12 or 20 (second series) questions with B.J. Soloy

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (2025, Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters (2016, New Michigan Press). With stuff recently in places like Painted Bride Quarterly, At Length, and Gigantic Sequins, he teaches at a community college and a women's prison near Des Moines, Iowa, home of The Whatever.

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, Our Pornography & other disaster songs, came out into the world in 2019 and didn't immediately blow open all the locked doors or give me a backstage pass to the scene, but it did feel real good. I got the email letting me know it won the Slope Editions Book Prize on my  classroom computer in between classes at the community college where I was teaching outside of Kansas City. I mostly swallowed my joy and taught some stuff, but it was a big deal to me. Ocean Vuong, who selected the manuscript, wrote a really generous introduction and I got to do my official book release reading at a Rodney Dangerfield-themed bar in Portland, OR with some badass writers. So, even though the world shut down within a year, I call it a win. This second book, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, feels like it's on the other side of a fat gulf. In between the two, COVID hit, I had a kid, my partner's been transitioning, we moved to Des Moines, and that's all bled in--at least in roundabout ways--to the more recent work. Though the first book was ostensibly a book-length poem and this one has discrete pieces, the new stuff feels more cohesive. They both blend personal, capital, pop cultural, but Birth Center seems to show more breadth and accidental daring. Recency bias exists, but it still seems more like an album to me.

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

I got my dead grandpa's old desk when I was, like, eleven, and it seemed wrong that it was empty. Its thin little skeletal drawers. I started writing little things on some notecards and keeping them in there, like newspaper people in movies with their papers and such. I mean, I have a desk. So I had this idea of being a writer early. I was mostly a sketcher, though, into high school, then it was almost a sort of synesthesia. I kept sketch diaries for years and years and image slowly gave way to words. My eyes retreated. A Shakespeare class in high school gave me the sonnets (at the time, I moved into our damp basement, acquired my best friend Josh's sister's yellow bed frame, and wrote Sonnet 60 on the side). When I started college as a visual artist, a class on attention introduced me to Schuyler. In my first poetry workshop at a now-extinct liberal arts school in St. Louis, I got Alan Dugan. Angie Estes and Kathy Fagan came and read at that school. The more I heard people writing about kicking rocks down the road or ducks walking into bars or trees as slo-mo explosions, the more my elliptical, faux song lyric, compulsive notes seemed like they might have family.

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?

3 (though I'm really answering 4 too). I try not to/can't successfully do projects™ very often. I've had a couple of exceptions with my first chapbook (a book of letters) and an elegy project for my dad, but mostly I can't compel myself to write to a theme or singular idea without boring myself into a torpor in an unpleasant way. I tried writing to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, but it was shitty. I invented a form, the Birdy-Lou, and tried to write a bunch, but it went flat fast. I'll probably keep challenging myself with projects and then swiftly failing, but about all of my work that, well, works slowly congeals. Scraps accumulate and I edit toward one poem. Poems accumulate and I start to pair them off. I rewrite by hand, over and over, forcing myself to see if it sticks. Eighty lines will whittle themselves down to eight and repeat. The eights add up and echoes start to emerge and after the bunches of poems turn to bunches of bunches, I'll print the whole mess off, spread it on the floor, and start editing for a manuscript.

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

Readings have become important to me. Maybe it's my experience as a musician and/or a teacher, but it feels more real, alive, fragile when received in person. My droll, boringly Midwestern voice is pretty close to my internalized narrator's, but the poems feel different. So, yes: I enjoy readings. And I enjoy reading with other people. Some folks I've read with many times; most I'm reading with for the first time. It's humbling and electric to be in a space and of a voice.

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?

As with subject matter, a lot of the theoretical concerns I surely use seep in without being explicitly invited. I've thought a lot about apostrophe and the construction of the mutable "I." The inherent postmodern distrust of clean meaning making is there. Werner Herzog's definition of poetry as "ecstatic truth" haunts them. As does a sense of the uncanny and the sublime, which I think can actually swallow the reflexive skepticism and turn it into something more generative. A cultural studies conflation of the high/low and the formal/informal (there all along in haiku, Eliot, Niedecker's amazing calendars) is a constant whisper.

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 loath to make any broad proclamations about the role of anyone, but I'm tempted to think about comedians/fools and all that. Right now, though, especially in the Trump era and its clear goal of censorship through pre-compliance and the chilling effect aimed at media companies, law firms, institutions of higher education, etc., a writer's ability to tell it slant, (Write it!) like disaster, etc. can be a real call to action. Maybe we have less to lose (no one reads poetry), but there's a freedom in that. In teaching Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman's "Describing Tattoos to a Cop," Rankine's Just Us, or Valeria Lusielli's Lost Children Archive, I feel the writer's ability to both distill and complicate things (topics/events/humanity) that have become so watery and boringly, lucratively provocative in social media's sad realms.

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

My editors have been blessedly hands-off, making sure the named people in my poems won't sue and going over consistency and sentence-level concerns, but they seem to trust that I've spent way too much time on every little phrase and punctuation choice to casually suggest reworking things to taste. I, honestly, love it when people come at my work, scalpels or flamethrowers in hand, but haven't had much wrasslin' from the presses.

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

Ed Roberson said lots of amazing things, but a throwaway line about finding good readers outside of school has turned out to be invaluable. I don't have the trading pages at a bar scene I did for years, but I find myself today with three pieces from friends awaiting some feedback and some pieces of my own to send away soon. I haven't been in a real workshop in—counts rings in trunk—thirteen years, but I know who I'll show my stuff to. Runner-up: "Never trust a man in a blue trench coat / Never drive a car when you're dead."

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?

This is where I'm old. My son wakes me up at 5:45 - 6:05, throwing Slothy the sloth and Fluffy the stingray onto our bed. My writing used to be done chronically, if never on schedule, but now it's purely opportunistic, running trickles of lines until they pool. I occasionally get a schedule (stop by GT in Des Moines on Monday nights after teaching my prison evening class and work on edits for an hour), or a habit (I started spreading out on the floor by the record player at night when everyone else went to sleep), but I'm feeling the need to get official (I have a new challenge/drawing restraint/party with my pal and great poet, Philip Schaefer: we're to write one new line each day, starting next week).

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

Honestly, sometimes it's so insultingly simple as just being, like, "It's poetry night."  I might need to bump sleep, grading, some plans, but I see it's been too long and just claim some time. Having a notebook handy after much driving and erring always on the side of "this is probably stupid, but..." help a lot too. For me, it's never about inspiration or intention but just dumb time management.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

When our little dude was even littler, we went full Raising Arizona. I grew and then shaved down to a Nicolas Cage mustache. With a Holly Hunter nightgown and some alternative Huggies, we could turn to the left and get our pictures taken as one.

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?

Driving and being in unfamiliar "comfy" places (e.g. a Vrbo cabin or in someone's kitchen) can influence a tone. Subtitles on films--even silenced English-language stuff, minimally creepy eavesdropping, and, of course, music all do things.

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

I've been affected by the difficult men I love (Denis Johnson, Jack Spicer) and have some constants (Alice Notley, Larry Levis, Jean Valentine) but tend to spend more time with a rotation of three of four books I'll take with me as a group, reading them together until trading them in for a new mix. Right now, it's Natalie Shapero, Bernadette Mayer, John Berger, and a book of historical film criticism I'm kind of reading for a class. Lots of fiction and lots of records end up being important as they stick with me on whatever I'm doing.

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

Maybe act.

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?

If I hadn't ended up wherever I'm at, there were some interesting paths pointing off in other directions. I've worked as a film projectionist, a line cook, a veterinary technician, and was in some bands that were having fun, but maybe I'd work for the USPS.

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

I still play music and keep a pile of collage materials, but writing seemed to take over--maybe in part--because it's free and always there, my writing voice is better than my singing voice, and I, you know, like it.

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

I just saw One Battle after Another and Train Dreams within a week of each other and like them both and, this last year, I finally read Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers and it just overwhelmed me. Like, it has a physical effect on me six months after finishing it.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I've started gathering a bunch of the stray sections and finished short pieces I've been slowly popping out over the last year or two and looking at it all together. (Post-)COVID, Trump-era cultural context is probably obvious, but it's delightfully all over the place. After hacking away the clear nopes, it's at forty-ish pages, but half of those will probably go live with a nice family upstate, on a farm, with lots of room to run around and no such thing as death.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jed Munson

Jed Munson is the author of the essay collection Commentary on the Birds (Rescue Press, 2023), as well as the poetry chapbooks Portrait with Parkinson's (Oxeye Press, 2023), Minesweeper (New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM, 2023), Silts (above/ground press, 2022), and Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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?
UDP published my first chapbook Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, in 2021. More than anything, it was my editor, Lee Norton, who changed my life by believing in the work and the play. My recent writing feels lower to the ground, slower, maybe also louder.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Attempting fiction and nonfiction writing in college was how poem writing first happened to me--I'd jot down ideas for essays or stories I couldn't actualize offhand, stuff to unpack later, and littered a bunch of notebooks like that. When I of course never unpacked anything I realized I was enjoying more than anything the poetic potentiality of that shorthand. Then weirdly poems taught me how to reapproach prose with a more poetic posture, which has helped prose feel lively again.
 
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?
Takes forever, then suddenly it's over. The gathering and positioning of the body and mind is the mysterious and laborious part for me. Once I'm in compositional time, I'm just occurring with the thing and adjusting to it. More and more those stretches/pockets feel like a gift.

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?
Poems tend to start as sound for me, in the air, usually when I'm walking or in a space in the day where it feels possible to ask a question, even a basic one, like what now? Then I work something out by hand in a notebook, pen and paper, sometimes many times, then transfer it into a document when the pages start to get so cluttered I can't see the sound/thing anymore. So I go from trying to hear the thing to trying to see it. It's in the document phase, when I'm working with something as standardized text, that it starts to harden into something that feels like a poetic object, as if the ease of pushing something around in a text doc is concurrent with the imminent sense of its hardening. That's when I think I try to feel the poem, fix it until I think I feel it as an organism. Essays actually work similarly, or I've been applying my process with poems to prose writing. Books are still mysterious to me. I have no idea what a book is but I would like to write a good one.

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 that are small enough for the mic to feel optional and the reading poems part to feel optional. BYOB!
 
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?
Lately I'm interested in the aroma of math in poetry.

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?
Good question. Maybe the writer should write. Despite the world and because the world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I enjoy editorial relationships because they're basically just collaborations to my mind, an extension of the writing process where writing exits the fiction of your control. Which can be frustrating of course, or miraculous.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If you don't want your porch pumpkin to rot so quickly, turn it upside down on its stem so that it thinks it's still in the ground. (--My grandma)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
Essays felt possible to me once I'd been reading and writing poems for a while and wanted to try applying poetic patterning to prose. I do think essays are a powerful field/form for showcasing thinking. I admire clear thinking but am not great at it. Essays help me discover moments of clarity though. They let me manage content and information more than poetry, but they can behave like poems. It's the saying power of essays that I appreciate, how they feel directed at a cry for truth. Sometimes you want to say something about something, and you want it to be understood that it's real.

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 write what I can when I can and rejoice when it happens. I'm constantly dreaming of a life where it happens more often and I'm not overwhelmed by the sense of guilt for stealing the time from something else I should be doing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I usually read good poems or talk to my sister.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Muted kimchi and garlic, mowed lawn smell, tinge of mildew and moth balls.

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?
All of the above!

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

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write actually accomplished poems in Korean.

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?
This is all I've got.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
This is all I've got.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Pink Noise by Kevin Holden--a great book by a great poet. I watched Totoro for the millionth time with some kids and my sister the other week and it's the greatest. Perfectly compact, digressive, stirring, fortifying. The kids had a gleeful scream in that scene where Totoro yawns. I can't stop thinking about it. Totoro's mouth is so tiny, like a pinhole, and then suddenly it's so big!

20 - What are you currently working on?
Joy.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stephanie Anderson

Stephanie Anderson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the If You Love Error So Love Zero (Trembling Pillow Press), as well as several chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, nonsite.org, Posit, the tiny, and elsewhere. She co-edits the micropress Projective Industries and currently lives in Singapore.

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?
My first chapbook was In the Particular Particular, from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, in 2006. It had the double effect of both validating my sense of writing as my "vocation" and making me interested in becoming a publisher myself. My most recent work is a collection of poems written through the lenses of pregnancy, postpartum, the news cycle, and living in China; it's similar to that early work in that it remains committed to form and linguistic playfulness. But it's written by a speaker who has a very different sense of what the "personal" is, and what lyric's audiences might be.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Length! I'm joking but also not. I used to write in other genres--I still write in other genres!--but when I would write fiction I would walk around in that world, and it was hard to do anything else. With poetry I felt (and still feel) more in a constrained time of making: like maybe I prep class, or feed the baby, or write some email, or work on building the poem, and it's one accomplishment of the day. Admittedly, the items on this list aren't equal--the time of poetry-writing is intense.

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?
The process really varies from project to project, depending on constraints, form, and so on. That said, for me lately, I think the biggest moment of suspension (the waiting for things to gel, or for my sight to clear, or whatever form of sensory attention and distillation you want to put here) comes when I've generated enough content to begin to shape it and am working toward seeing that shape. This moment feels slow, that's why I call it a suspension, but in terms of real time I'm not sure it's especially quick or slow.

I'm fumbling here. Partly because the circumstances of my life have become such that writing occurs in smaller increments, more frequently, grasped and darting and fought for dearly, so it's hard for me to answer this question. I used to sit down and not get up until I'd really drafted something, or get up only to pace around my apartment, alone. Now I write some silly shit at 1am in a WeChat memo to myself in the space just after a small human has gone back to sleep, I write material for something (not even a draft yet) in a journal in a 10 minute break, I go about doing writing in ways that are more improvisatory and I am not sure I can clearly state what that process looks like. It pleases me: at this moment, writing and reading are tethering me to myself. But they are always, always on the fly right 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?
It varies. If You Love Error certainly began as pieces/series, whereas some of my other books have been "book projects" immediately. I do like setting myself constraints (Lands of Yield is entirely in syllabics) and making things more difficult, and I also like shifting those constraints/difficulties as I write myself into a project, so that I'm always challenging myself. I don't always mean formal constraints; lately "I" find myself trying to admit things or use sentences in a way I haven't previously.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh fuck no. I mean, I love having done readings, and talking to people after readings. And I don't dislike a moment during, the one when I realize I will actually live. But before the reading, on the day of, I cry and question all of my life choices. This is not exaggeration.

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'm always having big feelings about time (where here feelings are theoretical concerns that haven't been robustly articulated yet?). My partner said something to me a few months ago: "I don't think people remember as much about their lives as you think they do." Writing is for me often the thing Socrates frets about in Phaedrus, a compensation machine for a bad memory. But re: questions: oof. My "creative" mode is not separable from my "scholarly" one but at the same time one of its pleasures is not having to put things in this frame. Who are we talking to? How can language let us imagine a world differently?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Oh this one's a doozy. I mean, can it be to write? Is that glib? I think I'm being sort of serious -- the writer can have many different kinds of public roles, and can be imbued with various expectations/meanings in different cultural contexts -- that's all well and good. And it would be nice if writers were all good people, and some were ludic, and some were vatic, and some were solitary, and some were community-oriented, and some were empathic. But to me there's no obvious public role for the writer. Ideally, they aspire to produce texts that allow us to see the world differently, and to imagine other possibilities for the world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven't done this much in my creative work, and would love to do more of it. In my scholarly work it has been essential; I have trouble seeing the middle register of an argument sometimes and identifying the stakes.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's... not all that easy. I like the idea of working on all the projects at once, pivoting back and forth, and am always working toward that model, but it's probably a mistake. But on the today when I'm typing this sentence, I've done a little bit on several things and I feel very satisfied. Part of the appeal of moving between genres is having to express ideas or things vaguely intuited in different ways.

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?
Hahaha. I have a routine when I can; when I can't, I just try to get time to write. Right now, I wake up and care for children and do Duolingo and care for children and the moment I can I read or write, and then I do those things all over again in other orders. I have sometimes written in the morning, which I love. I have sometimes written in the evening, which I love. I have, on a few occasions, written in the middle of the night.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
To memory. To sensory experience. To dreams. To the minutiae of the everyday.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sulfur and woodsmoke. That's one version of home, anyway. I'm constantly re-configuring my understanding of "home."

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?
The moment when I realized that I could use some of the skills I'd acquired as a child musician in my writing was a really important one for me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Bernadette Mayer,  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joe Brainard,  Marilynne Robinson, Susan Howe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, Gertrude Stein, so many others, and my friends.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a novel, learn to better identify trees, go skydiving.

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?
Lately I think about having been a book designer, but I probably would have kept doing non-profit work of one sort or another. I mean, I'm a teacher now, but I could well have become a different teacher.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Some combination of temperament and misplaced ambition and overactive imagination and sensitivity.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Stefania Heim's Hour Book, Lupe Gómez's Camouflage (trans. Erín Moure). Erm, films have been... rare, lately.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Spies in the Audience, a collection of interviews with women involved in small-press publishing between the '50s and the '80s. Ash for Snow, a novel-in-verse. All this Thinking Grammar (tentative title), the complete correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (co-edited with Kristen Tapson). The Magpie Letters, a manuscript of poems that's just about finished. Dating the Poem, a scholarly monograph. A picture book about Cassie the Cicada who wants to sing. The caretaking of very young children. Reading, breathing, doing free zumba classes in Singapore's HDB courtyards in the evenings.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Krieg

Brandon Krieg is the author of Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali, In the Gorge (Codhill Press, 2017), Invasives (New Rivers Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, BOMB, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Iowa Review, West Branch, and many other journals. He is an assistant professor at Kutztown University and lives in Kutztown, PA with his spouse, Colleen O’Brien, and their son.

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?

I write poems, not books. That said, I love the poetry book as a form. So, there is always a little anxiety for me as to whether the poems I’ve been writing can hang together as a book. When the strange attractor of a book is vibrating the air, I print out all the poems I feel are done and I spread them out on the floor of a room and I stare at them a while until they start calling out to each other and then I arrange and rearrange them on the floor until it all makes sense to me. But I never know if it will make sense to someone else. I was thrilled, then, when Ander Monson chose to publish my chapbook, Source to Mouth, as a finalist for the New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest in 2012. It meant that an editor whose taste I respect thought that I had indeed put together a book that made sense. My most recent book, Magnifier, was put together in the same way. It feels different because I think the poems themselves are more playful and various than in my other collections. It was such an honor to have the book chosen by Kazim Ali, and, I must say, such a relief. Now those poems have a home, the book is done, they no longer require my attention, a big space is opened for whatever is next.

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

I’ve loved the sounds of poetry for as long as I can remember. Early on it was Dr. Seuss, later Shel Silverstein. In second grade we read Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the repeated last line was so moving to me. I remember feeling like something had just happened to me and still thinking about the poem in a sort of daze on my walk home. I wanted to be able to do that with sound, too.

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 write constantly by hand in journals. A lot of observations, a lot of free association. I am in love with the process of discovery. Surprise is why I keep going back to the page. A.R. Ammons has an essay “A Poem is a Walk,” which makes so much sense to me. I love walking, too. I go for a walk not to see a particular thing, but to see whatever there is to see. I’d walk outside every day if I could. I am constantly surprised by what’s there. I write poems the same way. I flip through my journal, find some lines I like, type them on my typewriter next to other lines I like. Suddenly lines are calling out to lines and to new lines not yet written.  If I’m lucky there’s an urgency at the core of the lines discovered as they came together that holds them together. If not, I try again the next day. I used to worry a lot about whether or not I was writing a poem and whether or not it was good. Now I just trust that something good will come of what I’m doing eventually and try to have fun with it.

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?

Poems begin very small for me—usually with a line or two. That line calls out to other lines. Pretty soon a group of lines is there. Sometimes it feels like they’ve reached closure. Sometimes it feels like I have more lines to work with from the journal and a new section might start. I’ve written quite a few long poems in very different ways. I wrote the first poem in Source to Mouth, “I,Inc.” in one sitting, without lines, all in my notebook, almost verbatim, and worked out the lines later on the computer. That’s very unusual for me. I wrote a poem from Magnifier, “Comedy of Mirrors” which has 6 or 8 sections, by actually trying to write a much much longer poem that had over 50 sections before I abandoned it and culled the best of it for “Comedy.” I did something similar in a poem from my second book, In the Gorge, called “Verges,” and with the poems in the second section of Magnifier (which are all closely related), except in those cases I went to a particular place over and over again, took a bunch of notes after each visit, wrote way too many sections of the poem (or way too many poems) and then culled down to the best. I think of something I came across I think in Thoreau’s journals where he is astonished by how many acorns an oak has to drop to make another oak. That’s how I think about my poems—I write maybe ten pages of notes and drafts for every 10 lines I keep.

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

Readings are not part of my process because I don’t think about them at all as I write. I find I’m often not as inspired by poetry readings as I want to be. Even poets whose work I love often fall flat as readers. There’s a certain affect, a certain odd intonation many poets take on in performance that I find disingenuous and distracting, though I get where it comes from as I feel the pull of it too when I read out loud. The best readings I’ve been to recently have been open mics at our local bookstore in Kutztown, Firefly, and on campus, where students and community members come together and take turns reading their work in a pretty informal setting. I’ve seen students, positively shaking with emotion, for whom reading their work and being heard appeared to be a matter of life or death. Even when the work itself wouldn’t maybe be that moving on the page, you can’t help but get inspired by their belief in the power of language to express something meaningful to them. That gets me excited, and humbles me. Suddenly my poems feel stuffy or boring or stuck on the page. When I get up there, I try harder to bring the feeling in the poem out with my voice than I might if I were giving a solo reading somewhere and could get away with standard poetese.

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?

Cultivating compassion for myself and others. Paying attention. Being in my senses. Cultivating an awareness of my emotions. I intend to fully inhabit my life and poems are one acting out of that intention. In a culture driven by status, possession, power, my work keeps asking the questions I keep asking myself: How can we make meaning and do less harm? How can we make meaning now, in the imperfect world, even as we long for a better world?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I go in fear of self-righteousness and grandiosity because I know these things are in me and I see them in a lot of writers and artists. These impulses, though they might be indulged in for the most unassailable reasons, can quickly blind us to our actual impacts on the culture. If the politics and aesthetics of our work are righteous and yet we treat our loved ones with indifference, our colleagues with contempt, our students with condescension, our legacy on the culture will probably be to strengthen its worst tendencies. It is my intention, difficult as it is to practice, to cultivate compassion for the suffering of myself and others right where I am, to work to alleviate suffering, and to trust that the good of that practice will find its way into my work. In that way the work might have a positive impact, but probably secondary to the impact of my lived life. Many if not most writers I know have the privilege of being teachers or mentors at some time in their lives. I think by treating our students like their experiences and ideas are valid, like their lives matter, like they have tremendous capabilities, and by encouraging them and supporting them in their search for meaning, we have a wonderful opportunity to positively impact the culture.

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

My experiences working with editors has always been positive, though it has also always been in the fine tuning stages of a book or poem that has already been accepted for publication. Editors, particularly Pauline Uchmanowicz at Codhill Press and Stephanie G’Schwind at The Center for Literary Publishing and their teams have given me invaluable suggestions on what to cut, what to footnote, and what to line-edit and made me feel like my manuscripts were in the best shape they could be in before being printed.

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

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, “A Way of Writing.”

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

Difficult. I love to read critical prose, but I don’t like to write it. When I’m writing, I prefer to trust the connections between things as they arise rather than worry them out.

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 try to write in my journal every day and usually do. When I have more time I go through my journal, find lines that feel like the start of a poem, and type them out on construction paper with my typewriter, or jot them out in a larger notebook. Then I move things around, add new lines, follow the sounds, meander, wander, until I run out of time, feel I’ve finished, or abandon the poem. If what I’ve written feels finished, I like to type it up on a piece of cardstock and mail it to a friend. It’s like publishing a single-page literary journal in an edition of 1 whenever you want. Eventually, if I have a ton of time, I’ll type up the poem on the word processor and finalize it, then go back to it a month or two later and see if I still like it.

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

My writing doesn’t get stalled because I write all the time with really low standards, but it does get very indoorsy if I don’t get outside and walk around. When that happens I go for a hike or visit the city. I am incredibly fortunate at the moment to live 15 miles from the Appalachian Trail and a 2-hour drive from Manhattan.   

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Wet bark dust, wet firs, wet moss, wet grass, wet earth. The scent of wet vegetation reminds me of Oregon, which is where I grew up and where my extended family still lives.

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?

Nature. I hike as often as possible, usually at least once a week. What I notice or think about while walking is a huge influence on my work. Music and visual art make me happy and attune me to the cosmic vibrations of the creative plane (vibes, etc.), but I find I write about them directly less than I once did.

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

For my work: Lorine Niedecker, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Gary Snyder, Jean Valentine, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Ed Roberson, Arthur Sze, Lisa Robertson come immediately to mind.

For my life: Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Rebecca Solnit, Thich Nhat Hanh

And so many more.

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

Hike the Pacific Crest Trail—Maybe the section in Oregon first, but if I was really ambitious, the whole thing.

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 think I’d like to work in the Forest Service or be a therapist or be a mail carrier on a walkable route.

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

I’ve wanted to do write as long as I can remember. As soon as I could write, in first grade or so, it was my favorite thing to do in school along with reading.

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

In Defense of the Earth by Kenneth Rexroth; Parasite by Bong Joon-Ho

20 - What are you currently working on?

Poems.

12 or 20 (second series)questions;