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 was picked up quickly and then selected for a post-publication award by Rosmarie Waldrop, which set me up for some disappointment with subsequent my books! I had to adjust my expectations. All my books are quite different, but my newest manuscript is probably closest in form and philosophical rigor to my first, so things come around again. But I was in my twenties when my first book came out and now I am in my fifties. I am wiser in a lot of ways, and also much more tired. I am still looking forward at life, but it looks a lot different than it used to and is scarier for reasons that don’t even have to do with mortality. The poems in my first book feel very youthful to me now.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Actually, I started as a—sort of—fiction writer. When I was 26 I had my dream job as an art curator and was miserable, so I applied to MFA programs in the Bay Area, where I was living at the time, on the strength of two short stories I’d written. I started at California College of the Arts (at the time it was California College of Arts and Crafts) in 2002 as a would-be fiction writer. My first semester I took a hybrid poetry class with Kathleen Fraser, who was an incredible and uncompromising teacher. Now I write essays and “prose” as well as poetry, but haven’t written fiction since (with one misbegotten exception mentioned in question #12).
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?
Things usually begin as an outgrowth of something I’m reading. Often, there is a lot of note-taking. I’ve hardly been writing at all the last couple of years (except when I’m writing about how I’m not writing, which is not not often), so I have been trying to find a new way into things. No matter how they begin, almost nothing in my first drafts makes it into the last. It’s all about editing into submission for me.
4 - Where does a poem or 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 think starting with the idea of writing a book would shut me down immediately. Once I have a mass of stuff then I can look at it and ask what it is. I don’t usually know if I’m writing a long or a short thing until late in the process—I try not to ask it those kinds of questions until it become unavoidable.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I wouldn’t say they’re part of my process, but I enjoy giving and also going to readings very much. Given exigencies of the world and culture at present, it is increasingly rare to be in a room full of people actively engaged with art and questions about language. I want and need this more than ever.
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 like big abstract questions about consciousness and memory and their relationships with language. For a while now I have been obsessively concerned with theoretical physics and how much humans are capable of knowing about the physical world given the symbiotic limitations of our perception and language. I look for and want ride the line between how the world is and how it seems. My friend says I’m a phenomenologist because she knows I like hearing it.
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 don’t think there’s one answer to this question. Some writers’ work is of a piece with their social and political lives and others’ isn’t. Language is historically loaded and political, so writing is always social and political, including arcane language experiments. I think writers who pay attention to the origins and mechanics of language are important. Niels Bohr said about studying atomic behavior with a microscope made of atoms, you can’t measure a phenomenon with a tool it acts upon, and I think that’s true of language too, but we can’t give up trying to understand what our physical and psycho-social worlds are made of. You just have to acknowledge the limitations. There are writers who have something to say and I just want to see how we say. I love discovering how words work and what they can do.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve mostly had great experiences with editors at the presses and publications with which I’ve worked. The older I get, the less I bristle. I love it when others make me sound better.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My friend Kate Schapira is better than Ben Franklin. I think I’ve learned more from her about how to be an honest and ethical person than from anyone in my life. One thing she says that I think about all the time and which I believe first came from her mother is that what you practice you get good at, including the things you don’t want to be good at (e.g., beating yourself up, being selfish, etc.).
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I suppose it’s easy, but it’s also a necessity. Per the previous question, I get good at doing one thing in a particular way and then have to do something different to cure myself of it, which I think is the main reason I move between poetry and prose. Otherwise, I’d keep doing the same thing ad nauseum. If I look away and think in a different form for a bit, I come back with a new mind.
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?
I don’t have a routine, unfortunately. I wish I did, but my day starts at 6:30 with a scramble to get my kids to school, walk the dog, clean up, etc. Before I had kids I never did a writing residency because I didn’t think I needed one, but now I fantasize about it.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Visual art, usually. I’m kind of stuck in my method of unsticking at the moment though, and have been trying to write about Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning for five years. I think I’ve written three things now about not being able to write about it. I even started a novel, which didn’t go well at all.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rotting window sashes
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?
It all goes in there. I think and write about consciousness itself, so everything tips into the work, high and low. Saussure, Barthes, Fran Drescher and Weird Al Yankovic all make repeat appearances in Paradoxx.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
What a hard question. There are the cornerstones—or what I think of as the cornerstones—but are they really? Do I still need the Black Mountain and Language poets? And Stevens. I think I do. I began there, but my work has gathered and shed a thousand more influences. I think I return to those early influences to remember where I started and to recalibrate. I’m impressionable and have to actively push away trends in writing because I find them easy to adopt.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
My answer is inspired by your Question #11, above: I’d like to do a writing residency. Three weeks would be nice. I want to write every day, crank something out, take some walks, and then talk about it in the evening.
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?
I can’t imagine doing anything that isn’t intensely concerned with language. My favorite part of being an art curator was writing catalog essays. Before AI replaced me, I was also a commercial copywriter for a long time and I loved that work—it was like trying on costumes. When I was younger I trained as a dancer but it never quite clicked for me—I think I try to do with words what I never achieved with ballet. I love working with formal writing constraints.
My other answer is waitress. I enjoy the constant motion and intense focus that food service requires.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have two kids, a husband, a dog, and a job! I am mostly doing something else.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve read a lot of great things lately. I read Barbara Comyns’s entire oeuvre twice in two years, which was a joy. I want to write about her, but she’s perfect in a way that I can’t find words to apply to. I just read Duras’s Destroy, She Said, which I suppose is great because I hated it but am still thinking about it. I adored Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead, which is a must-read for any woman with a mother.
I go to bed early and read so am not up on film. I will get back to it one day. The last film I saw in a theater was Mickey 17, which wasn’t all that great. I did finally see Melancholia last year, after boycotting Von Trier for 25 years for the Bjӧrk movie, and that was a great film.
20 - What are you currently working on?
For the first time in years, I’m not working on any big writing projects. I’ve been slowly writing some essays and a poem here or there, but otherwise waiting for something to find me. I wish it would hurry because I need to write in order to survive this time of life and history.
But I am also starting a press and art collective called Red Nun with my friends Mary-Kim Arnold and Darcie Dennigan. We’ve talked about it for years, and have only just decided to go for it. In many ways, it’s a ridiculous time to start a press, which also makes it the best time.
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