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;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the  Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).

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

P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.

The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.

Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.

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

P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.

At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.

Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience.

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?

P.S.: I write almost every day. As I’ve grown older, I find myself demanding more rigor from my own language. I’m deeply interested in how words act upon the psyche, how they shape and are shaped by our collective human experience.

My process is iterative. I move through multiple drafts, often beginning with fragments—images, phrases, tonal gestures. These fragments function as building blocks. Over time, they begin to suggest an internal architecture, an image system that the poem is trying to construct into a coherent whole. The work rarely arrives fully formed; it is built, dismantled, and rebuilt.

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?

P.S.: A poem often begins with an image or a pressure—a moment that refuses to remain silent. Sometimes, it is a line, other times a rhythm, or a memory that insists on being revisited.

I tend to write individual poems that later reveal themselves as part of a larger constellation. Only after writing do I begin to see how they speak to one another, how they might belong to the same emotional or conceptual landscape. In that sense, the “book” emerges retrospectively, as an act of listening and arrangement rather than premeditated design.

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

P.S.: Public readings are both an extension of and a counterpoint to the private act of writing. Writing is solitary, interior, often slow. Readings return the poem to the body—to voice, breath, and community.

I value readings because they allow me to hear the poem differently, to experience its cadence in real time, and to witness how it lives in the presence of others. At the same time, the performance aspect can feel at odds with the inwardness of composition. I inhabit both spaces, recognizing that poetry ultimately belongs to both silence and sound.

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?

P.S.: Yes. My work is driven by questions about language, history, and consciousness. I am interested in how language both reveals and obscures truth, how it carries memory, and how it can resist or reproduce structures of power.

I often ask: What does it mean to speak authentically within inherited systems of language? How does one write from within displacement without reducing it to metaphor? What is the relationship between personal memory and collective history?

The current questions, for me, revolve around belonging, migration, and the ethics of representation in a fractured world (even a corrupt one. Corruption is a form of moral pollution).

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?

P.S.: The writer still has a role, though it is neither singular nor fixed. At its most vital, writing bears witness. It interrogates dominant narratives, preserves memory, and creates space for alternative ways of seeing.

In a culture saturated with information, the writer’s task may be less about producing more content and more about deepening attention—slowing down perception, complicating easy truths, and resisting erasure.

The writer should remain accountable to both language and community.

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

P.S.: Both. It can be difficult because writing is deeply personal, and revision often requires letting go of what one has grown attached to. But it is essential because an editor brings an external clarity—a different set of eyes attuned to structure, coherence, and possibility.

A good editor does not impose but reveals. They help the writer see the work more fully.

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

P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.

Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.

When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.

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

P.S.: Moving between poetry and academic prose is both challenging and generative. Each genre demands a different relationship to language—poetry privileges compression and resonance, while academic prose requires clarity, argument, and exposition.

The appeal lies in the tension. Each form sharpens the other. Poetry deepens my sensitivity to language; scholarship disciplines my thinking.

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?

P.S.: I don’t follow a strict routine, but I write daily, usually late at night or very early in the morning. Those hours offer a kind of quiet that allows language to surface more freely.

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

P.S.: I return to reading—poetry, philosophy, history. I also return to memory, to lived experience. Sometimes I step away from writing altogether and allow silence to do its work.

Stagnation is often a sign that something deeper is asking to be understood.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

P.S.: The scent of salt air mixed with dust after rain. Also the smell of coffee brewing early in the morning—those sensory traces carry me back to Haiti, to childhood, to a sense of rootedness that persists despite distance. Hibiscus flowers as well.

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?

P.S.: Music, visual art, and history deeply inform my work. Music, especially, shapes my sense of rhythm and tonal variation. Visual art influences how I think about imagery and composition. Even scientific thought—its precision and curiosity—can enter the way I approach language.

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

P.S.: Writers who engage both the lyrical and the political have been central to my development—those who refuse to separate aesthetics from history. I’m drawn to voices that challenge language while remaining accountable to lived experience.

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

P.S.: I would love to learn how to fly—either a plane or a helicopter. There is something about flight that speaks to freedom, perspective, and risk.

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?

P.S.: I am already an educator, which I value deeply. Teaching keeps me grounded in language and in dialogue. If I had not taken this path, I might have become a lawyer. I’m drawn to rhetoric and the art of argument, though not to its more manipulative uses.

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

P.S.: Writing, for me, is an act of consciousness. It is a way of recognizing the power of words and confronting the histories and structures that shape human life. That awareness compels a responsibility—to witness, to testify, and to seek a form of release from the weight of history. To write is to pursue truth beyond the self. Writing, ultimately, is a form of freedom.

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

P.S.: I’m currently reading Fearless by Tracy K. Smith, Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, and Vision and Difference by Griselda Pollock. I move between these and poetry collections.

As for film, the last two that stayed with me were Sinners and One Battle After Another.

20 - What are you currently working on?

P.S.: I’m currently working on three projects: a poetry collection I’m revising, Port of Sorrow; an essay collection on Haitian poets under review with Bloomsbury; and a collection of short stories, some of which have already appeared in literary journals.

I tend to move between projects. When one form resists me, I shift into another—entering, as I think of it, a different house of language.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with JSA Lowe

JSA Lowe’s first book of poetry, Internet Girls, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Biscuit Hill, Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review’s Mixtape, Missouri Review, Screen Door Review, Sinister Wisdom, Southeast Review, and Superstition Review. Her essays recently appeared in Denver Quarterly and Rupture. Her academic articles have appeared in Humanities, Journal of Fandom Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures. She is an adjunct professor of literature at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, and she lives on Galveston Island with her cat Zoë.

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

I like that book—it’s a chunky little long poem, DOE, that I call “Little House on the Prairie only with fucked-up pronouns.” What was nice about that was feeling that someone was listening, if only the editors. That I wasn’t just talking to myself in my office alone at 2 am to the cat, or at least not only that. Honestly I don’t find anything I’m doing that different now. At 55 I’m pretty set in my poesis, and when Carson says it’s the task of a lifetime to avoid boredom (in the introduction to “Short Talks,” which I have memorized)—you can’t reinvent forms every time utterly, I find I have to operate within the parameters of what I’ve already mastered, to some degree anyway.

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

I started writing songs when I was a kid, like maybe five or six, and am still a songwriter, and I think it’s pretty much the same lyric instinct. There’s an absence, a lack, and the only thing that even begins to soothe it is the heartbeat, the rhythm, and the arcing melody of plaint. (I’ve also always written fiction in my head, but only had the courage and the technical abilities to start writing it down in maybe the last three years? I’m working on a crime novel now, strangely enough.)

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 draft fast these days—again after, what, forty years? of writing poems I work a lot by instinct now, and don’t have to agonize over everything (at least not until revision). I generally start poems in the car/shower/on walks, scrawl down incoherencies, and then develop those phrases/melodies/thoughts later, when I type it up. I used to insist on drafting by hand, thanks to Brodsky and Walcott both being so insistent about it, but now I draft on my laptop, print out, and then revise by hand. I’ll go months only writing fiction and then suddenly switch to poems. Last year an entire 85-page poetry manuscript fell out in a couple of months, and I’m laboriously revising that now.

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?

Both. I have, I don’t know, eight or nine manuscripts that haven’t been published, and some are collections, and others are book-length long poems. So either can happen, and will.

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

I do love readings and I wish I got to do more of them. I have distinct ways that I hear my poems—usually as kind of sharp and furious—and I love to inflict this reading on others. It’s tons of fun. Certain kinds of poets are scenery-chewers by nature and I guess I’m one, for the same reason that I love lecturing to students, stalking around and expostulating, spittle flying like I’m onstage at the Old Vic. And also—yes, they can help with revision. I’ll revise while I’m reading; the second I hit a word and feel that twinge of dismay like, “oh no, I can’t actually say that aloud, that’s wrong.”

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 used to worry about this as a younger writer, what is my matière as the Old French poets used to say. Inevitably one has the same set of concerns, and equally inevitably those change. So now I’m more obsessed with e.g. my aging parents and aging self than my love life, which is no longer as colorful (thank god). I suspect death, who has always been front and center, will continue driving the car. Aren’t we all trying always, though, to answer the conundrum of late capital. The offensive ridiculousness of the carbon age, the excesses of the west, the ongoing cruelties of colonialism.

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 suppose this sort of came up in my last answer, but Brodsky used to have a very clear take on this: “A writer is a lonely traveler, and no one is [his] helper.” We can’t set to work with the idea of having a “role” in “culture,” we’ll faceplant. The only thing to attend to are the parts of speech, the slant and near rhymes, the pulse of meter, the felicity of a word or its fecund associations. That’s my only business and if anything endures, that’s up to humanity and time. My role is mostly to shut up and pay attention. Some people just pay more attention than others (cf. Jorie Graham).

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

I haven’t had a close first reader for a while now and that’s definitely been a bitterness, and a difficulty. (Although the writer Jael Montellano and I have been swapping drafts and gosh, she’s wicked smart.) I’ve never had an editor pay that kind of close attention; I think I’d enjoy it, though?

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

Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” So much goodness in there: “You’re a genius all the time”; “Like Proust be an old teahead of time.” And then, my beloved old Zen teacher used to say, “Just show up.” That’s pretty good advice. Show up for your life.

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

I started writing proper academic papers in media studies about ten years ago when I finally realized I didn’t have much to add to maybe, say, Dickinson scholarship, but I was unshutuppable about Tumblr memes of Marvel characters. After a decade of conference presentations, a couple of peer-reviewed articles, a book chapter, etc., however, I no longer feel I have very much to contribute there. These kinds of writing/thinking use completely different parts of the brain, and while it was fun, with the limited time I have left on our planet I’d like to prioritize fiction and poems.

Also, I was twice a semifinalist for the Fulbright to Taiwan and both times didn’t make the cut. It kind of knocked the stuffing out of me, and I think someone else who’s better qualified can write about the queer girls and their queer fanfiction, and why it’s so crucially and culturally important.

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?

Shower, coffee, feed the cat, take my meds, check Discord and Twitter because I’m hopeless, then lately I’ve been revising one poem a day. My spring semester has included new courses and 70 students and feeling like my hair is on fire, so I generally spend the morning doing schoolwork (although do not get me wrong, I’m happy as a pig in mud teaching film and literature; I always say it’s like the crack cocaine of teaching). Fiction tends to happen, if it happens, in the afternoons, but during the summer—the catnip used to lure academics—I write all day, gloriously, joyously.

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

Art museums and galleries are good, also films in languages I don’t speak. I call this filling the well. Long walks, and drinking a lot of water. Writing letters to friends.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Fresh hay.

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?

Just off the top of my head: botany, Lou Rhodes, Chopin, medicine, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin.

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

The usual suspects, especially during my long education; but lately I only read Chinese webnovels called danmei, which are queer genre stories. My favorite author is pseudonymously known as Priest, and someday people will read her alongside Dostoyevsky, I think. Sha Po Lang (Stars of Chaos) and Mo Du (Silent Reading) are my two favorites at present. They almost tempt me to write papers again.

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

Actually finish a novel! I keep starting them and then panicking halfway through. I also have a secret list of places to visit, even though I can’t afford them and will never get to go there. I’ll tell you three: Hangzhou, Dakar, Oaxaca. I had some idea I would learn to surf at fifty, but that…hasn’t happened. I love to watch surf videos, though. Maybe that’s close enough.

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 had an ex who used to claim that every single artist had wanted to be some other kind of artist, at first, and had failed—something about Ornette Coleman wanting to be a painter, maybe? I definitely wanted to be a singer-songwriter throughout college, and an actress in my teens. Those things are still there in me, just rearranged. I still rehearse lines in my car, for no clear reason. The body/face/voice just want to be shaping words, projecting them into the world. I come from a family of musicians and will sing and play until I die, probably. You can’t stop the signal, Mal.

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

It was cheap and I had no money. And a few people made the mistake of praising me, early on.

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

In my mythology class we just read Anouilh’s Antigone, and in my film studies course we watched Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de…/Black Girl. Not bad. On my own? I got to see Chen Kaige’s restored director’s cut of Farewell, My Concubine in the theatre and sobbed for hours afterwards. What a horrifying speedrun through the worst parts of China’s twentieth century, and also the heartbreak of being queer and cut off from the one you love, your people, your place, your own soul.

20 - What are you currently working on?

This crime novel, Beacon to Nowhere: harried New England women’s college dean (who just wants to be left alone to write her book) has to cope with an unfolding scandal involving a Title IX complaint and what’s starting to look like a sex cult, and also she might be falling for her dependable campus safety officer. Sort of dark academia/queer romance/cosy mystery? Heavily influenced by Robert B. Parker, because I devoured the Spenser books in high school like it was my job to do so. And, the new collection of poems, I don’t know what it will be called yet—maybe Alpenglow? Maybe Sins of Old Age? Maybe Not Again, because I’m just immature enough to think that’d be really funny.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jill Mceldowney

Jill Mceldowney is the author of the full length collection Otherlight (YesYes Books) and the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press). She is a founder and editor of Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Fugue, Vinyl, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

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?

Otherlight is my first full length collection! I’m super excited about it–publishing a full length collection is something I’ve been chasing for almost 10 years so it feels amazing to have it out in the world. I’m incredibly lucky to have been able to bring this book out with YesYes Books–working with them has been nothing short of absolutely amazing.

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

I actually started out as a fiction writer! I took an Intro to Poetry class in undergrad to fill my required credits. The class was taught by Josh Young who, about half-way through the semester, was like “You need to be a poet.” That kind of decided it for me honestly.

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 wrote Otherlight very quickly. It took me about 3 months to write the first full draft and then I spent about two years revising it and rewriting it. I used to be able to write so fast–I wrote 2 full length manuscripts while in grad school. Now, my process is much slower which I actually think is more in line with the material that I’m writing about and thinking about.

I usually start out with a plan for a chapbook and then see how things go. I love really concise, straight to the point books so that process really makes sense for me.

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’m definitely a “book poet.” I don’t know if that’s an actual “thing” or not but I’m always writing toward a book or a full length manuscript. I’m not the poet who can write a singular stand out poem. I love the challenge of working on a manuscript and the way verse lends itself to world building and creating an atmosphere. Building a world for the poems to live in is one of the most fun parts of the whole process.

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

X

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?

Otherlight as a whole is particularly interested in interrogating grief–what it means to individual and what it means to live with unresolved grief. I really wanted this book to–as closely as possible–depict grief and the processing of loss. It bothers me when the end of a book wraps up grief so neatly at the end and gives the impression that everything is okay. It doesn’t really work like. In the last few poems of Otherlight I wanted my reader to get the sense that the speaker was working through their loss, their grief–but wasn’t necessary working their way out of 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?

X

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

I definitely have my “first readers” who I send everything to. Caroline Chavatel, who works with me on Madhouse Press, is a brilliant editor. Katherine Sullivan was the editor for Otherlight. Working with her was so amazing–her attention to detail made the book that much stronger. It was a gift to have an editor who saw what the book could be from the start.

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

X

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 definitely don’t have a strict writing routine–I have to write when I can now. I'm a lawyer and that is a job that can definitely be all consuming. I have to be kind of crafty with my time and how I work in poems. If I have a 5-10 min break between meetings or research or drafting a legal brief, I’ll try and draft something–anything–even if its just a line. I take a lot of voice memos now while I'm driving and craft poems out of them later.

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

Interestingly enough whenever I feel stuck or like I can’t write–I go read a novel. Reading prose really helps me when I get stuck. I also I have books that I just keep returning to and rereading that just make me want to write poems. Just to name a few, some of those books are Ampersand Revisited by Simeon Berry, Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson, A Hunger by Lucie Brock-Broido.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lavender.

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?

X

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

Having a life outside of being a “poet” is definitely important for me and my work. Even just having a job that is not academia or poetry related is really healthy I think. It works for me. I spend time riding my horse, doing other types of art.

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

X

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?

It would certainly be nice to be a full time writer. :) Right now I’m working in tax and immigration law full time but I love poetry

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

X

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

I’m working my way through all the books I bought while I was in law school and didn’t have the time to read. I just finished Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang and thought it was absolutely brilliant.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a manuscript that is investigating adult friendships, childhood, nostalgia. I’m also heavy into the revision process on a manuscript that continues my study with grief, trauma, violence.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;