I do think poems can be said to present a thesis, and that it won’t kill us to think in terms of our poem’s thesis, how it is represented and argued by the poem. But I don’t see these explorations as purely intellectual, or trivial in terms of their impact on real life. I don’t think I believe an individual poem can save a life, but the writing of it, and perhaps the reading of it, can rescue the moment, though not in a sentimental way. The questions my work raises? What if desire is less interpersonal than we think it is…How does one call home her projections…Can “high art” become less alienating to the everyday…What is beauty, and how can it be rescued from capitalism and trauma…Who are my people…Where are my dead…What good is love if it ends…What is Paradise, and what are the costs of Paradise…Where’s my miniature pony…

In terms of how I view the current questions being raised in poems: How does a writer follow their own trajectory, which requires solitude and interiority, in a time in which no moment goes unphotographed and unshared? How can a writer experiment with form and content in ways that reflect the poem’s deepest need rather than the crowdsourced agreement about what experimentation looks like? If I make claims about my life am I confessing? Can I write on behalf of and still follow my own guttural painful absurd path? How do I exist in this publishing landscape without overvaluing or devaluing my work? Can one write work that is uncontaminated by careerism and branding, and still be read, and still survive financially? Is narrative dead because I say it is or because they say it is?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

So many writers, as a woman said to me once on the subway. So. Many. Writers. All of us playing one role or another, some of us in diminutive communities, others with an explosive impact on nations and the globe. Writers fix toilets, walk the dog, change the diapers, like the rest of humanity—or if they don’t, they’d better learn. The teachers of writing, if they’re dedicated and rigorous and real, make an impact that reverberates through generations. The poems or novels or essays themselves—well, they keep the soul alive. They respond to and rattle the political realm. They nurture the imagination. Now more than ever, we need art—not only self-expression (the easy part) but self-discipline and precision and ambition (for the work) and vision and wildness—art that wants to go far, and goes far. But we don’t need writers more than we need nurses, 3^rd grade teachers, bartenders, road workers, activists, office managers, custodians, cashiers, cowpokes.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

A good editor is essential. That work requires a level of intellectual empathy I find astonishing. What can be better than having an expert turn their attention to your work with the sole purpose of making it better? I’ve been lucky to have had the chance to work with the best—Jeff Shotts at Graywolf Press. I trust his judgment and rely on his honesty. To be seen and reckoned with from the outside looking in, well, that is a gift.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Well, from my mentor: “People are more important than poems.” I know it’s true, but sometimes I struggle against it. And an old saying: “Leave it lay where Jesus flang it.”

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Most of my life has been determined by necessity. I’ve been a single parent, a teacher with students who relied on me to show up and work hard on their behalf, and before that, a clinical social worker. Like most writers, I haven’t had the luxury of a routine, but I do have a discipline. That is, I’m always thinking about what I’m working on, and reading or looking at other art to help me in my writing. I walk around with lines in my head almost all the time—most of my head space is taken up in possible lines that may or may not make it to the page. Poems are pretty much my life now. Everything else has been winnowed away. Though time in the real world—road trips, even short ones—are important to the remembering that I am doing in my current project. But I’m like every other jackass in the world. First thing I do in the morning is drink coffee and check in on the political tyranny via the news. I get about halfway through The Price is Right and then I walk the dog. This is new for me, time and space. I just stopped regular work for the first time since I was 15. I’m still negotiating with the idea of space and time, and still problem solving how to keep it together financially.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

If I drive to the place I was raised, that’s enough to keep me going for months. It’s really a road trip into the past that never becomes less harrowing. And then there are the images that place provides. It’s overflowing with images—though people not from there would likely just see a Taco Bell, a graveyard, and a couple of abandoned factories. The ghosts there, for me, are as tall as silos. If I can’t get there physically, I can make the journey imaginatively. It’s always enough.

I also turn to form. If you’re facing “writer’s block,” which I don’t believe in, write a sestina, write a villanelle, write a sonnet.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The town where I was raised was composed of a mélange of scents: smoke from the burn barrels, tar laid down on roads to fill pot holes, frozen pizza burning in the oven, manure from the Green Giant mushroom factory…lilacs.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above. One must open the portholes and let the world in. The natural world is the most important to me. It’s the motherlode, the source of the imagination. I saw a guy say on social media, in response to a poem, that he “hates nature.” Now that is the pathway to hell, as far as I’m concerned. There is very little left that can offer us rescue. A tree—well a tree is the sublime. There’s a dying redbud in my backyard on which I hang a bird feeder and some wind chimes that is the hub of my spiritual life. Visual art, in terms of things that are human-made, probably offers me the most richness, probably because it’s usually made without words, beyond words. The way painters position themselves in relation to what they are gazing at gives me thought, gives me pause. Music is another mechanism of memory for me. Sometimes I just can’t listen—the feelings are too much. I love Dickinson’s love of botany, her dogged collection of pressed and labeled wild plants, that archival urge, which to me circles directly back to the urge to make poems.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Plath has been important. Keats. Faulkner. Baldwin. Roland Barthes. Gloria Anzaldúa. Whitman. Langston Hughes. Williams. Lucille Clifton. Chekhov, Joyce. Toni Morrison. Virginia Woolf. An art historian—Norman Bryson. Dickinson has been crucial in life and in art. In terms of contemporary writers, there are too many to name, and if I try I’ll likely snub someone important. I’ll just say Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fiction is important to me, as are D.A. Powell’s poems.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to go to Iceland. I’d like to feel unproblematically embodied. I’d like to experience not worrying about money. That would be cool.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I could sing I’d be a singer. I’d have loved to be in a band. I did some acting in my life. I could have gone in that direction. If I had a couple of other lives to spare, I’d like to spend one being a naturalist and another being an investigative journalist.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Well, I did all kinds of something elses. As I said, I was a psychotherapist for many years. I taught both clinical social work and creative writing. Earlier in life I was a nanny, a bartender, worked in a punk clothing store, secretaried, wrote romance novels and cheesy porn. I identify as a writer because it’s the one through-line in my life that stuck, and it is a frame for all of the something elses in my life.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Oh man. “Great” is such a problematic notion. I tend to read and watch classic/vintage stuff these days. I’ve been reading both Chekhov and Joyce, specifically their short stories, and I’m compelled by what I can only describe as the presence of absence in their work. In terms of poetry, the last great book—well, I recently read an incredible poetry manuscript in order to write a blurb for it. It’s called View from True North, written by Sara Henning, one of two winners of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Its extraordinary crafting is in counterpoint to the rawness of the trauma it describes. A fresh, honest, artfully-made collection. Evie Shockley’s book the new black is great in such unexpected ways. Her spin on form is extraordinary. Film: I see very few new movies. It’s the one area in my life in which I’m a snob. I like films that are not simply narratives, and I really loathe films built around spectacle. What I love are films that are another dimension of visual art, are at least as aware of the visual element as the storytelling. I love Hitchcock. Love classic horror films and noir. I can’t get enough of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a voyeuristic film about voyeurism. The Birds is underrated. I love the Swedish silent film The Phantom Carriage, and the silent The Passion of Joan of Arc starring Renee Falconetti. See? Snob.

19 - What are you currently working on?

My current project is a big one. It’s a kind of memoir in unrhymed (usually) sonnets. Taken together, they will compose a sort of incremental story of moments in my life as I experienced them, but also, the poems look at the nature of memory itself, how it operates, memory’s entrapments as well as its liberations. The poems try to get at the improvisational nature of thought. I have well over a hundred and I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer K. Sweeney

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Salt Memory, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and was later nominated for the Poets’ Prize, and Little Spells, forthcoming from New Issues Press. Sweeney’s poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. She teaches workshops and offers manuscript consultation in California where she lives with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney, and their sons, Liam and Forest. Visit her at www.jenniferksweeney.com.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book felt like I had received a certain legitimacy as a poet. I know it should not be this way, but holding the immortal object in my hands, I understood that all this quiet effort had come to something whole that would live beyond me. People can be somewhat belittling about one’s effort as a poet, as if it’s a hobby or journal flourish which is frustrating as a young poet who is trying to take the art seriously and for whom the work is life-saving. Having an actual book with a Library of Congress # in it did help to transcend some of these attitudes. That’s the outer realm. The inner world of my art had a wonderful momentum after the first book came out. I could approach poetry in larger sweeps, think forward in long-poems and bodies of work. The shape and scope of the art opened up for me. My most recent work is more diverse in range of style and approach, more music and sound-conscious, less determined in arc and theme.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t think this was a conscious choice. My poetic voice was simply the most compelling. When I sat down to write, I heard poetry, I wrote poetry. Poetry is the room with all the doors and windows. It propels me forward. It is a way of thinking and integrating and deepening and drawing myself closer to “the family of things.” I do love to write both fiction and non-fiction, but poetry is my home base, how I feel my way through the world.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
All of the above. When it comes to process, I stay pretty open about how writing projects develop. Sometimes they are mined from the deep and sometimes they are the result of notes, journaling, and laboriously culling a tangle of thoughts into shape. Every so often a poem comes out gloriously whole, but usually it’s more 90% there at first, then that last 10% to call something “finished” can take a very long time and involve some dramatic revision. I have one long poem I worked on and off for seven years. So this is a happy paradox for me. I am always simultaneously writing both quickly and slowly depending on the work. I’m writing from an “if-not-now-then-when” place and yet also resigned to let the whole process be glacial if need be.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem begins with a couple of words. I benefit from some sort of focal point on a white page, plant a few odd and compelling words at the top and begin. I don’t necessarily use them or write anything to do with them, but they act like little keys. Listening to the sounds of the words themselves or contemplating the relationship between them seems to order my mind just enough while still staying receptive and loose, and I start thinking into language and listening my way forward. A poem about this way of entrance: http://constructionlitmag.com/the-arts/poetry/jennifer-sweeney/  As for building a body of work into a “book,” it’s also a very organic process. I write poems for a long time not thinking too much about the shape of a book until I have maybe 25 solid poems, then I start listening to what they are saying to each other, and the shape of a book begins to clarify.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings. They often feel like the completion gesture of the creative process and are gratifying and generous occasions, but to be honest, I have become a bit more reclusive as a writer in recent years, and don’t do as many readings as I used to. They have become more and more emotional and vulnerable experiences for me. Preserving the kind of inner listening required for the writing life is my first and most important focus.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My poems often derive from direct experience, the aesthetic dimensions of music, image, meaning and spirituality—my angle is to stay close to rendering language that is true to the layers of consciousness that manifest during an experience, that is to trace the full dimensions of questions rather that answer them, to follow the questions rather than arrive at a conclusion. That said, I also love the work of the lyric poem that transcends meaning and experience and dwells at the edge of the known and the unknowable. As far as what questions are most pressing to me, this is always changing, but my third book, Little Spells (forthcoming in spring 2015), explores the scope of what slim margins all life leans on, fertility and the lack of, what rough spark we depend on every day to keep going. Much has been written on the ‘gates of death’ but perhaps less on what guards the ‘gates of life,’ and this collection seeks to perpetually meditate on threshold, potential, conjuring, from many different entry points to speak more universally about how we become, and how we endure a stalled narrative. It is the poetry of waiting, being suspended at the crossing, the work of everyday magic, loss, and bounty.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
This is a big question, and I think every writer would have a slightly different answer at any certain stage of her/his process. In direct and indirect ways, each writer is making an individual effort toward the collective expansion of the knowledge of ourselves by witnessing our lives and the time that we live. We chart a history of consciousness, and how we approach that is each writer’s contribution. No writer has to fulfill some duty call, but if the effort is honest, then the work will be useful and have value. Range of style, form, and topic is crucial in creating our full conversation about language and meaning, as is work that challenges and changes our perceptions.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have had editorial dialogues with two of my book publishers, and they were both very positive and clarifying conversations, not extensive or generative of new work, but more the tightening and completion of the ready-to-be-immortal. Seeing a body of work clearly at the end is a delicate thing; there is sometimes this impulse to make a lot of changes. Both editors helped tremendously in respecting my vision and talking about the poems intimately with me. Susan Kan, publisher of my second book, was open to adding in a long poem that had not previously been in the collection, but felt vital for me. This inclusion really made the book complete, and it was a big change; I was so grateful. Overall though, working with editors has not been an essential part of my work-in-process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Art undoes the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t. –Theodore Roethke

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Right now, I spend most of my time with my nine month old and four year old sons. I tend to write fast in unexpected corners of the day. Everything feels a bit stolen. Poetry steeps for a long time, then comes quickly. It’s not the ideal way to sustain a writing practice, but it is equal parts thrilling and frustrating, and the end result is much the same as when I languished for hours in a quiet room. Part of that steeping is writing fragments, headlines, math equations, travel phrases, whatever mess of things is tossing around in my head in a notebook. I take this ongoing collection of notes anywhere I might find a corner of space, and as a result, I have written the majority of recent poems in parking lots and waiting rooms. Whatever rules I previously had about what conditions were necessary for writing to happen have been tossed out. This is a good thing, I think. I wrote the last poem for my next book in a crowded basement room waiting for a blood draw. I just try to keep showing up at any hour or place; something is usually there. If not, that instance is clearcutting for the next time. There are so many terrible ways to kill an hour. Trying to write but not succeeding is one of the best.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t panic if I’m not writing, but it usually means that something is out of balance. Maybe I’m on the computer too much or not reading enough or I’m not in my body and the circle has grown too tight. When writers feel this way, the mistake might be in pushing the need to write to satisfy fear. Returning to a more present and embodied life is what’s essential for me. I wander the orange groves, drive up to the San Bernardino Mountains, read generously and without much thought of writing. I get excited about my life again in an authentic and curious way. When writing is stalled, it is time to listen more.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of these are meaningful influences for me. Nature and science have been sources of inspiration for all of my books. The ocean was spirit guide in my first book, but for all my writing, communion with the natural world is a place to keep returning to for nourishment, understanding, mystery, awe, terror. Music, both intrinsically and thematically, led me through the second book, notably in a long poem called “The Listeners,” where I explored my relationship with my father via our love for music, weaving in lyrics, memory, the obsolescence of the record album, meditations on time, and circular patterns. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Essayists are really important in helping me stay in my writer’s mind amidst an otherwise very full life. Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Rachel Carson are all writers whose poetic prose continues to slow and sustain me. As for poetry, I read very widely. I love range in poetry and read and enjoy all styles of poetry. I don’t understand why people are so divisive about poetry styles.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Swim with dolphins. Doesn’t everyone want to do that? I would like to swim with some dolphins and spend a lot of time writing some lyric essays. I would also like to try my hand at writing a children’s book. Hike a significant part of the Appalachian Trail with my husband and boys when they are older. Learn to play the mandolin. There is no end to this question.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Choreographer. Botanist. Park Ranger.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I had previously been a dancer, and though I met my limits with this art, I see now how being in the body and expressing that through a temporal art was co-creating my writing life. I try to bring what sound and body-wisdom I know from dance into poetry. As the other temporal art, poetry asks me to be ever sensitive to music, rhythm, and the sensory realm, and these very much guide my writing process. Breath, wind, pace, texture, form, compression all deliver an intensity of experience that feels true for me. Writing is the best way I know to live. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Lila by Marilynne Robinson right now. I’m not done yet, but it’s brilliant. As for film, I am really behind on watching great films. We moved three years ago to a house with a lot of windows, and there was only one logical place to put a t.v., but we’d already hung a beloved painting there and decided we’d rather look at that so we left the t.v. in the box. Sometimes I watch something on the laptop, but not often. Got any recommendations?

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am writing a fourth manuscript of poems, especially working with a long poem that weaves losing and finding myself in Prague, memories of my Polish grandmother, and the internment camps at Terezin among other things. I’m reading some interesting pieces on the colors of noises, and the “timbre of the universe,” preliminary reading for an essay I would like to write on white noise, development of the ear, Tuvan throat singing and our perception of sound in the womb.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;