How to Be a Writer When You Aren’t Writing

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Early this morning I was stretching before going for a walk (yes I’m that old) and my wife Lilian was viewing an online presentation from a noted export on Behavioral Science. During the pandemic, we have all be going down rabbit holes and she has read twenty or so books on the topic. The speaker, mostly in the framework of business productivity, discussed how people were motivated to follow a particular course of action because of:

• Accuracy – If you can frame yourself as an expert, people are likely to listen to you
• Connection – If you can show how people like themselves take a course of action, they will likely follow suit
• Ego – If you can make people feel better about themselves or buoy their perceptions of themselves, then you can motivate them

One example of ego motivation, my wife tells me, is how my affinity for Apple products affirms my belief that I am creative when all I do is run Microsoft Word on it and it would work better on a PC.

Whenever I come across new ideas, my thoughts often wander to how they relate to writing. In the context of Behavioral Science, you could think of readers as those who you are trying to motivate, ask yourself if these principles are applicable in the development process, or use this framework to try to better understand the motivation of your characters. A con artist character, for example, might put these principles into action. You may even keep Behavioral Science in mind when facing the daunting process of creating an agent pitch letter. The lesson here, with a broader lens, is that there are things you learn or come across in your daily life that you could be using as grist for your writing.

Can Your COVID-19 Obsessions Help Your Writing?

Like my wife and much of the country, I have gone down a few rabbit holes during COVID-19. In the past year, I have:

• Started a new job as a technical project manager
• Spent hours of time learning Portuguese
• Viewing videos of people walking the streets of Lisbon (research for a possible move)
• Scoured political news and theater
• Played a strategy game on a phone app with people (now friends) from many other countries
• Followed the drama of a regime change on the Pride of Detroit (Detroit Lions) blog
• Reorganized my playlists that disappeared when I sent my music to the cloud
• Participated in multiple, ongoing Zooms to connect with people in my life.

Nearly all of these activities or passions can make their way on the page: inspiration for a poem, a story, a character trait. My current novel-in-progress Lifelong is partially based on experiences from a job I had for six years. Real-life experiences and interests help a writer to expand beyond the trope of novels about writers (there are too many examples to site).

The Writer’s Dream Involves Dreaming

Another activity important for writers is to unplug enough to get into a dream state, an environment or state of mind that allows you to just imagine. For example, noted filmmaker and David Lynch uses meditation, workspace and routines to flesh out broad creative concepts, many of which never go anywhere. The ironic thing is the need to plan or make time in your schedule to get into this creative place. In Sigmund Freud’s essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” he espouses the theory that daydreaming is important to return to that childlike place where creativity flourishes without the pressures of real life. You can make startling connections and creative leaps when you make time for unstructured time and let your mind wander.

Engage with Stories to Strengthen Your Storytelling

Do you ever feel guilty for ignoring your writing and binging on books, movies, or TV shows? Don’t worry, it’s all good. Last night in my Novel Writer’s Group, we discussed the latest Netflix top 10 pick I Care a Lot, a story with a hot-button premise of legal guardianship abuse that could have gone in a number of directions. We discussed possible pitfalls such as:

• Characters being unlikeable and two-dimensional
• The main character Marla not having a moral code that would help you relate to her more
• Whether the concept would have been better realized as a slow-burning grift-based TV Show like Breaking Bad

You should, as you consume content, relate it back to your own creative processes and works-in-progress. The guilty pleasures in life don’t always necessarily need to be guilty. There are many opportunities for you, each day, to make progress on your dream of being a writer even when you aren’t actually writing.

10 Years, 10 Books, 10 Lessons

2020 is nearly here. As we reach the end of a decade, I’m grateful for the events that took place over the past ten years. For my kids growing up and becoming teenagers. For my divorce and remarriage. For a writing career that finally took flight. This seems like as good a time as any to contemplate the lessons I’ve learned from publishing 10 books in 10 years.

Book 1: Captive, De Novo Prize Winner, C&R Press, 2011

I graduated from the now-defunct Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC in 1997. I wrote and published extensively in magazines (hundreds of them) but my first book escaped me. The manuscript for my first book Captive was a finalist or semi-finalist for 20 different poetry prizes before it won the De Novo prize, C&R Press.

Lesson: The power of perseverance. 

Book 2: Poets’ Guide to America, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012

In the Spring of 2009, one of my best friends John Buckley let me know that he was starting to write poetry seriously and we decided to experiment with lines back and forth. Soon, we had a concept for a book: poems that take place in all 50 states. We ended up trading lines and ideas. John made me a better writer. He was a virtuoso of strangeness and Americana. We riffed on each other in a partnership that spanned nearly a decade.

Lesson: Writing can be fun.

Book 3: The Interrogator’s Notebook, Story Merchant Books, 2013

A book that came to life over a decade of workshopping it in my LA fiction writing group was accepted by an agent at William Morris. After a thirty page treatment and another draft, the agent left the business and I began looking for a publisher. At the time, I was working with Ken Atchity, a producer, on a film project and he convinced me to publish The Interrogator’s Notebook on his press so that he could pitch the film. It was championed at Paradigm Agency. and attached to a well-known Hollywood writer and director who wrote a pilot. It was pitched by Skydance Television and I still have hopes of the project being revived for screen.

Lesson: Sometimes it’s OK to not take a traditional path in publishing.

Book 4: Yankee Broadcast Network, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014

My first word as a kid was Batman, allegedly watching from the Adam West TV show. Like many Gen Xers, I grew up with the heavy influence of television as did my writing partner John Buckley. We created a universe tied to our childhood and delved into parallel reality of TV shows we invented. It was a lot of fun and the funniest book I’ve written in a genre that can take itself too seriously.

Lesson: It’s OK in poetry to embrace pop culture subject matter. 

Book 5: Underdays, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015

After my separation, after getting whooping cough and getting laid off, after bottoming out and rebuilding my life, I took dozens of old poems and braided them with new lines, my older self conversing with my younger self. Unlike Captive, this book won the Sandeen Prize within months of sending it out.

Lesson: It’s OK to embrace hard times and dig deeper in your work. 

Book 6: Interrogations, Fomite Press, 2016

Similar to my first book Captive, this short story collection was a finalist for a half dozen fiction prizes before Fomite Press published it. I generally write one to two stories a year and the 20 stories in Interrogations (all published in literary magazines) span over two decades. So many memories and snippets from my life find their way onto these pages, including the short story that prompted me to write The Interrogator’s Notebook. 

Lesson: The power of perseverance (important enough to list twice). 

Book 7: Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016

A scene from the first chapter came to me as a dream in college. I wrote the first chapter at University of Michigan. I wrote the novel as my thesis at grad school at USC. The story of cloning haunted me so much that I wrote a second draft, then a third draft a decade later. I grew up reading and loving science fiction. The long creation process was worthwhile. This is my only book where I haven’t had a negative review.

Lesson: It’s OK to let your writing develop over time. 

Book 8: Lessons in Camouflage, C&R Press, 2018

The third time’s a charm. My third solo poetry book covers similar terrain as Captive and Underdays, weaving poems of war and familial strife, illuminating truth in difficult times. Even though this book did not win an award like my first two solo poetry collections, it’s the better book. It’s taken me over 20 years to get here and in publishing this collection I feel like I can move on to new projects.

Lesson: Writing is a craft and it takes hard work to get good at any craft. 

Book 9: Fake News Poems, BlazeVOX Books, 2019

In 2017, I decided to write a poem a week using a news headline as the jumping off point during the first year of the Trump presidency. The rules where simple: I had to write one poem a week (n matter how I felt) and no rewrites after the fact. I wanted to catch a moment in time in these news poems, and I selected subject matter that reflected my own life as much as the world around me.

Lesson: Taking risks is part of writing. 

Book 10: Sharks vs. Selfies, Eyewear Books, 2021

The last few years I’ve come to realize in all the genres that I work in – fiction, poetry, screenwriting – that telling stories is what motivates me. Sharks vs. Selfies is a book of prose poem. The process of writing them is the most I’ve felt like my true self as a poet. It combines my imagination and love of weaving tales with a craft I’ve spent decades struggling to perfect. It’s a new direction and I’m excited for what the future will bring.

Lesson: Trust your feelings as a writer.

Branding for Writers: Why You Don’t Need to Embrace a Single Identity

Guest Blog Post by Lisa Marie Basile

Here’s a pic of me being many things — a panda, a lush, a poet, a bridesmaid, and an epic dresser.

Every single one of us as creators is asked to select a genre, select a marketing angle, select a box, select an identity. But what if — and I think this is true for us all — we are many things.

I write heavy lyrical essays & poems about grief, family, & desire.

BUT I ALSO write commercial nonfiction.

I have contracts with indie pubs and a mass-market publisher.

I like being flirty and sexy in pictures, and I like drinking and dancing all night. But I’m also fairly shy and private. I have loads of acquaintances and very few close friends, on purpose.

You can do, be, and work on it all.

You’re dimensional.

Fuck the little boxes.

I think the problem is that we’re supposed to be a ‘brand,’ many of us writers. I ask myself: Are you a poet? Are you a chronic illness advocate? Are you a witch? Are you an essayist? Are you a foster care youth advocate? How do they intersect?

I’m everything, all at once. I don’t need to plaster my platforms in one filter, one voice, one story, one angle — and neither do you. I can write about grief this week and candle magic the next. I can lead a workshop on ritual and then I can publish a long-form essay on health. I can post a stupid selfie and then a picture of me at a workshop.

None of this takes away from the all.

I believe in being intersectional in every way possible; I believe my interest in magic comes from my trauma, grief, health issues and family past. They’re not divorced, they never will be.

My poetry is found in all of my work. Poetry is my voice. My focus on trauma recovery is in all of my work, no matter the topic.

The next time you sit down and think, “who am I?” or “what’s my branding strategy,” I urge you to think about the beautiful magic of dimensionality, of how your layers make your work extra delicious, of how in presenting and working in and being the many layers of ourselves we are presenting something authentic.

I can be spiritual without posting photos of my altar. I can be a poet without constantly publishing poetry. I can be an artist and a strategist. I can be an advocate and a weirdo.

I know it’s hard because in this era, to be a writer is also to be a marketer to some extent — and maybe we never bargained for that. And it’s hard because when we’re dedicated to anything, we have to have an avatar to make it valid. It’s fucking hard managing a second self online that is supposed to accurately and perfectly represent you. The human brain wasn’t designed for this.

But you can be and do everything, too. Just keep doing you.

About the Author:

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine — a digital diary of literature and magical living. She is the author of “Light Magic for Dark Times,” a modern collection of inspired rituals and daily practices, as well as the forthcoming book, “The Magical Writing Grimoire: Use the Word as Your Wand for Magic, Manifestation & Ritual.” She’s written for Refinery 29, The New York Times, Self, Chakrubs, Marie Claire, Narratively, Catapult, Sabat Magazine, Healthline, Bust, Hello Giggles, Grimoire Magazine, and more. Lisa Marie has taught writing and ritual workshops at HausWitch in Salem, MA, Manhattanville College, and Pace University. She earned a Masters’s degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University.

Nine Simple Truths About Poetry Manuscript Contests

Guest Blog Post by Sonia Greenfield 

1. The award money, when you are done with the process and have won a contest, will probably not cover the overall cost of repeatedly submitting the manuscript. Some folks are geniuses right out of the box. Most of us have to edit our way in the direction of perfection.

2. For each contest cycle, you will think that the manuscript is done, and you will submit it with an outlay of anywhere from $100 to $300. If you do not win, you may figure out that what you thought was finished has still more room for improvement. That your editorial process was not finished. And this may go on for several seasons, because knowing the fitness of your own poems can be as difficult as assessing one’s own face or body in the mirror.

3. If you keep at it— this process of remaking and investment, your book will win a contest and/or be published, but you have to be down with the evolution and expense. But YOU. CAN. WIN.

4. Some big name publishers like more experimental poetry, some more narrative. Don’t waste your $25 dollars submitting your manuscript to a publishing house just because they’re well known if there’s no way your poetic vision aligns with their catalogue of titles. Better to shoot for a smaller house, because chances are…

5. You’re going to be responsible for most of the PR, touring, marketing, etc. anyway. Get comfortable with the idea that the writing you’ve created, the gift of it, may reach a smaller audience than you had hoped for.

6. But it’s okay if your gift reaches a more intimate audience. Friends, family, poets you admire, etc. These are the people you’re most in conversation with anyway.

7. Because if you were hoping that the publication of a first or second manuscript is going to get you a creative writing teaching job at a small liberal arts school in a charming town on The Hudson— it might, but you have to be fully invested in The Hustle, which means, probably, working the conferences, social media, etc. like you were born to be a Slytherin (not inherently bad; just ambitious).

8. If that sounds exhausting and not invigorating, then remember that your life and career do not have to drive toward that one, narrow goal. That sometimes you can be happy divorcing poetry from professional ambition.

9. Still, it is such that you can put out a beautiful book— a fucking masterpiece that should be seen by the world— but it will be modestly purchased and distributed. And it can feel disheartening. Buy yourself lots of copies and continue to read from them as you travel the world. With poetry, it will never be about the quantitative, but the qualitative, and your writing can continue to affect individuals deeply. Can cut them to the quick ten years down the line, but one or two people at a time. Think of them when you’re fretting over the art that you have made.

This little meditation is dedicated to Pauline Uchmanowicz, my wonderful editor with Codhill Press, who so carefully tended to my first book of poems. I found out yesterday that she passed away suddenly in a tragic accident in her home.

Ultimately, what matters is that you continue chasing down your own poems one at a time and that you keep putting them in the world. Don’t stop creating.

About the Author:

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review prize and her collection of prose poems, Letdown, is forthcoming in 2020 with White Pine Press as part of the Marie Alexander Series. She lives with her husband and son in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and co-directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

Writeliving Interview: Diane Seuss

After a small hiatus, Writeliving is back with an interview from fellow Michigander and powerhouse writer Diane Seuss. Four-Legged Girl was my favorite poetry book of 2015 and I was blown away by her lush, hypnotic, mythic poemscapes. I highly recommend Diane’s work and am thrilled to be able to share insights from her writing life.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

I could reel off a list of writers who have taught me a great deal (Dickinson, Clifton, D.A. Powell, etc.) but probably most accurately there are two significant influences—my mentor, poet Conrad (Con) Hilberry, and my mom. When we first met, externally at least, Con was everything I was not—quiet, private, gentle, formal in his aesthetic proclivities. He was the son of a college president and raised in suburban Detroit. In the psychological (and perhaps conventional) sense, he functioned as the father I didn’t have: he was someone and something to walk toward. He was supportive and encouraging: he saw me, and he accepted me and cheered me on for all of the ways in which I was a writer who seemed to be very different from him. He defied the cliché of the leering older male poet in the era in which I grew up. He was respectful, boundaried, sane. He did all of the right things—gave me books, helped me go to college, urged me to send out work—but more importantly he was the right thing. My mother influences my work in so many ways. I could, and probably will, write a book on the subject. Like Con, she defied all of the stereotypes about women and mothers in a time in which such defiance was not the norm. She also was and is a divine storyteller. She preserves the history of her time and place—the rural Midwest, born in 1929—via narrative. Both Con and my mother had a profound impact on my poems’ sounds, purposes, and values.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

I can’t separate my creative process from my process of tending to the conditions of my life. One could say I haven’t had the luxury to solely focus on my own poems, but I’m pretty sure that luxury would not have served me. Most of my poems come to me as I do what I do in my life—making soup, watering the tomatoes, interacting with students, sitting in the ER with my son, talking to my mom on the phone, walking the dog. I live with the poem’s entry point for a while—walk around with it. By the time I can turn to the page it has gained a body. Maybe a single eye. Too many limbs. Sometimes that germ of an idea requires research, which I often do in tandem with writing. Although many think of poetry as an art primarily of emotion, I don’t experience it that way. Maybe the closest I can come to describing the process is an image, that of a many-layered cake. Feeling is one layer, sure, but also intellect, meditative thinking, instinct, something like a checking-in with history, and consulting that part of the writer that has always been, and is unchangeable. All of that at once in one big bite.

What is the best advice you can give to a writer finding her/his voice and subject matter?

I don’t think these are things one can be overly-conscious about, or conscientious about. My recommendations are simple and probably nothing new: read everything, and not just contemporary poetry. Write often. Live in such a way that your life is a reflection of your art, and vice versa. Experiment with form, both traditional and invented. Remember where you are from—the landscape and people that vexed you and held you up. Write whatever is in front of you, whatever is next. Don’t obey the zeitgeist. When in doubt, take a road trip. You will generally only discover your subject matter and voice (whatever voice is) in looking back at what you have already made.

How has teaching impacted your own writing?

Teaching has kept me current, not just in staying up-to-date in my reading, but observing what is important to 18-22-year-olds, from eyebrow shaping to revolutions in identity. Teaching is a kind of performance. It makes one very aware of oneself and the way one performs oneself. That has certainly made its way into my work. At its best, the classroom became a place in which the group of us had a couple of good hours every few days to consider really difficult poems and to develop, together, a kind of thesis about them and how they were made. Those conversations compelled me, and made their way into how I think about my own work. Ultimately, teaching taught me the nuances of each individual and each individual poem.

What are you currently working on?

My next book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, comes out next May, and is complete aside from acting on editorial suggestions I’ll receive from my press. I’m currently working on a book-length sequence of unrhymed sonnets that, strung together, will make a kind of memoir, but less a memoir of events than of how my mind works and remembers in a given moment.

How has growing up and living in the Midwest affected your writing?

I can’t imagine how my poems would sound without the Midwest, its cadences and idioms, Michigan in particular, Niles and Edwardsburg, more particularly, nor can I conceive of my image palette without the rural Midwestern landscape—not just its “scenery” but its details. Along with my poems’ sounds and images, their point of view is profoundly Midwestern. They activate personality/performance to deflect suffering, for instance. They make space for and value oddity. I will add that I see no shame in enacting a regional perspective. Faulkner did it, and raised it to archetype. Frank O’Hara did it. Every contemporary poet came from somewhere. A coastal, urban somewhere and accompanying point of view is no more valid, contains no more provocative urgency, than Yoknapatawpha County.

What relationship do you feel your poetry has to prose?

Well, the boundary between the two has certainly grown less clear. Some would say my work leans toward the discursive and the narrative, which is probably true. When I write prose, I am more committed to the development of ideas than I am in poems, in which I allow for the associative mind to take over. Poems allow for the inexplicable image to dominate. I love that. Poems lead me; I lead prose. Maybe that is the central difference in my experience of writing the two. Still, anything I say about how the two modes operate only holds for me, and I am always ready for my own experience of writing to not hold.

Have you read anything recently that really got you excited?

Always. In poetry, Bruce Lack’s brilliant collection Service, on his experience as a Marine during two tours of duty in Fallujah, Anne Cecelia Holmes’ The Jitters, which is the best depiction of how the self and the mind operate in a profoundly disorienting time that I’ve read, and Aaron Smith’s Primer—honest, brutal, erotic, human. I’ve also had the chance to read a thus-far unpublished manuscript by Courtney Faye Taylor. All I can say it—get ready, world. I also love to read nonfiction. I’m currently reading an arcane dictionary of superstitions that has me geeked, and I’m re-reading The Grapes of Wrath.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

Most lives are a sort of string of pearls of adversity, adversity represented by the pearls, not the string. My pearls are many—losing my dad at an early age, contending with loved ones’ addictions, divorce, single-parenthood, poverty, major physical injury. I would say that the writing is what held me up, rather than me maintaining it. It was writing that kept me alive and intact. Writing—form itself—is profoundly grounding. A writer can direct her gaze anywhere, sometimes toward adversity, sometimes not. It’s all content—from a shattered body to the song of a spring peeper. Poetry equalizes. To form something out of the chaos of experience is salvation.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I can fix a toilet with a paperclip.

About the Author

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015 by Graywolf Press, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her poetry has been published in a broad range of literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review, New England Review, and The New Yorker. Seuss’s fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2018.

Writeliving Interview: Matthew Olzmann

Photo by Evans Tasiopoulos 

I’m thrilled to get a chance to interview one of my favorite poets and fellow Michigander Matthew Olzmann. Yes, I can still call myself that after so many years in California. Matthew’s work is imaginative, rich, accessible, playful, and memorable. Consider getting his newest book Contradictions in the Design, from Alice James Books, for the holidays.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

Too many to really list, but Wisława Szymborska, Robert Hayden and Larry Levis are writers whose work I’ve returned to with great frequency. My teacher Stephen Dobyns. My wife Vievee Francis—my discussions with her are always a part of my writing.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

I’m always working on several things at once. Maybe five or six poems plus a story or essay. I tend to shuffle between them as I revise. I work on something and take it as far as I can go with it then, when I get stuck, I shift to something else and eventually circle back.

What is the best advice you can give to a writer finding her/his voice and subject matter?

Instead of finding your “voice” find a bunch of “voices.” Try on a lot of new things, new approaches, new ideas, etcetera. See what fits, what you might grow into and what’s challenging. Make mistakes. Your voice will be somewhere between all these things.

How has teaching impacted your own writing?

It makes you more aware of the choices you make and the things you value in writing. Having to articulate what might seem to be intuitive or intangible causes me to be more conscious of how I approach a piece of writing. Discussing a poem—whether it’s a poem I know and love by a writer I admire, or a new poem by a student that I’m reading for the first time—requires a careful attention to how a poem is put together. You notice what effects the poem produces, and then you try to describe how those effects are produced. It’s a discipline, a type of study, that deepens your relationship to the craft.

What are you currently working on?

I’m working a on new manuscript of (mostly) epistolary poems, and some scattered poems which are unrelated to that project. Also some short prose—flash fiction and lyric essays.

How has growing up and living in Michigan affected your writing?

It’s provided the landscape that’s become the backdrop for many of my poems. It’s introduced me to some of my closest friends in the writing world. It provided the first communities of writers that I was a part of, communities that probably continue to impact my writing and worldview in both pronounced and subtle manners.

Have you read anything recently that really got you excited?

House of Water by Matthew Nienow. Look by Solmaz Sharif. Also really looking forward to reading Overpour by Jane Wong, Vanessa Hua’s collection of stories Deceit and Other Possibilities, and Mike Scalise’s memoir The Brand New Catastrophe.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

Not really. The “dream” of writing, I think, is kept alive solely by your love for it. You have to find time to write and to do that you might have to sacrifice something else. Those sacrifices might be significant, but you do that because you love writing. Writers write because they love books or stories or poems. And any obstacles I’ve faced aren’t incredibly unique to me. I went to four colleges before finishing my undergraduate degree. It took 12 years with a lot of time off in between. I tried to learn to write on my own for awhile. A lot of rejections. There’s the realization that the gap between the poems you want to write and the poems you’re capable of writing might be vast. And you go back to work. I hesitate to call any of this “adversity” because I’m doing something I love.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I wrestled in high school. I played trumpet for three years and hated it. I’ve had jobs as a theater usher, a grocery store cashier and as a medical courier.

About the Author:

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two poetry collections: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design (both from Alice James Books). His writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Eight Stages of Writing a Poem

Guest Blog Post by Rick Bursky

1 Fishing

This is the beginning, looking for an image, sound, snippet of language anything that could launch my imagination into something that might hold my interest long enough to begin a poem. Just because this starts the poem doesn’t guarantee it will survive as the first line or even be in the finished poem.

2 Collecting

Once I have the way in a begin collecting lines that might relate to the opening even in the most obscure way. At first blush, the new lines might only relate on an emotional level. But this is like brainstorming, there are no bad lines. I write them down, whatever I come up with, collecting a page or two of stray images of statements.

3 Expanding/Building

I look at what I have and assess the possibilities. Now I’m applying some rational logic to what’s on the page. I’m trying to see what lines I want to elaborate on, perhaps look for interesting words –– I might pick up a book of someone else’s poetry, read something and find a word I haven’t ever used in a poem and use that as the point of expansion. This stage is most emotional.

4 Shaping

The cutting begins. I toss out the lines that stick out and haven’t found a way to cement themselves into the emotional heart of the poem. This is also where I begin to pay attention to the lineation of the poem, enjambment and whatnot. The look of the poem begins to show itself. This stage is all about craft.

5 Titling

The DNA of a poem is in the title. This is crucial and where the intent –– though not what started the poem –– of what I’ve put on the page announces itself. The title is the emotional introduction to the poem.

6 Reading

I ask some trusted readers, all accomplished poets, to read the poem and provide comments.

7 Revising

I have comments from my readers. And because some time has passed I don’t have any emotional attachment to the poem. I look at the comments and start revising, I don’t always use the comments but usually use most of them, or at least use them as questions to ask the poem. Revision phase is also craft, and is very clinical. It has little to do with creating art, it’s all about “writing,” sandpapering and clarity.

8 Evaluating

This is one of the toughest, if not the toughest phases. I have to decide if the poem is any good. Do I want to throw it away? Or harvest any of the lines for some other poem? Should I revise, shape or build again? Do I want to send it out? Do I want to put it in my manuscript? It often take weeks, months or longer to answer those questions.

 

 

 

 

Writeliving Interview – Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass is a writer I admire and continued proof that California yields some of our best poets (yes, I’m West Coast biased). Ellen is able to write about her life in a way that transcends confessional poetry and draws on themes of family and community. Her work is compassionate and passionate, and spiced with humor and insight into what makes us tick. Please enjoy this window into her creative process.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

My first major influence was Florence Howe, my teacher at Goucher College, with whom I later co-edited No More Masks!, the first major anthology of poetry by women, published by Doubleday in 1973. Florence’s generous mentorship opened the doors of poetry to me and changed my life forever.

I was immensely fortunate to study with Anne Sexton when she taught in Boston University’s MA in Creative Writing Program. Without her encouragement I don’t think I would have had the confidence to try to make a life of poetry.

My third mentor, the brilliant poet Dorianne Laux, taught me just about everything I know about the craft. I owe her an immense debt of gratitude that I can never repay, but can only hope to pass on.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

I wish I had a creative process that I could describe, but every poem seems to have its own process and what worked for one poem rarely works for the next. I try anything and everything! Sometimes I think about a subject for a long time before I see a way to nudge my thoughts or feelings toward a poem. Sometimes I write many not-so-good poems grappling with the same theme before one succeeds. Sometimes I imitate a poem I admire. Sometimes I just start writing without any idea where it might lead. Sometimes I hear a writing suggestion that piques my interest and I decide to try it. Sometimes a poem seems almost to just offer itself up whole. Usually I’m grappling with an experience, an event, a feeling, a thought that I want to explore. Often I make lists of words that I find in some way interesting or that catch my eye and I try to include them in a poem. I think all poets fall somewhere on a bell curve from logical thinking to wild thinking. I think I fall toward the logical thinking and so I’m always trying to do things that will loosen up that rational impulse and allow more strangeness into my poems.

What is the best advice you can give to a writer finding her/his voice and subject matter?

Paradoxically, I think that often the best way to find your own voice and subject matter is to study the poems you most admire. Examine them, take them apart, see what makes them tick, imitate them. That will help to train your ear, your eye, and your sensibility. It will teach you how broad the range of voice and subject and approach can be and then when you write you’ll have widened the scope of what’s possible. Beyond that, each of us has our own unique life experience within which copious matter is packed. Sometimes it’s a question of opening ourselves to the subjects that we didn’t recognize as worthy of poems. And then I’d add, Be brave.

How has teaching impacted your own writing?

I love teaching. Besides the obvious privilege of diving into poetry with people who are also excited about it, teaching also gives me a place to feel competent, something I never feel writing poems. I never sit down to write a poem thinking, I can do this! But although there’s always more to learn about teaching, I feel basically capable in that arena. It’s a wonderful respite from doubt and the many failures that writing poetry consists of.

What are you currently working on?

I never have a “poetry project.” I just pray for the next poem—and do my part by sitting down and trying.

How has writing both non-fiction and poetry books influenced each genre?

Well, writing non-fiction has taken me away from poetry. I simply am not capable of doing both at the same time. After spending six or eight hours writing non-fiction, the last thing my brain wants to do is arrange more words. So I’ve given up non-fiction—at least non-fiction books. Not only was non-fiction not good for my poetry, but I think my poetry was also not helpful for the non-fiction I wrote. Had I been a creative non-fiction writer, it would have been different, but my non-fiction books are what I think of as “functional non-fiction.” They’re not there to please aesthetically, but to give people information that they may need—in some situations desperately need. So it was important not to have writing that called any attention to itself. I had to strip down my overly “literary” style. We wanted the writing to be invisible so it didn’t get in the way of its usefulness.

Have you read anything recently that really got you excited?

Yes! So much gets me excited. I’ve been reading Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Patricia Smith, Kwame Dawes, Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland—I could go on and on! I also just finished the “Edith Trilogy” by the Australian writer Frank Moorehouse which is the story of one woman’s life braided with the story of The League of Nations. Each book is the size of the Bible and I was so sad when they came to an end.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

I’m not sure I’ve encountered anything I would call true adversity. I’ve always just tried to do what I wanted to do—in life as well as in writing. Sometimes that hasn’t been the wisest path, but it seems to be the one I’ve chosen. It’s hard to know what the best choices will be so I believe one’s deepest desires and passions are as good a compass as any. I’m a ridiculously optimistic person and although I also am a worrier, the hope that it would work out tended to trump the worries so I kept plodding forward. I’m also a very practical person so I knew from the beginning I’d have to put food on the table along with writing and I accepted that.

Actually, as I think about it, it’s the other way around. It’s writing that has helped me overcome adversity!

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

Hmmm. So many of my quirks have been included in my poetry. But I don’t think I’ve revealed one of my special talents—I’m quite good at finding lost things—which also requires some of the same qualities that are necessary for poetry—perseverance, strategy, patience, intuition, perfectionism, a willingness to not overlook the obvious—and of course luck.

About the Author:

Ellen Bass’s poetry includes Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002). She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973. Her non-fiction books include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008), which has been translated into twelve languages, and Free Your Mind: The Book for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review and many other journals. Among her awards for poetry are two Pushcart Prizes, Lambda Literary Award, Elliston Book Award, Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, Larry Levis Prize from Missouri Review, New Letters Prize, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. www.ellenbass.com

Writeliving Interview – Richard Garcia

Richard Garcia, aside from being one of America’s premier poets, is a teacher who has had more impact on my writing than anyone else. His voice is still in my ear  as I work, telling me to take risks, to find the poem outside of the poem you thought you were writing. His students — past and present — love him and his impact goes way beyond his righteous books of poetry.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

Many writings I would have read in my late teens and early twenties, the coming of age time. Mostly in a more imaginative mode, Spanish, French, and South American. Surrealism and fabulism. But what made me want to begin in earnest was reading Whispering to Fool the Wind by Alberto Rios. It was very much like I had wanted to write when I had written some years before, and although I was not writing when I read his book, it did make me feel like I could get on the right track. I liked his American, Mexican, playful, dark and serious humor.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

I was at a reading listening to a poet answer that question and it seemed to me that everything she was describing was part of a ritual. Get up at this time, coffee, go to the place, sharpen the pencil, not just any pencil but the #2 such-and-such, now get the pad that you like to write in… So if you do this every day in just this manner every day, she will come, the muse will come to you.

So many of your former students have had successes of their own. How has being a teacher affected your own writing?

By learning to teach I have learned to teach myself.

What is the best advice you can give to a writer finding her/his voice and subject matter?

Try to ignore your subject matter, your obsessions. Suppress the agenda. Go into the place. Your subject matter will be waiting there for you anyway. It may be in an unfamiliar guise or in disguise, and you won’t recognize it. But don’t worry, it will find you. As for voice remember that you are more than one person. You have voices you don’t know about, and they don’t even know each other.

I loved your prose poem book The Chair. Do you have a different process for writing prose poems?

Sometimes I can’t get the lines right, and then I notice that the narrative has a fable-like quality. Then I know it is a prose poem. The prose poem might be pissed. It coulda been a poem or even a story. But now it knows it won’t get to be in those nice lines and stanzas. And even if it is a story, it will be a story in which nothing happens.

What are you currently working on?

I have been finding poems in my laptop files. It is easier to find poems than to write poems.

Have you read anything recently that really got you excited?

Anything by Terrence Hayes. And I found an article I had lost years ago and searched for online unsuccessfully, until now. It is about a strange garden in Italy. Edmund Wilson, “The Monsters of Bomarzo.”

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

Of course there are the heroes that overcome real trouble. As for myself I think of the adversity of the everyday. Even without outside help I can provide my own adversity. I am my own adversity. Having no adversity can be an adversity.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I can play the jaw harp. I am really a sensitive guy.

About the Author:

Poet and writer Richard Garcia was born in San Francisco and started writing in his teenage years. He is the author of six books of poetry: The Flying Garcias (University of Pittsburg Press, 1991); Rancho Notorious (BOA Editions, 2001); The Persistence of Objects (BOA Editions, 2006); Chickenhead, a chapbook of prose poems (Foothills Publishing, 2009); The Other Odyssey (Dream Horse Press, 2013); and The Chair (BOA Editions, 2014). He has also written My Aunt Otilia’s Spirits, a bilingual children’s book (Children’s Book Press,1978). He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, and the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. His poems appear in journals such as The Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, and The Georgia Review, and in several anthologies, among them The Best American Poetry 2005, Touching the Fire, Seriously Funny and The Best of the Prose Poem. From 1991-2002, he was a Poet-in-Residence at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, where he conducted poetry and art workshops for hospitalized children. Garcia teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Low-Residency MFA program. He lives on James Island, South Carolina, with his wife, Katherine Williams, and their dogs Sully and Max.

Internet Literary News, July 2014

In July, I found myself looking back at some literary masters, publishers looking at new ways to sell books, writers thriving on social media, and a few lessons, bad and good, in our ongoing efforts to live the writing life. Please enjoy.

– Martin Ott

The Loss of Nadine Gordimer

I was saddened to hear the news of the loss of one of my favorite writers Nadine Gordimer. In a year of saying goodbye to some of our best writers, this one hurts.

Issues of Re-Issues

Writers have a hard enough time finding readership — do we really have to worry about deceased literary heavyweights vying for a share of the marketplace? Last month, I highlighted new poems from Neruda. In July, Grove announced that it is issuing a lost story from Samuel Beckett. Scribner is also reissuing Hemingway’s classic novel The Sun Also Rises with a previously discarded first chapter. It seems as though publishers are starting to mimic movie studios in the way they mine old material to obtain a new audience.

Don’t Go Into Poetry for the Money, Honey

Kate Angus penned a great article at The Millions about how, even with the proliferation of MFA graduates and the hard work of small press and mainstream publishers, Americans seems to love poetry just not poetry books.

Writers Who Run the Literary Internet?

Flavorwire published a spotlight on 35 writers who run the literary internet. While it looks as though a few on the list purchased followers and  reach on Twitter, most of the writers highlighted here are worth following.

Let Amazon Run the Library System (It Runs Everything Else in Literature)

No Forbes isn’t the Onion, but it saw fit to publish Tim Worstall’s article “Close the Libraries and Buy Everyone an Amazon Kindle Unlimited Subscription. We all know the public library system is no engine of efficiency, but it provides more than just books to our communities (such as computer and internet access). Digitization is part of the future, obviously, but we need to find a way to support those of us who can’t afford the internet fast lane.

Odds and Ends

Here’s a few other links I found entertaining:

– The First Asian American Superhero: The Green Turtle

– What Writers Can Learn from Goodnight Moon

– Computer Engineering: a Fine Day Job for a Poet