12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Lippmann

Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology, Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible, from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published in 2026.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Doll Palace put me in conversation with readers for the first time. it gave me a kick to keep going (tho i'd likely keep going anyway.) My forthcoming novel Hidden River actually feels closer to my first than others -- all have dealt with predation in some way, but these two really explore the set and setting (i.e. the perfect combo of socio-cultural-environmental factors) that prime the waters. Also, Hidden River is structured in flash-like sections, and it was flash that spurred my initial return to writing (years ago) in the first place.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Ever since my first workshop in college, it's been fiction all the way. Careerwise, I started out writing for magazines, so I've done my share of nonfiction (although writing for men's magazines as a young 22 woman is its own form of fiction) but it was always the short story. I enjoy the ability to hide while telling the truth, to get out of my own way, to yield and recede in service to the story.. 
 
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?
It takes forever because I'm scattered and distracted and terribly disciplined. I work in fits and spurts. When I do sit down, I puke out a mess. So 90% of my writing is through revision.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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 love this question. How do you know what container to lend to a particular narrative? I don't really know. I can share that the seedlings of this novel Hidden River were planted in a Kathy Fish flash workshop many years ago. I was just noodling around, playing. I tested the waters with a few flash pieces, a short story about this stuff. But there was more to say. It just kept at me, whispering in my ear. Then I realized the fractured flash structure actually made a ton of psychological sense for the internal makeup and movement of this project, so I doubled down on it.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
As a kid, I was terrified of public speaking. It's something I've written about, but ironically, it's become a part of my job, both as a former host of a reading series and now as magazine editor hosting events, and as someone who values those live connections with readers and listeners. It's all part of the larger conversation.
 
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?
How can we release from the grips of experiences that haunt us? This book concerns itself with the scars of private v. public trauma and the intimate and proximate experiences of both, so the ways in which our society is not only complicit but sanctioning, driving the predatory impulse is another central concern. 

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?
The writer holds up a mirror and in so doing confronts and challenges the larger culture, but the only "role" of the writer as I see it is to grapple honestly with the deep mess of what it means to be human. Once the writing becomes moralistic or pedantic or cleanses itself of paradox, contradiction and nuance endemic to the human experience, I'm out.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven't worked with one though I often do work as one. As a developmental editor, my goal is to pave the paveway for deeper discovery and a fuller experience of the work. To that end, the experience of working with Jerry at Tortoise was so wonderful. The ways in which he engages closely and intimately with the text makes the writer feel seen. He's been a great partner: challenging the work where it needs to be challenged, and underscoring where it needs to be sharpened. I've also never had another editor riff hilariously and personally alongside the text in the margins, which solidifies the feeling, the hope that the work you're putting out, is fostering coversation.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My thesis advisor in college, Meredith Steinbach, told me to sit up straight. Sure, I might have had crap posture. But she meant stop hedging or apologizing or shrinking but to take up space. Take what I had to say seriously. (not too seriously;) It's been some version of Own Your Shit ever since.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
With my last book, LECH, I cheated on it with short stories so compulsively that I wound up pooping out an entire story collection (JERKS) alongside it. Which is to say, it all feeds the work. Go wherever the energy lies. I like to move between flash and longer projects, or stories and novels, flirting with the essay every now and then. Working cross genre can be energizing, especially when stuck in that seemingly interminable murky middle of a longer thing.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
When I am generating, I need to do it before the critical brain wakes and starts hollering that I suck. So if it doesn't get done first thing, it won't get done. At my most disciplined, I'm up before dawn. That hasn't been happening lately. But I do host these (free!) Ungodly Hour Writing Clubs periodically on zoom, which is a way to hold us all accountable as we show up for ourselves and our work. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I pick up poems. I do morning pages. Maybe I'll play around with flash, my first love. I go for runs. I live life. I allow myself the space around the work. I have lonnnnnng fallow periods. I used to fight it or feel embarrassed by this, but I've come to accept, as my rhythm. It's okay. Plenty of writing happens while you're away from the page.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents' house smells like old newspapers. My hometown smells like the inside of a WaWa.

14 - 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?
Music. I was one of those kids who grew up with an ear glued to the radio, waiting for their song to come on to push play in the tape deck. I grew up in front of MTV, waiting in line outside the record store for tickets to concerts, attending live shows. When you get to my age you can't listen to a song without it triggering a specific memory, so it's that movement -- of being simultaneously in the present and in the past, that enveloping emotion, which is also akin to how I experience narrative, so I try to capture some of that time fluidity on the page.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Where to begin. Reading wise, A.M. Homes, Grace Paley, Roth, Malamud, Baldwin, Nabokov, Salinger, I mean so many of those formative writers turned me on to writing at a young age through their singular voices. Meg Wolitzer got me back on the writing horse after a long absence. Steve Almond has taught me more about craft than anyone. Peter Orner's work breaks me and puts me together again. I could go on and on.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
run a marathon. write another book.

17 - 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?
Mental health. I'd probably go into clinical psych work or social work. Character work, how and why we do what we do, etc, it's all related to the work of a writer.  

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The music.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished The Tavern At the End of History by Morris Collins. I'll be his conversation partner for his NYC launch in February. It was fabulous. Brillant, challenging, gorgeously written and aching and wholly inventive. 

As for films, I am hopelessly cinematically illiterate. It's actually a running joke between a friend of mine, a film critic, because I cannot keep up. That said, we just showed The Godfather to my kids when they were home from college over break. It was wonderful to revisit that classic, and to see it fresh through their eyes.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
Sadly, I'm not. There is a new project calling me, but a lot of life and day job duties have been coming between me and the work right now and I haven't been touching it the way I want to be. I know, I know, discipline, habit, but I'm trying to be gentle with myself at the moment. This is my goal for 2026. To put down more words, one after the next.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet

 

            Do you remember the Phantom of the Opera original cast recording? That white mask, that red rose? Of course you do, you were probably gay once too. The “Overture”—that’s what this is, get it? I’m setting the scene. I used to listen on cassette. My mother took me to see the production in Toronto—her friend worked with a theatre producer who later went to prison for fraud and so we got great seats, right under where the chandelier swings cinematically. I want you to be hearing a pipe organ. I want you to be waiting for a chandelier to fall.

I am very pleased to see the smart, self-aware and delightfully-playful full-length debut by Montreal poet Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2026). Following the chapbooks FLORALS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2022), My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet utilizes as its central prompt the real fact of the author’s great-grandfather having danced ballet, and jumping from there to an expansive and even explosive exploration on Jewish identity, possibility, history and queer desire. “In a hotel room in Burlington, Vermont,” the poem “The Limits of Fiction” begins, “I try to get my grandfather to tell me if his parents ever told him stories about the old country, but he just wants to tell me about Lill St. Cyr at the Gayety.” As the back cover offers, the collection “is a daring, erotic, and humorous exploration of queer longing and Jewish possibility at the turn of two centuries. In a captivating series of narrative poems, Misha Solomon entwines an alternate memoir of his great-grandfather in pre-Holocaust Romania with a contemporary gay life in Montreal.” The poems unfold around the central core of that lifted fact, swirling a structure that might hold elements of narrative scaffolding and narrative building tools, but also elements of sound, repetition, visual gesture and playful chant into something far larger than anything pure narrative could ever provide. “the man man man man man men men / men men men men” he writes, as part of “OVERTURE,” a stretch of repetitions that flow into “men men men men were / in love, are in love, I move them across a / stage and their love seems so true I / convince myself for a moment that I really / do exist [.]” Earlier, in the same poem-section, writing:

a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
came here and they changed his name

The collection isn’t structured into sections per se, but there are poems highlit in the table of contents that suggest themselves the openings of new groupings, new directions, across Solomon’s book-length suite: “OVERTURE,” “THIS ISN’T A GAY POEM.,” “THIS IS A POLITICAL POEM.” and “THIS IS A CULTURALLY JEWISH POEM.” As opposed to offering distinct, separated sections, Solomon composes a book-length suite with an ebb and flow, a rhythm across the book as a whole. “I was supposed to be the mayor at minimum and now my daily / achievement is holding off on jerking off until I can write an / erotic poem about my great-grandfather,” begins the poem “Belongings III,” “or some made-up / version of him, writing this poem instead of that one, even, / because googling ‘1940s name for male sex worker’ felt a / little too close to ‘old-fashioned word for semen,’ the search / that was on my screen when Guillaume walked into our home / office the other day […].” The poems accumulate together into something large, built purposefully from a series of disparate and different parts, all circling that central core as a kind of mosaic or narrative collage.

Certainly, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet follows a trajectory of other recent full-length poetry debuts through Brick Books that play off and through family archive, offering book-length explorations through new and unusual structures, and allowing the shapes of the poems to provide startlingly fresh perspectives on the otherwise-familiar complications of family, cultural collisions and the disappearance of stories. I’m specifically thinking of titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself (2021) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Nova Scotia poet Nanci Lee’s Hsin (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], although Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet offers the added layer of fictionalizing elements of family story, for the sake of doing something simultaneously more specific and far more expansive. “You asked why I liked / you,” the poem “To my colleague Ernest, for his eyes only, in response to his confidential queries, 1934,” “or in fact you asked why I was wasting my time with / you, and when I rolled my eyes, you rephrased, but the reason / I didn’t answer isn’t because I don’t know the reasons. I know / the reasons. I like you with all of my senses.” Solomon offers a heart and a lyric that flows, naturally, carefully, delicate and precise, writing family elements as an entry point to a larger exploration on Jewish and queer themes between the past and the present, and all the glorious complications, lovely patter and potential dangers that surround. Or, as the poem “Yoo-Hoo” writes:

Yoo-hoo, do you see me, do you see me over here? I wore this tomato-red shirt so you could see me, yoo-hoo, you with the well-dressed baby, you look like you know nice shirts, yoo-hoo, do you want to tell me you like my shirt?

Over there, you over there, yoo-hoo, do you want to ask me what I’m working on? I just bought this new notebook to write one poem per day, but, yoo-hoo, I’ve only written the date and my name and now I’m staring thoughtfully past you hoping you’ll think I’m actually staring at you and you could say “yoo-hoo, why are you staring at me” and I’d say “how embarrassing, yoo-hoo, I’m actually staring past you, thoughtfully, thinking thoughts, by the way, do you have the time, I didn’t bring my phone, I’m trying to be more present?”

Yoo-hoo, do you have the time? Yoo-hoo, do you want to know why I need the time? I don’t look like someone who needs to yoo-hoo for the time, isn’t that intriguing?

Yoo-hoo, do you want to know?

 

Spotlight series #118 : Jason Heroux

The one hundred and eighteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Kingston poet Jason Heroux.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit and Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christian Schlegel

Bio → Christian Schlegel is the author of three books of poetry: Honest James, ryman, and the newly-released The Blackbird, published by Beautiful Days Press. He used to be a teacher, is now studying to be a lawyer, and lives in New York.

Note → E is Elena Saavedra Buckley, writer/editor, who conducted the interview using rmcl’s language and added a few things.

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

The first book, Honest James, helped me feel I was really Doing Poetry, and I worked with a press (The Song Cave) which had impeccable taste, my own book excluded––I was happy to be in that company and grateful to be connected with other writers and have a career (in the cool and not straightlaced professional way). 

Those were the biggest immediate things. Honest James like many books took a minute to find readers; I didn’t register its publication right away, but now it’s being translated into Spanish, which is mind-blowing, a special honor. My most recent work is different in style and structure, but tonally I think it’s similar.

E - What’s the tone of Honest James, what’s the tone of the new book, and how do they compare?

Honest James is mostly poems in received form from a fake past. Writing into other people’s voices … and then also a sad humor … I have a hard time being funny when I’m “trying to be funny,” but there’s a mordant and also muted, possibly depressive humor, can we say that, in that book, and also in the talk poem books, ryman and The Blackbird. The difference was: Honest James was tight, compacted language; the talk poem books do the opposite, have expansive, big nets of language … it sounds more like a kind of speech, the new stuff. Honest James was extremely hard to read aloud from, and maybe alienating to listen to live, but with the new books I’m reproducing a speech-experience for people and maybe interpolating into it or riffing on it when I’m up in front of a room. Honest James was a headphone album, it turned out to be better for silent reading, is my theory.

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

I always liked writing and assumed I’d try to be a novelist, not because I thought I could do it, but because that’s what books were to me. I don’t have a good sense of linearity, construction of character, plot; scenes make sense to me, I hope there are some scenes in my books where people do things in space, but I have a hard time chaining them together to build a fictive world and doing the technical work a novelist has to do. I read them, novels, but I can’t do those things.  

I came to poetry from the negated space of not being able to write prose fiction, then of course I saw poetry had these opportunities that worked better, to the extent they worked, with the way my mind is … I started to read more poetry … in English class senior year in high school we read the Metaphysicals and I thought, damn, holy moly, and then in college creative writing I started reading American poetry and at that point I saw more and more that I loved poetry, that it was everything to me. But I still wanted to write a fiction thesis my senior year and as I remember it they were like, why not apply for poetry? So I did that.

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?

There’s a lot of notes … it takes me a while to prewrite, and that’s the most challenging period. I’m just at the beginning of that now, figuring out what to do, I like that freedom but it’s stressful … the ideas kinda stick together in a Notes App file, usually, then I worry about it for a while then I try to forget it and go do something else, run errands, I’m seriously considering starting the most basic yoga possible … then something jostles loose eventually and I write it down as fast as I can and I’m missing stuff that’s leaking out of the thought and that’s exciting. 

Writing, my friend and penpal Kate Briggs says, has to move somewhere, I guess that’s Stevens, too, it has to have a Point A and Point B at minimum, usually I have one of those but not the other, and once you have both the potential for the path is opened and you walk it; you have to figure out the actual movement inside it but you have a vector.

E - Before you give a talk, how much do you determine how you’ll get from Point A to Point B?

The best possible outcome, which is not often what happens, is: you have an intuition and then when giving the talk you realize a new thing or revise the intuition.

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?

Increasingly the second one … with Honest James, it was fun mosaic-ing the book together, I liked doing that, but recently the ideas percolate and I try to find passageways and resonances … The Blackbird, for a long time, was called Is This Skateboarding, which seemed like an important theme in the book, but then I did “The Blackbird” part and realized that was where I wanted things to land.

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

I remember saying to a friend in my MFA, I don’t like reading my poems aloud, and he said that was an indication that my poems should change so I could enjoy reading them aloud.

E - Is doing this interview aloud more about being comfortable or more an artistic consistency thing?

That’s a good question … in college I used to dictate drafts of papers sometimes, so for drafting, yes it’s easier … for people of my cast of mind, who are obsessive and/or compulsive, if I’m writing, writing is the most important thing, so then I’m doing the most important thing possible and it becomes freighted, but talk is cheap, you can do it without worrying about it, you’re not forcing yourself into serious art.

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?

If there’s a big theoretical and unreachable concern, or I can’t reach it, it’s the problem of the lyric poem, what’s the current state of the short portable non-epic poem, is that a thing we should care about, inhabit, revise. Basically every poet working now is operating under that sign. 

Josh, one of the Beautiful Days publishers, said before my reading in New York that he thinks of me as having the Romantic cast of mind, which is nice, I hope that’s right. Wordsworth is probably my favorite poet, if you could only give me one for the rest of my life it would be him, followed closely by Ashbery, but Ashbery would lose out because there’s stuff in Wordsworth’s poems that happens, you can track it. 

Now I’m in law school and starting to think about how the law affects my thinking and what my poems can do to loosen or linger in questions of law, that’s interesting to me, but I can work that out consciously rather than implicitly, as with the Lyric Problem which no one can solve.

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?

I can’t presume to have anything original to say here but I’d like to think that writing, artmaking, that’s the creation of a mutual realm for a different kind of experience with people, art allowing for a parallel dimension connected to the world we live in, not totally distinct from it, situating itself accordingly but with slightly different rules, whatever those are, not so different from a game, which I talk about in the book in my dumb Wittgenstein way, the game is related to art, related to life, but is probably distinct from both. 

Art that feels entirely like a game, I find that dissatisfying, but art that’s a little bit a game, a little bit a reflection of life, yet holding itself apart … I think that’s true of anyone’s artistic practice right now, navigating these categories. There’s so much work on these questions: what’s the difference between my art life and the one I live outside art? Do I care about being online versus not and explaining what that feels like? How much should I insist on the difference between the places/modalities I live in? Maybe the answer is: a little bit, a medium amount. But not totally, because then you’re a decadent or a hermit. 

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

Editors are essential and the best. I say this to my writer-editor girlfriend. I think that, uhh, yeah, poetry, when you have a person who wants to edit it, edit you, it feels really good! Because they’re reading you close. Poetry today is kinda pre-edited through workshops, summer seminars, writing groups already, that’s probably part of why editors are more deferential to writers at the book stage. But Josh and George, my editors at Beautiful Days, are amazing, they helped me see the book fully and pushed it to interesting places; they didn’t ask me to do huge things, but they were always there.

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

Jim Galvin, my teacher at Iowa, I don’t know who said this to him, in my brain it’s been a lot of people: Writing isn’t work, it’s just really hard. That’s a huge difference. I like thinking about artistic problems now, but when I was younger I used to feel the burden, or what I thought to be the burden, of artmaking. But now it’s joy to me and an actual privilege, so thinking of any part of that process––getting started, being in the middle––it doesn’t always feel good, but it is ultimately a source of play and joy. I don’t take it for granted as much as I did before. 

Of course I get despairing about my art like everyone but that’s the ideal: an artistic practice you love having and being in. Lots of people’s lives don’t allow for it because of the excruciating inequality of the world … and if you’re dead you’re not making art and can’t make it again. So you have to enjoy it now. And then I try to have a practical life, maybe even a political life, but I don’t always know how that intersects with the art, and that’s fine.

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?

I’ve had this weird professional life: I was in graduate school, then a teacher for some years plus the adjuncting and TAing, etc., then I decided to go to law school. So I had a period when I was very busy, working and going to school at night; now I’m a full-timer and thought I’d be less busy but I’m not really, so I want to be writing, thinking, researching at 5% all the time. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I think it’s kinda true: every day I see what tiny problem I can solve, but a lot of the time it doesn’t look like writing; I try to take the anxiety seriously and channel it into an issue worth addressing and do that over and over, so that’s the routine but sadly it’s not sitting down with coffee in the morning.

Teaching was helpful for learning to be a performer, how to ask questions and listen and answer. I also had the privilege of working at a school that’s artistically inclined, so there was broad support for the idea that as a teacher you also had an art life, but for me that was turning into standing up in front of people anyway and talking. 

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

I guess I’m a little bit of a jerkish Oulipian on this and don’t believe in inspiration per se, I think of it as pernicious even. There’s no inspiration––just ideas and trying them, and knowing or sensing when they work or not, exploring and abandoning. But of course everything is inspiring in the general sense which is how a more charitable man than me would have answered the question, walking around New York, movies, wine, baseball, the good things.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

There were good smells in Reading, PA. It’s beautiful where I’m from, vaguely pastoral and a little haunted-looking, and there were lots of different grass and mud smells that were a huge part of my life. Happy Hollow Park, I remember what that smelled like.

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?

Nature does not figure in my work in any taxonomic sense, which is an embarrassment. My dear friend Jake Fournier, who I’m shouting out now (buy his book!), has the ability to ID plants in nature. Or birdwatching … I can’t do that stuff. I love being outside, and it’s interesting to me as a source of phenomena, but I don’t have curiosity about the names and have been ashamed of this in the past, because I felt, like many poets I bet, the obligation to learn the flowers and trees, perhaps the animals eventually, but I won’t. 

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

Poetically it’s my closest Iowa buddies––we have a group chat called The Gay Science, formerly The Merry Company: Jess Laser (of The Goner School fame), Jake Fournier, and Dan Poppick. We went to Iowa together and we talk about writing; we have a bond, I don’t know how else to describe it, and it’s the most urgent place for me to share writerly info, in addition to the friendship. I want to share work with them. And then the concentric circles of other amazing people in a city or via MFAs or publishing … you want to listen to their opinions, too, esp. if they’re different from those of The Gay Science. You want to be interesting to each other but not so insular that you forget what’s going on beyond your little team. But when we formalized the chat during the pandemic it felt right.

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

I would love to write a novel––love is a strong word––but it would be interesting. How do you even do that today? My friend Dan, above, wrote a beautiful novel called The Copywriter (order it!), and it’s inspiring to see poets do that and find their way into the form. It would be humbling to write one and be bad at it but that’s like everything else. I’d love to make a movie––of course I have no technical skills on that score.

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?

I’m grateful to have had two distinct careers. I didn’t love being a student so much as being a teacher, which I truly loved and continue to. I didn’t get my fill of teaching when I switched to the law but I love the law, too. 

I don’t know how I made the decision to switch; I basically woke up one day and decided, but that means I must have been thinking about it a long time. Lawyers are compulsive and punctilious and the stakes are high, but they’re also making claims that don’t hold water and losing all the time. Even when you think you have it down, there’s something that eludes you, and I find that fascinating, the ideal of zealous representation that essentially has no bounds, but you’re also a mortal. Law school exams are impossible and unlike anything else I’ve studied for, because you memorize a bunch of stuff re: what the law is then apply that to facts in a short period of time. I’ve never had to do that before.

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

I remember I had a teacher who said, it’s nice to have a sense of project in your life. Something separate from your job and your personal life, a third space for your brain. It’s the Starbucks of your brain. I realized I guess that art could be a thing different from your job/work, and different from your friends and family, and I went toward that. 

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

Last great film has to be Twin Peaks, all of it. You and I watched the whole of it recently. It’s the great American artwork of the last however many years. It’s so insane, brilliant, and sad and scary, and stilted. Everyone said the third season was the best of them all and I said there’s no way that could be true, but it was, it’s so disquieting and our Moby Dick. And I like how Lynch did his thing, as a guy who pretended to just be this folksy smiling doofus. A holy fool. Fantastic.

Last great book: Hard Rain Falling, which you also recommended to me. By Don Carpenter, I was gonna say Gary Johnson, another midcentury white guy name. That book is so amazing, there’s a little bit of Lynch in there, the moody America. Subtraction, by Mary Robison, which poet Sarah Trudgeon put into my hands a long time ago and I’ve shared with many people since. Farnoosh Fathi, Granny Cloud; Emily Skillings, Sara Deniz Akant, Margaret Ross, Zan de Parry, Dan Wriggins, Kate Briggs.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Becoming a lawyer and another, uhhh, book. Each will take about … a year to figure out, or two years, even just finding a job and getting traction on the poems or their ideas. I wanna write criticism but it seems so hard. And I want to interview people, because I like being interviewed, thank you for doing it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions: