12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Hyland

Emily Hyland is the author of My Wise Little Ghost (Trio House, 2026), Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story (Howling Bird Press, 2024) & Emily: The Cookbook (Ballantine Books, 2018). Her third collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2027.

Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza. She leads poetry & movement retreats across the country & lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she writes & teaches at Yogasource, a beloved local studio that she co-owns & directs.

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 checked the box of achieving the goal. I did this thing I’ve been hoping to do since 7th grade when I first started writing poetry during National Poetry Month for a chapbook unit with Mrs. Berrian. The new book feels different because it’s the next iteration of lived experience being processed—themes from the original book get teased out and more deeply explored in My Wise Little Ghost. This book, and the special voice within, emerged during a consciousness-explanding period for me—this book was quick and unexpected and poured out onto the page.

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

See above! I first started writing poetry during National Poetry Month for a chapbook unit with Mrs. Berrian in 7th grade. I still have that chapbook, and she actually came to my first book launch back in 2024. What a gift of a teacher!

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 have a fairly generative process. I’m in a bi-weekly writing group, a weekly drop in group with peers, take an array of classes, and go on poetry retreats, so there are always constructive reasons to write. My process is very much meditation/processing-in-action—working through whatever’s in the field through the use of language and creative expression. Typically,  I’m drafting in free form, then go back to edit and finesse. Drafts are alive; one of my favorite parts of the process is being in collaborative conversations with friends or editors who help me sculpt and refine my poems over the course of many evolutions.

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 project oriented. Each poem feels like one piece of the larger whole.

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

I like doing readings that have a conversation element to them. I like being in dialogue with others and learning from each other in community.

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?

Right now, I’m exploring how so many of my behaviors and expressions of emotion stem from old, stale narratives from family of origin. I’m interesting in discovering what plug sockets those old wires are plugged into and then untangling that big mess of wires and updating to a more current operating system. It’s been wild to tease the storylines out from where they originate and then see all the doors that open up into lineage and ancestry.

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?

Writers are deep observers; I think that quality of being a witness and then writing it is a vital check in society. I’m a yoga teacher and practitioner, and the yoga practice also requires contemplative awareness. I do my best to honor what practicing yoga actually means; according to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: yogash chitta vritti nirodhah, essentially translates as “yoga is the quieting of all the changing states of the mind.” The primary purpose of this practice is to clear the lens to be in a state of heightened clarity at the present moment. What better conditions exist for poems to emerge than from the place of sheer presence?

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

ESSENTIAL. The right set of objective eyes, (or a few of them), is essential to crafting and refining poems when the poems are ready for that stage of work. This is part of the journey is a wonderful opportunity for self-inquiry, because it allows me to explore my relationship with ego, want, and attachment. Why am I clinging to this couplet? What makes this image so damn precious to me? What happens if I let go and allow the space for possibility beyond what I originally imagined?

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

Last year, I had the opportunity to study with Ellen Bass on her Truth & Beauty retreat in Santa Cruz with Marie Howe. When I was concerned about about what the poem was uncovering about the person and situation it was based on and feeling guilty about putting all of the mess into the poem, she told me, “Give the poem what it needs.” It was such a declarative moment of wisdom. You can go back after and do all the things to care for the humans who’ve inspired the pieces or think about how the audience will meet the piece, but as the poem is coming to life, don’t hold back. When I head into tough territory around family of origin work, I hear this reminder and charge forward, emboldened and reminded to meet the poem where it is and tend to its needs.

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’m up early to feed my fur babies, then coffee and clearing the inbox of administrative distraction. On my non-studio days, I strength train and run, then write, read, edit, or work on array of poetry tasks like these interview questions. On yoga days, Friday-Monday, I head to the studio and teach and take classes. Each weekend, I teach through the lens of a poet, and read their work as part of my opening talk, then weave the themes, concepts, and new learning into the way we are thinking about being and breathing in our bodies on the mat. What is the poem that the body is writing today? Where is the old tangled set of wires lurking in the connective tissue that need to be combed through, cleared, and exhaled out?

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

Books. Opening a book and reading is a natural inspiration boost for me. Stall is also part of the ebb and flow, and it’s been important for me to explore patience and ease during times when writing seems less available. I had an extremely generative few years then almost a full year of fallow field. The best way to meet that was to myself rest in the field, trusting the poems would start to sprout when ready.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Palo santo. Grounding and warm.

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?

I’m starting to spend more time with visual art, and the dimensions of color and story, among other elements, that live in a painting excite my creativity. As I mentioned earlier, the predominant place of inquiry and influence for me is the body. Every experience we have ever had lives in our tissue. The somatic space is its own endless universe of poems waiting to be written. My big toe wrote a poem this past year with a big moment of awareness with an acupuncture needle; just a few weeks ago in yoga class, my hip flexors tuned me to a hard memory I’ve been avoiding for a long time and nudged me to try and write it. Running feels like meditation-in-action as well and my morning runs are spaces where my mind can open up to a quality of thinking while resilience-building in a way that also creates potent conditions for poems to come forth.

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

Reading Sharon Olds in college was my entry into this world. Mark Doty has been my primary teacher for many years now; he has built a wonderful community of poets and creates the safe, supportive, kind circumstances to grow as a writer in workshop. He shares many students with Ellen Bass and Marie Howe, and both of them are huge influences both as teachers and as poets. I’ve recently studied with Gaby Calvocoressi and Shira Erlichman, and look forward to studying with both of them more. I’m inspired by Ocean Vuong and Ross Gay. I’m in a peer group with emerging poets like myself: Sarah Williams, Lexi Pelle, and KuhuJoshi. These are three powerful poets to be on the lookout for. I’m peers with Kristin Lueke and LO Naylor, two other raw, outstanding new voices I’m lucky to call friends.

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

Run a half marathon. Yikes. Now that I’ve said it I have to do it.

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?

I seem to be someone who does a lot of different things already; I’ve been a restaurateur for over a decade, I co-own and direct a yoga studio in Santa Fe called Yogasource—come take a class if you pass through! I also lead creative expression and resilience skill-building retreats with Mark Doty and other folks wherein we discuss, read, and write poems, and move our bodies as a means to be with the poems as they come to fruition. If I had the time, I would become an esthetician and clean pores all day long.

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

As a kid, the page was a space I could trust early on. It was the place I could best relate to my feelings and feel safe to express them. Thank god for that!

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

Just watched Bugonia. AMAZING. WOW. I just read Creature in Bloom by Rebekah Hewitt. I met her at AWP this year and we bought each other’s books. Another amazing woman writing about the experience of being a woman in her body and her life. Highly recommend!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on community building in writing and movement land: my next retreat, Magic in Mexico: Light & Joy in Practice, with a renowned meditation teacher, Erin Doerwald. We’ll be helping folks tune towards the key resilience skills of levity and gratitude. She’ll be teaching gentle movement and meditation practices, and I’ll be holding poetry discussions and teaching somatic movement classes around this important topic. Come with us!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christian Gullette

Christian Gullette’s debut poetry collection Coachella Elegy (July 1, 2024) won the Trio House Press Trio Award, and his poems have appeared or will appear in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, the Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), and The Yale Review. He has received financial support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Christian completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and when not serving as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review, he works as a lecturer and translator from the Swedish. He lives in San Francisco.

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 just came out officially on July 1, 2024, so it’s still very much a moment-to-moment experience. The first thing I noticed was how different it felt to stand at a microphone and read poems from a bound collection rather than printer paper. That really hit home.

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

Several high school English teachers assigned readings from an anthology of poetry, and I was hooked. As a kid just starting to recognize my sexuality, something about the lyrical gesture – the things unsaid as much as said, the compression, the emphasis on feeling and image – really appealed to me.

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 write poems in bursts after several weeks or even months. And even then, it might just be a few poems. I need to live life. Travel. Go to the ballet or go hiking or watch a classic film. Stay out all night partying. A line might occur to me. I usually write it down in my phone and leave it there for a while. What the poems discover can take drafts to emerge, if it does.

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?

Usually with that line I abandoned in my phone. If it keeps calling out to me in my head, I’ll come back later. I don’t usually set out to write into a project. I wait for an obsession.

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

Readings are definitely a part of my poetry experience – especially attending as many readings by other poets as I can. I enjoy reading my own poems, as well.  

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 interested in the tensions between pleasure and pain, joy and loss, beauty and destruction. Those complex, conflicting emotions are also part of an attempt to move through grief, which, in my poems, often finds expression seething beneath the surface, an intimacy and deep pain between the lines and in acute images rather than bold declarations.  I’m interested in notions of place, particularly California and notions of queer utopias, and the narratives and destructive myths than inform them. Considering environmental precarity, drought, fire, land displacement are all part of that questioning. Another form of precarity is that of the body. There’s a lot of erotic desire in the book, and I love to write love poems, but there’s a sense that the body is never far from dissolution.

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 hope my poems make a reader feel something.

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

I find it was an essential part of editing my book. But I also received the gift of editors who felt connected to my work and invited me to participate in a collaborative process, while also not being afraid to suggest a few major suggestions that in the end, really sharpened my book.

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

A mentor poet always tells me to “keep going.”

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

I also work as a Swedish-to-English translator, so switching genres feels natural to me. In addition to translating fiction and non-fiction, I devote as much time as I can to translating poetry. I’ve learned so much about my own poems, especially regarding word choice and tone and music.

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 tend to write in the afternoons. It’s not constant or according to any schedule. I’m not a great café writer; I like to be at my desk with my music and a tree or view out the window. Individual lines can come to me wherever and whenever, especially when traveling.

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

Travel, nature, and especially museums. Movies. Hotels really spark memories. Cocktails on a rooftop. Books can sometimes help, but I find them to be more helpful when I’m in the mood to write.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Chlorine.

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?

Art is very important to my work. As is music. Nature for sure. Food.

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

There are so many writers and artists I return to, and it would be impossible to do that list justice, but here’s a brief attempt: C.P. Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Tranströmer, Louise Glück, Henri Cole, David Hockney, Lana Del Rey, Ada Limón, Diane Seuss, Reginald Shepherd, Joan Didion, Randall Mann, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Thom Gunn, Christopher Isherwood.

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

Publish a translation of a poet’s full-length collection. Learn Italian.

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?

Cinematographer would be cool. I’d love to live in Sweden and work for a Swedish television show. I’d work at a dog sanctuary helping dogs splash in a pool.

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

It insisted no matter what I did, as if it were the only way I could know something about how to feel about my experience.

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

Book: Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

Film: La Piscine

20 - What are you currently working on?

Hopefully some new poems after a few months, but I’ll have to see.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carolyn Ann Hembree

Carolyn Hembree was born in Bristol, Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Skinny, came out from Kore Press in 2012. In 2016, Trio House Books published her second collection, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, selected by Neil Shepard for the 2015 Trio Award and by Stephanie Strickland for the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Poetry Daily, and other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. An assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, Carolyn teaches writing and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
I sent my first poetry manuscript, Skinny, to contests and open reading periods for ten years before Kore Press made it a book in 2012. Cracks of lightning, too, lit that decade-long night of rejection; journals and anthologies printed the poems individually, and the manuscript was a bridesmaid in several contests. (Those modest gowns cost money though.) In sum, I felt gratitude for the book’s acceptance. Practically speaking, the book’s publication weighed in my University’s decision to promote me to a tenure-track position; the course release and raise have made life easier.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Both books evoke the South and a kind of isolation. The first book exists inside of a dream, not to be helped. No single voice is entirely drawn: all share a telephone party line, snatches of this and that mesh to form a psychology. The second book, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, feels denser, I suppose. For one, the landscape becomes a character as much as any soul. Doctrine I absorbed in the Presbyterian Church my family attended shows in a fatalism, an inevitability, a finish of the second book. To my mind, the first remains more in the air. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In an effort to check my juvenile delinquency, my parents sent me to an evangelical school for the ninth grade. Naturally, my nefarious activities increased in the authoritarian atmosphere, where I quickly found coconspirators with whom to share earbuds during morning prayer (Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” our go-to, obviously), to drink vodka during PE, to disrupt assemblies—whether by inciting a chant to call out the tuba player who masturbated under his band jacket during pep rallies or making infant cries during cautionary abortion films. Needless to say, I only attended the school one year. Aside from the fun, this Advanced English teacher, Mrs. Bolla, had us write poems. Mrs. Bolla, who only allowed herself a reading list befitting a conservative Christian woman, pulled my despairing rhymes from the bunch and showed them to her friend, a bona fide poet who sent a gentle and encouraging letter my way. That was all I needed.

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?
It takes years with stops and starts for research, drafts, rewrites, and final edits across the manuscript to unify motifs and excise overused language. All in all, the second book, a modest 72 pages, took thirteen years, thereabouts.

For any given poem, I start with 100 pages of words: research notes, model syntax, observations, snatches of overheard conversation, images, and so on; this mother document, as it shrinks and expands, serves me for the whole book. I reduce the words the way I imagine a sculptor reduces a block of stone. By the time one emerges, the poem usually knows its shape.

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?
With a few exceptions, I work on books even if the “project” later becomes a single poem.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My acting training informs my natural yet dramatic presentation of the poems. Because I want listeners to have a different experience than they would reading my work, I try to create various narrative, lyric, and rhetorical trajectories through my selection and arrangement of pieces; this preparation requires creative thinking. Yes, the readings serve as part of my creative process, and they run counter to my process. Readings allow me to meet my real audience, which colors the intended audience (the dead, a former self, other poets mainly the dead for me) when I return to the page. So, meeting people who read my work enriches my understanding of audience, a good thing. When I was younger, I could get paralyzed for days after a reading if, say, an older gentleman felt called upon to tell me how valueless he found my work. Now, I’ve learned to better avoid such interactions.

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 asking what’s my stake in a thing. A narcissistic creature, I know to be savage with myself, my perceptions, my values. As default practice now, I write the opposite of all direct statements. When I studied under Jane Miller at the University of Arizona, she emphasized the paradox inherent in much poetry, an idea central to my poetics. Yes, I occasionally try to answer questions with the work; Chevy closes with a series of poems titled with questions Stephen Hawking has posed about the nature of time. These questions prompted me to explore Appalachian folklore that addresses the progress of existence, as well as collective and personal memory.

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?
Do our roles now differ from back when? Artists are the true historians. Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” comes to mind: “And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.” I believe in the longevity of our art, in the contribution of folks of all stripes, public poets and private ones. I give thanks for this golden age. Yet I can only dictate my role, and “my business is Circumference,” as Dickinson wrote.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. By the time an editor lays hands on my work, I have so excoriated it that I welcome outside input. I also have incisive readers who work me over before an editor enters the picture.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Well, I’m not going to offer one “best” (Circumference, you know):

“Stay upset.” –Brenda Hillman

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."—Samuel Beckett

“You are a poet all of the time.” –Jane Miller

 “... nothing could be ruined in one stroke.” –Elizabeth Alexander

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I do not move between genres, not to say that I will not.

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 get my kid ready in the morning, alternate transporting her to school/camp with my spouse, practice yoga, meditate, then read and write for two hours. Usually, I have to get on with teaching or lesson preparation at that point. However, during the summer months, I’ll take a walking break after two hours then write for another one or two. As I have zero impulse control, I keep all distractions at bay during my writing time by blocking the Internet and silencing my phone.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Since my process accommodates alternating periods of research and periods of writing, I tend not to get too stalled. When I was younger, blocks occurred more, but now I better understand, for good and ill, how my imagination works, that my mind has to wander, to meander, to steep.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Blue Grass dusting powder, Halls cough drops, Granny’s beef stew, damp books, honeysuckle, elms. There was an apple tree, so a cooking-apple tree in bloom. I’ve had many homes though. New Orleans now. And what does New Orleans not smell like?

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?
To return to Jane’s advice on being a poet “all the time,” I try to stay alert to everything: when visiting a museum, walking my neighborhood, eavesdropping in the grocery line, listening to traffic, watching trash television, reading an anthropology article. ... Aside from reading, I get a tremendous lot from interviews of survivors of violent crimes. What interests me – how we attempt to verbalize the unutterable: idioms get mixed, banal phrases repeated, and dialogue recalled precisely.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dickinson, Donne, KJV Bible, early anonymous ballads, Shakespeare, Etheridge Knight, John Berryman, C.D. Wright, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, Beckett, Kafka, Faulkner, Chekhov. I don’t have a reading life outside of my work.

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

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’ll go with the latter question: prosecuting attorney, missionary, literary agent, improvisational actor, or circus contortionist. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It stuck around.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: The Descent of Alette. Movie: The Act of Killing.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Two books of poetry: one a book-length project, one in loose pages. As my middle-aged great-grandmother –women from my line, we’re small-framed with prodigious stomachs – when asked by a neighbor if she was pregnant (she was not) responded, “Only time will tell, only time will tell.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;