12 or 20 (second series) questions for Kelly Terwilliger

Kelly Terwilliger is the author of three published collections of poetry, and a fourth hybrid book of poetry, painting and prose. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain, and she recently was awarded a residency at PLAYA in Central Oregon to work on a collaborative manuscript about swimming in wild places. She teaches and performs as an oral storyteller in public schools. She lives at the edge of a forest in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband, an occasional bear, and lots of deer. 

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 made it easier for me to think of myself as a “poet.”

It gave me the satisfaction of drawing together what had been disparate moments of poem-making, discovering how these separate creations could converse with each other, and appreciating how they could become a whole together. 

It was something I could share. I liked that.

My latest book, ENDNOTES, is a different kind of “pieces in conversation.” I hesitate to call it a book of poems. It IS a poem, in three versions: 1. lineated verse, 2. words + pictures, and 3. expanded notes. That someone decided to publish this book gives me a great feeling of possibility. What else could become a book? And what else could poetry become?

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

Was poetry first? It’s hard to remember. Yes, I think in second grade I wrote poems before I wrote other things. People talk about the compression of poetic language, but I feel poetry as spaciousness. Poetry doesn’t have to adhere to structures of plot and argument. Poetry can sing, bark, whisper in many shapes. It can slip through time and logic into currents of thought and emotion. Despite being made of words, it can nonetheless function like music, affecting us beyond words.

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?

Every project is its own creature. Sometimes writing is fast, sometimes it takes years to find its shape. I am getting better at fending off the worries (This was so sudden. Is it real? Am I fooling myself? This is taking so long. Will it ever come together? Is it real? Am I fooling myself?). 

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?

Poems begin with noticing. An ache, a worry, a curiosity. An image, a feeling, a sound. A story, an event. Attending to what’s around me and what’s inside me. Often poems come to life for me when unexpected juxtapositions occur in the process of writing. When I feel how seemingly unrelated things resonate.

I’ve had gradual accumulations and rearrangements add up to a “collection.” I’ve had an organizing idea call out from the start.  At a certain point I like to physicalize projects: pinning pages to walls and walking around among them, making maps, drawing pictures. Talking out loud to myself.

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. Because I also work as an oral storyteller, I use oral language a lot. I love how it lives in the moment, and I take pleasure in its stretchiness, its variability. Elements that are hard to indicate in writing-- silences and tempo and intensity—emerge in oral language. You get to interpret the written word when you speak it, just as musicians get to interpret written music when they play it. Wow!—what if we called reading a poem out loud “playing a poem?”

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 hesitate to declare “what the current questions are,” because I think there are many, and there always should be many. Thank you to all the poets who are wrestling with life and questions in ways I’m not. My own theoretical concerns: how to find connection with beings unlike myself (human and otherwise). How to perceive interconnection in what might seem like fragmentation. How to access joy and trepidation and wonder and compassion and grief and terror and not shy away from any of it.

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?

Gosh, who is “the writer?” Loads of people are writing—texts, tweets, blogs, posts, emails, all manner of books, online and printed. Do “literary” writers have a special role? I feel cautious about claiming anything that strays into some kind of special wisdom or insight or sensitivity. Or responsibility. But I will say: writers are word artists. We are conduits of now in the medium of language. We express in words the human experience of being and in so doing sometimes help illuminate this experience for others.

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

I seek and welcome outside feedback, but it’s not essential to creating.

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

I am drawing a blank. Why? I know I’ve heard lots of wise advice! Maybe I just want to choose something really profound…the MOST profound!  But I’m going say I don’t know.  There you go—maybe the best piece of advice for right this second: you don’t always have to have an answer.  Sometimes it’s best to admit that you don’t know.

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’d love a routine! Or, I think I would—but no, I don’t really have one. My day begins with tea, usually breakfast, a little puttering, and looking out the window. After that—some days I sit and work for hours and hours. Some days I scribble here and there between tumult of other responsibilities. Some days I create in other ways with other materials. Some days I don’t create at all. But too much not-at-all and I start to wilt and get leaf spots. I carry notebooks all over the place, just in case a moment opens. Just in case I desperately need to write something down.

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

When writing is stalled, a big walk helps. A wild place is good: forest, or canyon, or edge of the sea.  Sometimes I jump into cold water: river, lake, ocean. Or I read again something that has moved me. Maybe I do another project that reminds me how to play, how to loosen up. I draw with sticks. I cut words out of junk mail. I make little books with stamps. I call up creative friends who say, yeah, getting stuck, that’s how it is sometimes. You’re okay. Go turn up the music and dance for a while.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of rain. Loamy damp earth and leaves. Or the briny smell of seaweed at low tide, even seaweed dying, decaying on a beach.

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?

I love listening to creative people talk about their work, especially when they work in forms and media different than my own—dance, music, visual arts. I love the curiosities and rigors of science and scientists (I grew up with marine biologists. I am surrounded still by people more scientific and logical than I am and I love their minds). My own observations of the natural world are deeply sustaining and  inspiring to my work. And music, yes. I keep thinking about writing in musical form: a symphony, a series of themes and variations. Aria. Dirge. All these music words! I’ve also been increasingly obsessed with sounds. I even got a little microphone with a fluffy thing on it to block wind so that I can collect soundscapes. Tuning in to what’s there.

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

Recently I reread Anne Carson’s FLOAT, and for the first time read WRONG NORMA. These challenge and delight my longing for disparate things to be able to reside together in unconventional ways. I love Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness, how her prose moves like poetry. THE SUMMER BOOK by Tove Jansson, for its strange beauty, its restraint, its emotion, and its interweaving of two perspectives, very old and very young.

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

I’d like to play the cello or stand-up bass. Something big and resonating. I’d like to become fluent in another language. I’d like to do one of those rope-climbing things into the upper canopy of some massive tree.

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?

Maybe an arborist? A therapist?

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

Writing lets me access a particular interior space which is both safe and familiar and immensely expansive and sometimes terrifying. It’s a place I made for myself and words way back in the beginning of my time. I love other art forms, but I suspect only these word rooms have this kind of simultaneous home and boundless feel.

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

I recently read Raising Hare and loved the experience. I liked feeling drawn into its intimate focus. Night of the Kings is an amazing Ivory Coast film.

What are you currently working on?

I’m always working on poems. Right now a lot of them contain crows.

I’m also working on a collaborative manuscript with a friend of mine called WATER QUESTIONS about skinny dipping in wild places.

I’m writing brief pieces in response to a series of drawings in an attempt to give sound and voice to each picture. 

I’ve just had a launch for my new book, ENDNOTES, in which I incorporated the “language” of 4 instruments and a dancer. It was an extraordinary experience and I’m considering where else I might pull together a similar collaborative endeavor.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Dan Beachy-Quick, Elements & Offerings

 

N.

Of noman—
that name is an echo in the blind monster’s cave— 

What grammar keeps these ghosts at their labor?

The silent letter h—. The silent letter g—.

Of gnomon—
the spindle on the sundial that is the one that knows—.
You do your thinking by sunlight or torchlight—. You
make a shadow to see—. But who are you? 

Nomon. Gnomon. Here’s my shadow—. 

Tell me what day it is. What day is. What is time. (“Library of –”)

The latest from Colorado poet, editor and translator Dan Beachy-Quick is the collection Elements & Offerings (Baton Rouge LA: LSU Press, 2026), an assemblage of poems patterned with stitched lines and lyrics set in curious rhythms. The book is organized with opening poem, “The Song Dynasty,” and three sections: “An archive,” made up of the lettered sequence “Library of –”; and two cluster-sections of shorter poems, titled “A braid of.” and “& offerings.” There are curious visual and rhythmic elements that Beachy-Quick employs, including placements of em-dashes and periods, offering a sense of the extended, the open-ended (akin to Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt in the 1960s and 70s not closing her own established multiple parenthesis within poems), suggesting both a continuation and a kind of leap, over a break or a pause. They’re used sparingly, often at the ends of titles, and they intrigue, in part for how carefully they’re utilized. The opening of the opening poem, “The Song Dynasty,” suggests it more of a visual cue than anything rhythmic, not a pause or a break at all, beyond the line-break itself:

One way to make snow in mountains is
to leave the paper blank
& ink in the crags & pines—
a scholar’s hut by the flowing stream,
such cold water for the tea—
but there are other ways. The mind 

makes its equal signs & leave them
unspoken.

What is the purpose of these em-dashes beyond what is already there, I wonder? The dashes not mid-line but at the end of a line. Pointing to elsewhere, the open space; a diving board, or the classic pirate ship’s plank, upon which dead men are forced to walk. Visually intriguing, the structure he hints at in the opening poem really comes alive in the book’s second section, a poem in twenty-six lettered sections, extending across a lyric of halt and stagger and staccato; of joyful collage and lyric play, an abecedarian of swashbuckling measure. As the fourth poem in the sequence begins: “Desire is the space between / stars. Distance is / the space within // an apple, a bird, a brain. / A dream of daughters in heaven / diagramming sentences: // The moon is bright. It’s not / a light.” While that example might seem structurally rather straightforward, the poem otherwise holds pause, poise, fragment, impossibly quick turns, visual elements of collage, hush and halts and italicized highlights, staccato and sound, built as a sequence replete with sprinklings of em-dash, whether followed by line break, comma or period. Does Beachy-Quick’s em-dash hold too much weight? Only, one might suppose, if the eye is meant to linger there too long.

Even across the poems of the further two sections, the play and patter is evident, but often more subtle, at least than evidenced within his abecedarian, allowing as a means to an end across lyric distances within shorter bursts of lyric. His poems don’t tend to move in a straight line, but the thread remains, articulated through a delightful array of ebbs and bobs, pauses, punches and quick turns. The movement of the poem, however subtle, propels each piece to sparkle.

Auricle

            —for Sasha Steensen

No lamb I know asks
    the question—
but I only know one lamb.
Though the coal burns
    bright orange
behind the dark iron
slats, no tiger I know
    asks—
but I don’t know any tigers.
When the child misspells
    good as god
I correct her. You need
another o. Oh, she says,
    okay. A dog
with no legs and no tail
sleeps on her throat
    at night.
A lamb lies down
under the yellow stars
    painted
on her sheet. She never
asks, either. Silent as her
    pet lamb. Okay?
Silent as her tiger that can’t
bother to exist.

Adriana Oniță, Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems

Uită-te afară. Your balcony in Edmonton is a cinema, the undulating refinery flame glows toată zina prin casă—your body a ginger machine. Tomorrow, cănd te trezeşti, the table will be rearranged with tulips, on 106th Street, or Via Giglio, or Strada Odăi. Before this room, or the many rooms you left: bread sliced and spread with vinete de la Jilava. For the next few days, you won’t empty your pockets on the shelves. You will keep the drapes open, tiptoe on the rub, recut the tulip stems. English has taught you how to pick your own bones clean. You discard your mother’s tongue and call it forgetting. (“A DERETICA”)

The full-length poetry debut by Edmonton-based poet, artist, educator, translator and researcher Adriana Oniță is Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of poems that sits amid and between two languages and cultures, even as the author feels her Romanian slip slowly away. “I should have begun by saying / that I lost my mother tongue.” begins the poem “LIMBA MATERNĂ,” early on in the collection, “I know what you are thinking. / How can you lose something / that lives inside of you, unless / you chose to live languageless? // Forgive me, loss never occurs / on purpose. Think of the way / you lose a loved one, or faith.” Her poems speak of a loss still in-progress, with almost a call-and-response element to a number of these poems: offering a line in Romanian that follows in English translation, almost as a kind of reclamation of her mother tongue, but one that sits aside this more recent English comprehension. The poems work to reclaim and, perhaps, to recontextualize, offering alongside this life built fresh in Canada’s prairies. As the poem “PENTRU A FACE ŞI DESFACE / FOR DOING AND UNDOING” writes:

Fă rai din ce ai.
Make heaven from what you’ve got. 

Grăbeşte-te încet.
Hurry slowly. 

Am carat apă la fântână.
I carried water to the well.

The way her two languages, her translations, are set against each other, it suggests not simply to replicate or repeat in English, but composed and translated in a way attempting to shape and articulate that space where both Romanian and English might comfortably meet, within the comfort of her own divided imagation, perhaps. Accompanied by full-colour collages, including those built with photographs from the family archive, Oniță writes to articulate, to claim, to re-claim, setting up a new foundation from which to finally build. I am curious to see what might follow.