12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. 

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

I don’t know if my life changed, but a certain anxiety eased—at least for a little while. It gave me a little more confidence to think I could make a life writing poems. In some sense, it didn’t have to do with getting published, but a sense that being at work in the work itself is what is most worthy. I found an ethic that I’ve tried to hold to for nearly 30 years. The early work is so long ago, I feel like I have no idea—though I think, I suspect, that certain concerns trace through, even though the poems have grown wider in their approach and cares—a poem as ethical form, a leaning toward the philosophical, a need to honor other poems and poets.

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

I had an extraordinary high school teacher who could actually teach poetry. I remember distinctly understanding a poem for the first time—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I simply didn’t know a human could do that in words, and I was desperate to learn how to do so myself.

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 not much rhyme or reason here for me, I’m afraid. A sense of whole book can come in a flash, and I’ll spend the next year working on it; sometimes I’ll sit on a single line for months, waiting for the next line to appear. I think I have an intuitive sense of a direction--& then sort of blindly stumble in it, blind until I learn to see.

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

A line that comes to my ear as a gift, often at random, walking the dog or bird-watching or reading a book. If I don’t forget it in two days, I know it’s likely a poem. Sometimes a book; sometimes not.

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

Not counter, just apart from. I am the sort of writer capable of enjoying giving a reading, who often doesn’t. It makes me much more anxious than it used to do. I say “yes” with much trepidation.

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?

Yes, almost always. My work is most often agitated into being by something I’ve read. I think I’m mostly trying to learn how to think, and the poems are laboratories of a kind, an epistemological laboratory, to find out if I can learn to think for myself the thoughts another person thinks. I’m not trying to answer questions; I’m trying ask them. I suspect—and this comes from 15 years of translating from Ancient Greek—that the current questions are the questions that have always been questions. Not “current questions,” but a currency of questions.

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’m not so sure it’s different now than it’s ever been. I sort of think of a poet writ large as a sleepy watchman at the periphery of…of the knowable, I guess. I don’t think of it as a role, per se. I’m with Emerson when he says, “Do your work, and I will know you.” Poets get itchy in a uniform, and the art itself wants to dismantle any authority a given poet might feel as their mantle. The role of the poet might be to refuse the role of the poet.

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

The only work I do that is heavily edited is art and poetry reviewing. I think of it as a collaboration; I’m grateful for another mind.

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

Heather McHugh to me: “All you need to do is make friends with the dead.”

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

I like to know how words behave in different genres, how words think when out to different uses. A long time ago, inspired by Emerson and Thoreau, and inspired by Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian, I decided to try to form myself into a poet-critic, poet-thinker, I’m not sure what the right designation is…I don’t find it a hard transition, just a different use of the same muscle.

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?

For 15 years I’ve been nearly religious about waking up around 5:30 in the morning and translating for an hour. It humbles me into the day. For my own poems, I avoid routine. I labor with translation and reading in hopes of being worthy of a poem coming to me—and when one does, I set to work, and stay at work, until it feels done.

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

I memorize poems I love. I read. I go to the gym. I go birdwatching.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Blue spruce.

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?

I’m very attuned to visual art as a primary influence. I’ve written a book that parallels a work of Robert Irwin’s. Working now on a poem pondering Duchamp. I’m in active collaboration with the ceramicist/sculptor Del Harrow. Music, yes—but music is for me a method more than a subject. Physics, yes—. And what isn’t nature?

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

The list is very long, and I don’t want to anger the ghosts by any omission. Many polestars. Each a worthy north. All my work is in the end to honor them by following the direction they make possible.

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

I have a real desire to develop a material practice. It’s my only real regret that I don’t have one. But I have plans.

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?

My back-up plan was to be an art historian of the Song Dynasty.

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

I’ve loved poetry since I was 15, & I’ve never looked aside. It’s the only thing that ever made sense to me.

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

I just re-read all of Wallace Stevens. And then am doing so again. Great—. Film is harder for me. I recently re-watched Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. It’s great. “They say ‘Time heals all wounds,’ but it’s more true to say, ‘Time heals everything but a wound.’”

20 - What are you currently working on?

Homer.

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.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melora Wolff

Melora Wolff’s work has appeared in publications such as Brick, the New York Times, the Normal School Best American Fantasy, Speculative Nonfiction, the Southern Review, and Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Her work has received multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays and Special Mentions in Nonfiction in the Pushcart Prizes. She is director creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My new book Bequeath is a memoir in essays, a collection of personal pieces I’ve published over many years. So, there are variations in the essays’ styles and forms, but together, they tell a sustained story about my family’s past and about the vanished city of Manhattan in the 1970s, my coming-of-age years. The book explores family bequests of myths and artifacts that get passed along from one generation to another. People die, leave ideas, objects, and footprints behind in the snow or sand, and all those ghost-prints mean something—but what? The narrator—the persona of me, at various points—uses both imagination and memory to sort it all out. In essays, I’m always reckoning with the effects of memory and imagination in truth-telling. My previous short book, The Parting, published by the now shuttered Shires Press, is a collection of published prose poems, a similar book thematically, but with many more dreamscapes and fantasies. And both books depict moments of transformation, when realities start to morph into something else, something “other.” I love how certain styles can deliver solid facts in ways that feel mysterious, eccentric, even magical, so I hope that the books have that approach in common.   

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

When I first started writing seriously, I was a university sophomore enrolled in Fiction workshops, led by the late poetic postmodern novelist John Hawkes. His teaching was an intense, festive inspiration for a lot of young writers. Thanks to his mentoring, I continued as a fiction writer, and yet I also loved and wrote first-person narratives, and my short stories always leaned obviously—yearningly, really-- toward personal writing, memoirish tales. I discovered my personal essays by writing autofiction in graduate school. Now my essays—all of them factual—do use some techniques of fiction. People have told me that reading Bequeath feels like reading essays and short stories simultaneously. I’m glad the book lives in some happy marital space between fiction and nonfiction. And two great poets also influenced me deeply as teachers and as writers, Agha Shahid Ali and Galway Kinnell. My biggest love is language, really, not genre, so I continue to write and read fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose poems, hybrid works.

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 me a long time to commit myself to an idea, but when I do, work comes very quickly. Suddenly I’ll just see a pattern or a connection that makes an essay complete in my mind and I usually draft a full essay in one sitting, re-writing sentences as I go. Then I work the sentences over and over obsessively, so that takes a while! 

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?

For me, writing often begins with a sudden image or with a connection that happens in my head in a nearly audible flash. And then I have to start writing. The title essay of Bequeath, for instance, came to me suddenly at an exhibit in El Museo del Barrio in New York while I was looking at the artworks of Raphael Montaňez Ortiz. I saw the shape of the whole essay, for some reason. It’s an alchemy that can happen when you look at fascinating art sometimes—images beget more images. Another essay came to me entirely on a train in the instant a certain stranger passed by me in the aisle and I drafted the whole thing before the train arrived at the destination. Of course, some pieces take much longer, even years, like the essay “Fall of the Winter Palace,” which went through many versions.  Gradually, work accumulates into a book with one voice.

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

Yes, I enjoy giving and attending readings. I like seeing everyone all out together for a word concert. Story-telling, poetry—it’s all born of oral traditions, so readings continue that history.

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 don’t sit down to write with any theoretical concerns in mind, but I discover concerns while I write. Many of my essays explore power struggles between men and women, the legacies of expected gender roles, different forms of violence and vulnerability. I’m always exploring the implications of truth, lies, and memory in inherited stories. I’m interested by all those intimate, urgent questions that keep you up at night, especially, what’s going to happen next? Hidden questions that you hear in the dark are really useful because it’s the intimate, unanswerable ones that make you want to keep reading and revising your own inscrutable life, learning its story a little better by letting it burn on the pages, even if it hurts, which it often does.

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

Essential. Editors can talk you through an idea and a paragraph, they can see a bigger picture very well and reflect it back.  Good editors feel the rhythm and heart of a sentence and a story and a sensibility, and can help writers to feel them more completely too.  Good editors know how to stir the waters for dislodging even deeper, clearer words. Most writers have very rude inner-editors—sometimes they’re too harsh, or too lazy, or too noisy—and professional editors can intervene in the scuffles that sometimes break out between a writer and their inner-editor.

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

At this point—and I’m hoping to have another couple of decades to decide—three things come to mind. Never say ‘I told you so.’ Shake off despair. Love your own space.

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

My days begin with coffee and a drive to my office on the college campus where I teach. I don’t keep a daily writing routine, and I admire those that do.  I write when I can and keep notebooks on hand all the time for ideas that come to me during the busy days. Sometimes my creative self really wants all my attention at an impossible moment, and notes are one way I can notice thoughts that become essays later on. For me, there’s usually at least one long walk in the woods—preferably through snow drifts--literally, before I write a final draft.  

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

I re-read my favorite authors, re-read their language, some in translation, that I know thrills me—like the prose of Polish author Bruno Schulz. Just reading a paragraph or a few sentences by Schulz in his collections Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass, his ecstatic flights of mythic imagination, and I know I’m back in touch with the physical, swooning feeling of a meaningful relationship with language. I need to push myself to fall back in love with words. And walking through an art gallery, seeing the fabulous ways that visual artists speak through images can get creative energy moving again too, light some spark.  

What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I think I was a mouse with big furry ears. Or maybe I was a Frosted Flakes Cereal box. And I was a child, I should add. In actuality, not in costume.

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

If I hadn’t become a writer, I would have been a singer. I grew up in a family of musicians and singers, and music was usually playing or being played--Broadway scores, jazz, Gilbert and Sullivan, cabaret tunes, pop and folk hits. There’s been an opera singer in my family, and a sax player, and two light opera singers, and two pianists. Someone was always in rehearsal or dashing for a show or a gig or a concert or a lesson. Growing up, I loved listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Blossom Dearie--all those fantastic female voices. Singing is emotional and physical, a full body workout in a way that writing—in my experience—isn’t, so I hope singing is my life and career in the multi-verse.

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

Words are natural companions and I love them all for it.

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

I’ve read a lot of wonderful books in the past months—The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Michael Ondaatje’s new poetry volume, A Year of Last Things, Carol Mavor’s book of essays about objects and art, Serendipity. I finally read The Invention of Morel by Alfred Bioy Casares and was amazed by its imaginative structure and pathos. I think Edward Berger’s 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is a great film.

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

Swim with a dolphin. Play fiddle in an Irish pub. See the stained-glass windows of Notre Dame. Hug a collie puppy. Sip champagne in a Prague café. Meet Edgar Allan Poe and have a long chat with him about hypnagogic visions. Learn how to throw a pot, blow glass, play the cello, speak Gaelic, sing harmony without effort, grow roses, climb an apple tree, waltz with someone who really knows how to waltz, live near a country church, see the Northern Lights from a fjord, and grow old happily.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lee Upton

Lee Upton is a multi-genre author of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism. Her novel Wrongful, a literary mystery that deals with writers behaving badly, is due out in May 2025 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, appeared in May 2024 from the same publisher. Another novel, The Withers, is forthcoming in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. Her other books include The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia 2023); Visitations: Stories; Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems; The Tao of Humiliation: Stories; and the essay collection Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. She is also the author of an award-winning novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, as well as six additional books of poetry and four books of literary criticism. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.

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 a collection of poetry, The Invention of Kindness. It opened up new and gratifying friendships for me. Wrongful is a literary mystery and, as such, differs a great deal from my previous book, a comic novel—Tabitha, Get Up. This new book, Wrongful, feels quite different because questions about evil animate the book. It’s a romance, in some ways, but there’s terror lurking.

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

Poetry came most naturally to me—the way rhythm and images unfold, the way associative links lead us through a poem.  It has taken me a long time to learn how to orchestrate fiction in which cause and effect propel at least some outward action. Writing both poetry and fiction is satisfying—you can’t help but find yourself inside mysteries within other mysteries.

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 tend to work on multiple manuscripts at the same time—and things move quite slowly. When I hit a wall in one area, I work on another manuscript. By the time I return to the original trouble-making manuscript, I may discover a solution. This way of working means that multiple manuscripts finish at roughly the same time. My final drafts often are very different from my first attempts.

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?

My poems, short stories, and essays tend to have individual lives and often stubbornly resist becoming part of a collection. Or so I tend to think at first. And then I realize that the same obsessions are winding their way through much of the work.

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

I like readings. It’s only the hours before readings that tend to be problematic for me. I’ve hardly ever not been a nervous person. Once I begin reading, however, I’m often very happy to voice the work.

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?

In Tabitha, Get Up (2024) I was concerned with issues of self-trust and how we may attempt to defeat entropy and create sustaining meaning. In my new novel Wrongful I’m interested in questions of evil, how evil always has its “reasons” and a self-perpetuating vitality. Wrongful is not only about the temptations toward bad behavior that writers and all of us face; it’s also about readers and reading—the intimate romance of reading

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?

This is an individual matter, but it seems that writers should be profoundly grateful to whoever taught them to read and write and find their way to new adventures through the imagination. We can help others find their way by mentoring and by allowing ourselves continual freedom to be bold in our own writing.

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

I’ve been able to work with marvelous editors and publishers and designers. Publishing takes a willing and devoted team, and I’ll always feel gratitude for those I’ve worked with.

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

 “Relax.” It sounds so insulting, but it’s pretty good advice. If you can relax, your own mind will give you something to imagine and consider…

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

Each form is difficult. Moving toward extended time and action frames in the novel was especially challenging for me, given my general proclivities. Each genre comes bearing its own gifts for discovering whatever mystery we might be avoiding otherwise.

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’m now able to write full-time, and so my life is very different from the days when I was working full-time and had small children and many other obligations. Typically, now, my day begins with too much coffee, and then maybe with my making a list about what I want to do, and then—if I don’t have any larger responsibilities—I dive into working. Usually on my laptop first. Then I print out the manuscript and revise. Next, I put those revisions into my manuscript on the laptop, and the process begins again. And again.

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

I usually read poetry or fiction—to hear another voice. I might pace around the house…I might eat something, like chocolate. Chocolate needs no defense.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs.

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?

Visual art, flowers, trees, talking with family members, overheard conversations

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

I’m inspired by the writing of Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Anita Brookner, Tracy K. Smith, Margot Livesey, Timothy Liu, Charles Holdefer, Rachel Cusk….and so many others. I’m fortunate to have a number of friends who are writers, and they’re deeply important to me.

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

I think it would be nice to stay for a while in a cottage by the sea and take long walks every day. And have marvelous hot soup on those days. (I sound deluded. I’m actually serious. It would be so nice.)

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?

If I could pick up another gift and had the talent…I would still want to be a writer. For the freedom and the adventure of it. If I couldn’t be a writer and were suddenly gifted with ability, I’d want to be a singer who worked on original material. Which really means being a writer with vocal range…

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

I’ve wanted to be a writer since childhood. I also, as a child, wanted to be a spy. Now I don’t want to be a spy. Although writing is a little like trying to spy into the depths of the culture’s hidden life.

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

Last great book: The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch.

 Last great film: 1900, by Bernardo Bertolucci

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on poems—always—and I’m redrafting a novel in which a younger visual artist believes her life has been dramatically damaged by her relationship with an older artist.  I’m also rewriting a couple of novel manuscripts that I lost faith in earlier. I’m now trying to give those manuscripts new and more exciting lives.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;