How Douglas Cole Became a Writer

I liked the way in writing I also felt like I was doing something magical. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I went chasing after that feeling ever since.

 

Douglas Cole has had work in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Rock Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He has published two poetry collections—Interstate (Night Ballet Press) and Western Dream (Finishing Line Press)—as well as a novella called Ghost with Blue Cubicle Press. He is currently on the faculty at Seattle Central College in Seattle, Washington.

Featured at Talking Writing: This interview is part of a partnership with Talking Writing magazine. The How to Become a Writer Series here at PhD in Creative Writing includes interviews with Talking Writing’s featured writers. Here is the beginngin of Douglas’s story “Wanderers” published at Talking Writing:

Out in the dark field, Ronnie was running. I was running, but my gut was too full of beer to keep it up. She came back with a few deep breaths and hands on hips. John wasn’t even trying. I love that guy, but he’s soft in the middle—a soft, Connecticut, slow-moving mescaline freak.

Read more by and about Douglas:

Story: “Wanderers” at Talking Writing

Story: “Standing In Hawaii” at Baltimore Review

Poem: “Counsel” at Eckleberg Review

Three Poems at Black Heart Magazine

How Douglas Cole Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series at Ph.D. in Creative Writing. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Talking Writing for sharing their writers, and thanks to Douglas for his answers!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

When I was a kid in school, one of my English teachers assigned Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. It was the first book I ever read all the way through. I was hooked, you know? I couldn’t put it down and just became completely absorbed in it. It was very addictive and set me on a voracious reading journey. I think that was when I first caught a glimpse of the magic of words and stories. Later, in another English class, my teacher, Mrs. Sheridan, had us write a descriptive piece. We were sitting in class, so I decided to just describe what I saw around me in the room. I don’t remember it, except I remember that I ended it with a description of a poster on the wall of a ballet dancer and the words at the bottom of the poster: Twyla Tharp. I was just fooling around, but she liked it and ended up reading it to the class. I liked that feeling. I liked feeling good at something. And I liked the way in writing I also felt like I was doing something magical. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I went chasing after that feeling ever since.

2. How did you go about becoming a writer?

I read everything I could, everything that I thought would teach me something, even if I didn’t think I liked it at the time, like if I had heard it was an important work. If a teacher assigned a story or a poem and I liked it, I’d go find that writer’s books. I’d go to Moe’s Bookstore and in a groping way just scan other books and read the first paragraph if a title caught my eye, give it that test and see if it grabbed me. And once I started something I would never put it down without finishing it. I felt almost a moral obligation to go all the way. And if I found writers I liked, I would absorb everything I could. I’d read everything they had written, even biographies and critical stuff on them and their work. I realize I was listening like a safe-cracker. And I treated everything as somehow connected, or I’d look for a connection. Movies, for example, and how a filmmaker tells a story and sets a pace and a mood and works an image. Music, the same thing. How does a song work like a poem or a story, or what does it do differently that can be converted, and what does it do that I want to do? All my classes in college: philosophy, history, science, weight training, tennis! What could they contribute? How did they relate? What could they teach me that would work for writing? I was that conscious about it. Friends? Any moment? I always thought in terms of creating. Not to sound pretentious, but I remember reading Joyce say that he wanted to convert the bread of everyday to the holy host. I took it that seriously.

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

Charlie, Chris and Mike Steele. I met them when I was sixteen. Chris was going to PSR, the Pacific School of Religion, where my mother was a student. She and my mother were friends. And Chris brought her brother Charlie down to stay, there in Berkeley, right after he had finished college, and he and I became friends. On my seventeenth birthday, he gave me a copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude with a big fat joint taped to the inside cover. Then their brother Mike came down a little while later. He was an actor and a musician and a writer. They were all talented musicians and writers and scholars, just beautiful people, physically, energetically. And they had such a rich vocabulary for the world and love for art and music and literature. Charlie turned me on to Richard Hugo and Joni Mitchel and Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. They were intellectuals, poets, people who lived with passion and never said a dull thing or yawned. And I connected with them right away. They inspired me to love even more deeply what I already loved, and they helped make my love of the arts cool. They’re still my family. I love them dearly and feel I owe them a great deal in terms of finding what would be the only real community I ever wanted in connection to writing. I’ve always been pretty private about it.

4. Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Reading Douglas Day’s biography of Malcolm Lowery was almost as harrowing as reading Under the Volcano. I knew I was reading a genius, though, when I read Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce. I couldn’t finish The World as a Lie, though, the biography of James Dickey. And that’s unusual for me. I love Dickey’s work, of course, but I was going through some rough time, to be honest, and I just couldn’t handle it. I still intend to go back and read it. I think that’s one of the only times I can remember not finishing something I started. But as I get older, I’ve come to let go of that imperative a little. When you have less time, you treat it more dearly. I love biographies, though. When I’m in a good one, it’s like time travel or shape-shifting. A crazy leap into another world. Negative capability. Cold but intimate friends.

5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Read. Read everything you can. Study the world and write all the time in all forms and no form at all. Just write. Don’t even think about publishing or money or fame. Just write and reach for that illusive image in your mind. I love what William Faulkner said when he received the National book award. He said “I accept this on behalf of all, who like me, failed. Failed to create what we imagined in our minds, but in failing set out to get closer the next time.” Keep your crap detector on, especially with yourself. But also have compassion. We’re all struggling. So be open. Think. Look for the connections. Experiment and be joyous. Like John Gardner said, “Write what you’d like to read.” Write and write and write freely without concern for punctuation or intellectual coherence. Follow music, like Hugo said. Meaning will come. And when you revise, revise ruthlessly. But always save a holy space for the private prayer of writing with no intention for public consumption. That’s your gold. That’s your soul. Never sign anything in blood except for love. Dive into the dream and the unconscious ocean. Steal without guilt. See through the eye that’s seeing and record your vision in whatever languages you know or create. Have no fear. You’re always all right.

How CL Bledsoe Became a Writer

Today is the first day of CL Bledsoe’s virtual book tour celebrating Man of Clay, a novel with elements of magical realism and a dash of steampunk. This funny, engaging story redefines what Southern Literature is capable of being. Man of Clay can be pre-ordered today!

CL Bledsoe is the author of four poetry collections, one short story collection, and five novels, including the Necro-Files series. His stories, poems, essays, plays, and reviews have been published in hundreds of literary journals, including Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Arkansas Review, Pank, Potomac Review, and many others. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize thirteen times, Best of the Net four times, and has had two stories selected as Notable Stories of the year by Story South’s Million Writers Award. Bledsoe currently lives in Alexandria, VA, with his daughter.

Read More By and About CL:

Short Story: “Mouth”

Short Story: “Texas Never Whispers”

Poem: “The Sad Lobster Speaks”

Poems: “Roaches” and “Anthem” in Story South

Interview: By Cervena Barva Press

Interview: By Etopia Press

Poetry Book: Riceland

Novel: The Necro-Files: $7.50/Hr + Curses

Essay: “My First Critic”

Essay: “Thesis”

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to CL for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

I was raised by storytellers, so it was a natural progression to want to tell stories myself. I grew up in the rural South on a farm, and my dad, brother, and uncles were always telling stories. Everything was a narrative to them. If you asked if someone had seen a movie or TV show or read a book, there was no “yes” or “no” answer; instead, you got a story about the experience. And they were entertaining stories. I’ve always been enthralled by the abilities of good storytellers who can control an audience. Stories, specifically books, but movies, and comedy performances also, were the only things that really provided comfort for me when I was growing up, but more than that, stories were exciting. I had an unusual and difficult childhood, and I never saw much gain from church or school or the social conventions one was supposed to pursue but didn’t seem particularly welcoming to me. Similarly, we were poor and the farm was struggling to stay afloat. There wasn’t a lot of hope or optimism around. But stories showed people with dignity and wisdom and all those things that we’re taught matter when we’re little kids, but we learn don’t really exist in any reliable sense when we grow up. Stories reconstructed the world into something better. In a good story, there is a God—the storyteller—and s/he does care about the characters, loves them, even when s/he makes them suffer. In that sense, it’s pure escapism for me. It’s a better world, but it’s a true world because it presents people we strive to be. And, most importantly, it shows us what we can be.

2. How did you go about becoming a writer?

When I was a kid, I’d play “writer.” I’d gather up whatever office supplies I could get a hold of—crayons and paper, glue sticks, scissors—and sit at our big dining room table and…mostly make messes.

When I got older and more serious, I struggled quite a bit to work out the various conventions of writing novels and short stories, especially, but also poems. I didn’t realize that writing IS that struggle. I went to college to learn how to write. I worked my ass off. All around me, I saw folks calling themselves writers who lacked work ethic. Not me. I took every suggestion I could get and tried them all. I’d submit something for workshop every week, if I was allowed. I set up off-campus workshops in addition to my classwork, and provided new material for all of them constantly. This was because I was a really rough writer, but I wanted to improve.

I started sending work out to literary journals as an undergrad because that was something I understood. I’d been on the staff of one in high school, but they wouldn’t publish me until I purposefully wrote something about Jesus, which they snatched right up. In college, I cast the net pretty wide. I’d send out work to fifty places at a time. Most would reject me. I started targeting places I’d seen the grad students get published in, and I had some success. My first big publication was in Nimrod as an undergrad. That was quickly followed by Story South. I had certain journals I aimed for and loved, and these weren’t usually the popular ones. I remember the first time I placed something with Clackamas Literary Review, which I considered one of the best journals out there but I’m sure most people have never heard of. Hobart was another real coup, though it has become, deservedly, pretty high-profile. I’ve continued submitting work to those kinds of journals—solid journals that aren’t necessarily hip but publish good work. I’ve been in plenty of hip journals—and I realized pretty quickly that popularity had nothing to do with quality. The same way my high school journal wanted Jesus poems, these hip journals wanted whatever fads. I’ve never been a cool kid, but I have been guilty of trying to follow the fads on occasion.

“The writers and artists I most admire are those who labored, at times in total obscurity, just to create their art. Henry Darger, the outsider artist/writer, comes to mind.”

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

I never really had a mentor, per se, which I regret—it was kind of one of the main reasons I went to grad school—but a ton of people have helped me, and still help me. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know a lot of publishers, editors, and other writers, and I think that most of us understand that we have to help each other. More than that, we enjoy it. I don’t want to name a lot of names, but I’ll narrow it down to two major groups of folks. The first group was centered around The Arkansas Review. I’ll expand this to include several folks not really connected to AR but who are connected to Arkansas, where I was born and raised. Several, several folks have helped me by publishing me, promoting my work, and just being friendly, because we all are either from Arkansas or are connected to it. We’d reach out to each other and share stories about being away from “home,” and we’d promote each other’s work. Along the same lines, when I moved to the Baltimore area, I met so many wonderful writers and promoters who have invited me to read or submit writing to their journals. Baltimore has an incredibly vibrant literary scene, really supportive but also wild. I love reading in Baltimore. Maybe somebody gets drunk and heckles you, or maybe somebody takes their clothes off, but they listen. And they’ll buy you a drink afterwards.

4. Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Some terrible instructor asked me, once, what my goals were as a writer. I told him I wanted to be a mid-list writer, plugging away, pumping out books on university presses without a lot of accompanying fanfare or drama. I was being an asshole, but I was also not. I am definitely more of a tortoise than a hare when it comes to writing, and the writers and artists I most admire are those who labored, at times in total obscurity, just to create their art. Henry Darger, the outsider artist/writer, comes to mind. Van Gogh. Emily Dickinson. Wilhelm Stekel was quoted in Catcher in the Rye when Holden’s former teacher tells him, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” That’s how I feel about writing and art, and I admire those who live accordingly, in the same way that I admire those who live their lives humbly. Writing, for me, is more about life than lifestyle.

5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Only do it if you have no choice. A friend once told me that we’re writers because we’re damaged in such a way that this is how we communicate. I have to write; it’s a physical necessity. If I don’t write, I get anxious, depressed, antsy. It’s how I process and think and live and love. If this doesn’t make sense to you, go do something else.

Having said all that, I think the greatest lesson to learn about writing is to be open, which is also the greatest lesson to learn about life. Read voraciously—not just within your own preferred genre—and write voraciously. Don’t worry about what others will think of what you’ve written until you’re revising, if even then. And be open to every opportunity you find, or that finds you.

Be kind to yourself. Write every day, except when you don’t. Fuck up and start over.

Follow along with the Man of Clay virtual book tour by heading to [PANK] tomorrow!

 

 

My Writing Process – Blog Tour

I was initially invited to participate in this Writing Process Blog Tour by the fabulous Rebecca Meacham, whose fiction I admired even before the publication of her debut and award-winning story collection, Let’s Do. She was ahead of me by a few years in my Ph.D. program and I always admired and looked up to her – despite the fact that I think she’s a foot shorter than I am. Check out her post from last week.

Then, when I was just about to send a message to My Go-To Guy – the dangerously charming and talented Joseph Bates, author of the story collection Tomorrowland – inviting him to participate, I received a text from him, and he was inviting me. Like at the exact same time! Since he was up first, we decided he could tag me, and I’d tag other writers. Check out his post here, and see below for the three awesome writers who agreed to do it next week.

So anyway. Here are the questions and here are my answers.

1) What are you working on?

My personal life, mostly. It’s been a year in which I’ve felt more like a character in a novel than creator of characters. And things are never easy for characters in novels. So many internal and external conflicts! So many unexpected plot twists and cliffhangers! Obstacles! Antagonists! Only now do I feel that things are settling down enough that I can be the kind of character I prefer: Mrs. Dalloway wandering the streets of London, pausing as Big Ben rings another hour (irrevocable) and pondering the messages of aeroplanes.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I am not very generically stable. Fortunately I’ve found a publisher – Rose Metal Press – whose mission is to mix-and-match genres. I sent them the manuscript for Liliane’s Balcony, calling it a “novella-in-flash.” I’d never heard of such a thing, but they were like, yeah, sure, we love novellas-in-flash. This fall they’re publishing a collection of five novellas-in-flash.

Rose Metal Press is also going to publish my next book, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová, which I am calling a collage biography. It’s all found texts from books and letters and internet sites. It’s also got images – photos, collages. It may or may not also include postcards that I’ve been writing to Božena. Stuff about my aforementioned personal life.

3) Why do you write what you do?

I go to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house on a chance trip to Ohiopyle, PA, I take a tour, I am overcome by the place, by its natural and architectural beauty, I think OMG I have to write a story set here, I listen to the tour guide who tells of the Kaufmann family who purchased the house, I remember being a kid in Pittsburgh and going to the Kaufmann department store, I think, “Same folks?” I go home and read up on the house and the Kaufmanns and I learn that the wife Liliane was beautiful and smart and tri-lingual and an art collector that her life ended in an overdose of pills in her bedroom at Fallingwater. I start writing.

Or. I go to Prague on a chance trip, I buy a book of Czech fairy tales for my daughter, I notice that there’s a picture of a woman (a woman!) on my Czech money and that her name matches the name on the fairy tale book, I do some research to learn more about her, I find conflicting info, poor translations, and outdated material, I find that someone has translated some of her letters and they are nothing like what I expected based on the research, and I take all my notes and quotes and arrange them until they tell some combination of her life and the impossibility of telling it.

4) How does your writing process work?

My favorite part is the research. I don’t think we talk enough about the importance of research, or the fun of it. You get to work on your writing project without actually writing, and research gets you excited and loaded with ideas so that you can’t help but write.

For Liliane’s Balcony, I volunteered as an Ask-Me Guide at Fallingwater, traveling to Ohiopyle, PA once a month and volunteering all weekend, talking to visitors and employees. I traveled to Cincinnati where I uncovered an archive of letters from Edgar Kaufmann to Liliane. I took photos of each letter, transcribed them at home, and incorporated excerpts into my book. I toured Wright’s other houses in Chicago. All of this informed and inspired my writing.

For my Božena Němcová project, I took a month-long Czech language class in Prague, visited her home town of České Skalice, and toured the extensive museum dedicated to her in the town. (I also got totally lost in this unpopulated village of non-English speakers.) I went to a used bookstore in Prague and bought old copies of her books to make collages. Most recently, I bought a 1968 Czech typewriter on eBay. All part of the writing process.

A sketch I made of Bozena’s glasses, pen, notebook, and rosary displayed at her museum in Ceska Skalice.

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Here are the three writers who I have tagged for next week. And when I say ‘tag,’ I picture myself holding a magic wand that sparkles as I touch it to their shoulders.

Donna Miscolta is the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, and her story collection Natalie Wood’s Fake Puerto Rican Accent was selected by Peter Ho Davies as a finalist for the 2010 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. She has received over a dozen grants and fellowships and has been awarded artist residencies at Anderson Center for the Interdisciplinary Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. See her website and blog at www.donnamiscolta.com. [I also interviewed Donna for my How to Become a Writer series!]

David Dodd Lee is the author of eight full-length books of poems and a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), and The Coldest Winter On Earth (Marick Press, 2012). His newest book, Animalities, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in October, 2014. [He also makes gorgeous collages! Visit: http://seventeenfingeredpoetrybird.blogspot.com/]

Margaret Patton Chapman is the author of the novella-in-flash, Bell and Bargain, forthcoming in My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press 2014). http://margaretpattonchapman.com/

How Jessica Tyner Became a Writer

Publishing is just like dating.
Just because one editor doesn’t like it, or even hates it,
doesn’t mean another won’t fall in love with it.

Jessica Tyner, born and raised in Oregon, is a member of the Cherokee Nation, a Pushcart Prize nominee and a graduate of the Ooligan Press program. She received her master’s degree in Writing from Portland State University, having completed the second year of the program as an intern with the Fulbright Commission in London, England. An extensive traveler, she has lived in England, South Korea and Costa Rica and has had her poetry published around the world. She’s the founder of The Jessica Tyner Scholarship Fund, an annual gift for graduate students with a Native American connection who are pursuing an advanced degree in writing or a related field.

Read more by and about Jessica:

Book of Poems: The Last Exotic Petting Zoo

Poems: “The Carving Station” and “Bronco Bustling”

Poem: “Love You More”

Poems: “Two Days Prior to the Burial” and “How to Oil an Indian Man’s Hair”

How Jessica Tyner Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Jessica for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

Writing has always come naturally to me, but I grew up in the era where those with an English degree could “only” be teachers. This was right before the boom of SEO, web content writing, monetized blogging and other potentially lucrative writing careers. I pursued an undergrad degree in English followed by a master’s in writing based on pure passion. Throughout my academic career, I worked for non-profits writing grant proposals and marketing materials—always publishing my own poetry on the side. However, it took my department being shut down and a fluke of a segue into freelancing to discover that writing really can be a “real” career. The simple answer is “always,” though. I’ve always known I’m a writer, but I don’t think it’s something you become. You can definitely, constantly improve your writing skills, but I think for most writers it’s something we’re born with.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

I got into the non-profit field via a work-study position. My university placed me with Oregon Literacy, a local non-profit, simply because they thought the words “English major” and “Literacy” went hand in hand. I had a knack for grant writing, and it was the first time I was paid for writing so I stuck with this industry probably longer than I should. Honestly, my first freelance gig came about when I was perusing Craigslist after my department got laid off. One ad was for a writer for a short-term project, and was rich with arrogance and elitism. I just had to write to the poster to let him know my thoughts on such a haughty ad. He ended up being my first project manager—we worked together for years.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

In terms of becoming a successful professional writer, that Craigslist poster was the biggest boost. From a poetic standpoint, my undergraduate poetry professor, Michele Glazer, was hugely inspirational. I’m sending her a copy of my book with a note of thanks. I still remember the best (I think) piece of advice she gave us: “You should memorize poems because if you’re ever put into solitary confinement, you need beautiful words besides your own in your head.” I actually wrote a poem about that advice, and still remember many of the poems I memorized for her classes, particularly Kim Addonizio’s “What Do Women Want?”.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

I’m a big fan of Li-Young Lee. He was born into a family that was literally exiled, and into a country that wasn’t his own. His history is steeped in political strife, yet his work centers on the self and love, much like my own. He also married into a different culture. I greatly admire what he’s achieved, and even after years of reading and re-reading his work, he continues to have the ability to manipulate my emotions with ease.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Grow a tough, thick skin and don’t let anyone tell you that a creative degree is useless—but don’t be passive either. As a writer, you need to forge your own path and work much harder than many in other industries. I had an editor of a journal write a nasty personal letter to me once calling a particular poem clichéd. That same poem was nominated for a Pushcart. Publishing is just like dating. Just because one editor doesn’t like it, or even hates it, doesn’t mean another won’t fall in love with it. Believe in yourself and your work, but write every single day (even when it hurts) and look for new publishing opportunities relentlessly. Unfortunately, many writers fall into the stereotype of being flaky and missing deadlines. I know because I’ve hired quite a few. Be the exception, blend business savviness with your writing skills, and you’ll have an edge.

How Zarina Zabrisky Became a Writer

This is one stop on Zarina’s virtual book tour.
Keep up with the rest of the tour here!

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I have a tattoo on my wrist: You must become who you are. It is a quote from Nietzsche.

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of two short story collections IRON and A CUTE TOMBSTONE (Epic Rites Press) and a novel WE, MONSTERS (Numina Press). Zabrisky’s work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award. Read more about the author at zarinazabrisky.com. You can purchase A CUTE TOMBSTONE here.

Read more by and about Zarina:

Story: “The Twilight of Liberty”

Video: Zarina reading “Pig Legs.”

Short Story Collection: Iron

Novel: We, Monsters

Interview:The Nervous Breakdown

How Zarina Zabrisky Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Zarina for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

I wrote my first poem at six.  My first novel at eleven. There was no “why.” But if I have to rationalize, I would love to quote Josef Brodsky: “I’ll just say that I believe – not empirically, alas, but only theoretically – that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.” So, I figure, if I write anything anywhere close to Dickens… at least, I can try.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

It is not becoming a writer for me. It is being a writer.
I was in Queretaro at a writing workshop last summer. I wrote a poem there:

There is a knitting shop
On the corner
And three old women are knitting,
Needles dancing.
Their faces are still, bronze,
Their eyes fixed on the wall,
Not on the knitting.
Their fingers know
How to weave.
Their hands remember everything.
Their patterns come from their hearts
Or, maybe, from the spirits that live on that big invisible mountain.

They don’t knit,
They became the knitting.
Same for me:
I don’t write–
I became the writing,
And my fingers dance blindly
Across the page.

As for becoming oneself, I am still working on it… I have a tattoo on my wrist: You must become who you are. It is a quote from Nietzsche.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

My father liked my writing before he passed away. He didn’t do or say anything that stuck in my memory but I remember his face softening and the expression of pride or happiness in his usually sad or withdrawn eyes. Then I became a closet writer and no one had an opportunity to help me–they did not know I needed help.  I didn’t know that myself.

I found a whole new dimension of helping each other in the creative process through literary collaboration with my writing and life partner, Simon Rogghe.  Through listening to each other, and hearing, we write and discover. Being heard is the most important–and almost impossible–type of help that a writer can use, I think.  Together, we have gone on many adventures: performing our poetry to music and even dancing it and taking it around the country–from Pittsburgh and Cleveland to Seattle and Portland; writing poetry duets on an imaginary journey in Mexico and creating visual concepts for it.  This went so well that the book of collaborative poetry is forthcoming from amazing Numina Press, in November 2014.  The book is called Green Lions and in it I will debut with my illustrations–the visual concepts found together with Simon.

I was also very lucky to have my publishers, Epic Rites Press (Canada), Numina Press (SF) and Nostrovia Press (mobile and everywhere) work with me and support my books.  The independent publishers are passionate, powerful and insanely talented people, of a rare kind.

Vaslav Nijinsky

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

So many… From Salinger who managed to run away from it all to just write, to Vaslav Nijinsky, a legendary ballet dance, whose diary was the book that impressed me the most, perhaps. Nijinsky is the dancer who became the dance.  The diary was written in Switzerland in a short spurt, and in a matter of weeks schizophrenia won over one of the most unusual and creative minds of the last century.  But before he sank into decades of mental non-being, Nijinsky pulled up the curtain of the theater which only can be called Universe.  There is no bullshit in that book.  He even says that it should be read the way he wrote it: in his rushed cursive, in French and Russian. I did that: went to the NYC Performing Arts Library and ordered the microflims.  Read them in the dark room for hours…  Also, Jim Morrison.  William Blake.  I am inspired by people who stayed true to their core and vision despite of any circumstances.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

“You must become who you are.” Also, write and read. In particular, read Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading. The only good book on writing I have found.  The book cuts into the bone marrow of language, brain work and the intangible realm called poetry. No frills and no politically correct New Agey nonsense. He can be blunt and rude, but if you read his ABC you might end up with better writing.

How Kathleen Rooney Became a Writer

I’ve always loved the feeling that reading gives—like the author is letting you in on some mystery, big or small: the mystery of a huge world event or the mystery of a private individual consciousness.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She is the author, most recently of the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake, 2012) and her debut novel O, Democracy!has just been released by Fifth Star Press. She lives in Chicago. Her latest chapbook with Elisa Gabbert is The Kind of Beauty that has Nowhere to Go (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Follow her @KathleenMRooney.

Web site: http://kathleenrooney.com/

Read more by and about Kathleen

Novel: O Democracy!

Novel in Poems: Robinson Alone

Essay at Poetry Foundation: Based on a True Story. Or not.

Project: Poems While You Wait

5 Poems with Elissa Gabbert: Five Poems

How Kathleen Rooney Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Kathleen for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

Mysteries. Not like mystery novels, but the mysteries of the world—supernatural, mysteries-of-the-unexplained type mysteries, the mysteries of why people act the way they do, religious mysteries, mysteries of history, especially those that involve once-popular things that have long since been forgotten. From the time I learned how to read up until the present day, I’ve always loved the feeling that reading gives—like the author is letting you in on some mystery, big or small: the mystery of a huge world event or the mystery of a private individual consciousness. Also from the time I learned how to read I wanted to do that, too—to have that sense of discovery you get when you are trying to write about something, either through research or through the act of trying to sort your ideas out on the page.

I’ve always wanted to be a detective, like a private investigator a la Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe and since that seems not to be in the offing, being a writer seems like the next best thing. Private detectives and investigators have always intrigued me, at least as they’re depicted on shows like or The Rockford Files or Murder She Wrote or Magnum P.I. Columbo, I guess, is the exception, in that he is an official—a police detective and not a private one—but he’s so unrealistically so—I mean, he’s basically an angel—that he makes the list too.The Wikipedia page for Sam Spade says that he is notable for his “detached demeanor, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice.” All three of those seem like writerly traits—the degree of removed observation necessary to understand how people act, the intention of getting the details right, and the impulse to shape a story into the form or outcome you desire.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

This is not an original answer, but: I read. A lot. Everything. I still do. All genres from poetry to fiction to cereal boxes to nonfiction to comics to newspapers to magazines both high-minded and trashy. Formally, I studied creative writing from high school through grad school, and that formal education was certainly important in terms of becoming a writer, but I’m not sure it was more important than just trying to “be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” like Henry James recommended.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

This, too, is probably not such an original answer, but I had brilliant English teachers when I was in high school: Beth van Es my freshman year, Irv Lester (RIP) my sophomore year, Jane Rice my junior year, and Linda Augustyn my senior year. They were supportive and encouraging to me at an early age—all four of them took my aspirations and my earnest dorkiness seriously and at face value and went out of their ways to help me become a better reader and writer. Essentially, they treated me like an adult and a whole human, not like someone to condescend to. The same can be said of my undergraduate teachers, especially Margaret Soltan (whose excellent blog you can find here http://www.margaretsoltan.com/) and Tara Wallace. And of my graduate teachers John Skoyles and Bill Knott (RIP), the latter of whom taught me how to be a contrarian when necessary and how to be a teacher—he was so sincere in his love of poetry and so incapable of bullshit and so determined to try to help everyone be a better reader and writer and thinker. He died earlier this year, and that was a huge loss, I think, to everyone who knew and read him.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

The poet and writer Weldon Kees’ biography—from his Midwestern roots and early promise to his likely very sad and mysterious demise (Did he run away to Mexico? Or did he jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?) inspired me so much I wrote a book about him, Robinson Alone. In his introduction to Kees’ Collected Poems, Donald Justice writes that Kees is “one of the bitterest poets in history,” and that “the bitterness may be traced to a profound hatred for a botched civilization, Whitman’s America come to a dead end on the shores of the Pacific.” I like his bitterness, because it is also smart and sad and sharp and funny. Kees was an optimist, and his capacity for deep disappointment came from his equal capacity for deep hope. I admire that.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Indirectly, from Fred Leebron, “Writing is a game of attrition; don’t attrit.”

 

How Theresa Williams Became a Writer

I think my biggest epiphany about writing was fairly recent: it happened when I remembered how much fun writing was when I was a child.

Theresa Williams is a University Lecturer and author of The Secret of Hurricanes (MacAdam/Cage 2002). Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, Hunger Mountain, and other magazines, and poems in a number of magazines, including Gargoyle, DMQ Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lilliput Review, Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, Apple Valley Review. Her chapbook, The Galaxy to Ourselves, was published in 2012. She is the creator of The Letter Project, an online repository for actual letters–written and sent.

Featured at Talking Writing: This interview is part of a partnership with Talking Writing magazine. The How to Become a Writer Series here at PhD in Creative Writing now includes interviews with Talking Writing’s featured writers.

Read more by and about Theresa:

Essay at Talking Writing: I Hear the Woods Beating

Novel: The Secret of Hurricanes

Chapbook: The Galaxy to Ourselves

How Theresa Williams Became a Writer
This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Theresa for saying yes!

1. Why did you want to become a writer?

I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but the desire to be a writer evolved much more slowly. The first step was when I took my first fiction workshop at East Carolina University. I took it on a lark. That’s what started my adult writing life. But I think my biggest epiphany about writing was fairly recent: it happened when I remembered how much fun writing was when I was a child. I used to make newsletters to entertain my friends. I’m back to that concept now: writing for fun. It’s glorious!

2. How did you go about becoming a writer?


University classes got me started. But it was hard to maintain the writing life after graduation. After I finished the MFA, I didn’t write for five years. When I started writing again, it was like starting all over. It took a lot of soul searching. I had to force myself to go into my writing room and slave away. It was like digging holes in hard dirt. Now my writing life isn’t separate from the rest of my life, and, as I said earlier, I’m having fun.

3. Who helped you along the way, and how?

Without a doubt, the editors who published my early work. They gave me hope, and without hope, all is pretty much lost. I still credit editors of magazines, big and small, with keeping writing alive, not just for me, but for many people.


4. Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

I’m inspired by writers and artists who overcame great obstacles to keep writing and making art. I look to writers like James Wright and Theodore Roethke who had mental conditions that affected their ability to write. James Wright wrote a lot of tortured poetry, but he also wrote things like:

Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.

5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Actually, I write lots of letters to aspiring writers. I believe in letters and encourage people to write letters. In my letters, I remind aspiring writers to read a lot and to write a lot. I remind them that they are unique and have things to say. I tell them that if they write with honesty, people will want to read what they write.

I also try to answer their questions about writing honestly and to give them the sense they have truly been “heard.” Despite all the connections we make on social media, I think a lot of people suffer from the condition of not being heard, so they learn to hide their innermost desires as a form of self-protection. It’s like putting their diamonds in a lock box where they will be safe. The problem with a lock box is that the beauty isn’t accessible. Eventually, one even forgets it’s there. The diamonds are our imagination, our art, our spirit–what keeps us truly alive.

Joseph Cornell, Taglioni’s Jewel Casket (Image from MOMA)

How Marcela Sulak Became a Writer

I immersed myself in new situations and surroundings all the time—I lived in South Bend, Indiana; Philadelphia; Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic; Rottenberg am Neckar, Germany; Caracas, Venezuela; Austin, Washington, DC, and Tel Aviv. I had a baby. All of these things make the world absolutely new—or maybe they made me new, and forced me to reinvent language and my relationship to it.

Marcela Sulak was born and raised on a rice farm in South Texas.  She attended The University of Texas at Austin, where she received a BA in Psychology and Honors English.  She received an MFA and an MA at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, winning the William Mitchell Award for Best Graduate Creative Thesis. She holds an MA in Religious Studies from VillaNova University, and her Ph.D. in English is from The University of Texas at Austin with concentrations in Poetry and Poetics, American Literature, and a certificate in European Studies. She is a four-time recipient of the Academy of American Poetry Prize, and has won five FLAS prizes for the study of Czech and Yiddish. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and the chapbook Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best (Finishing Line Press). Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as  Guernica, The Black Warrior Review, The Cimarron Review, The Notre Dame Review, Fence, The Indiana Review, The Cortland Review, Quarterly West, Third Coast and No Tell Motel, among others.

Website: http://www.marcelasulak.com/

Read more by and about Marcela:

Book of Poems: Immigrant

Chapbook: Of all the things that don’t exist, I love you best

Translation: A Bouquet of Czech Folktales

Poem at Guernica: Marriage

Poem at Cortland Review: Jerusalem, a ghazal

How Marcela Sulak Became a Writer
This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Marcela for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

I am not sure I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to become a reader. I grew up on a rice farm five miles outside of a town of 250 or so (the town was not incorporated), so I read a lot.  All the time, in fact. And when my siblings and I were outside, our immediate world was mediated through the stories my father and my maternal grandparents told about it—we grew up a mile from where my father did, and ten miles from where my mother was raised. I grew up with the expectation that everything around me contained a story.  I suppose I began to write in order to have a dialogue, to add to the family conversation with the land and with one another, and with the books I read.

The world portrayed in books never matched the world of our rice farm, though; we did not have snow or really much of a change in seasons. We had no highrise buildings or elevators—I must have been in high school before I saw either an elevator or an escalator. And since this was the end of the twentieth century, not the end of the nineteenth century, I realized later, my experience was unusual.  At any rate, after I left the farm, I found the world a pretty exotic place. It gave me the sense of a foreigner everywhere I went. Somehow, this feeling seems to be conducive to writing.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

I read a lot, everything in the public library and school library. I began to keep a journal when I was twelve and have kept it ever since. I try to free write in the journal for at least 30 minutes a day—everything from new words to recipes to names of birds to things that happened to me or things I saw. I also studied literature at university and creative writing in graduate school. But what really helped me become a writer was simply the practice of reading and writing.

Also, I immersed myself in new situations and surroundings all the time—I lived in South Bend, Indiana; Philadelphia; Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic; Rottenberg am Neckar, Germany; Caracas, Venezuela; Austin, Washington, DC, and Tel Aviv. I had a baby. All of these things make the world absolutely new—or maybe they made me new, and forced me to reinvent language and my relationship to it. They certainly forced me to renegotiate my relationship to the world. This can be exhausting, but there is nothing like the perspective it gives you.

I did my MFA straight out of undergraduate, but that was really too early for me. I needed to expand my horizons first.  I worked as an English teacher, free lance writer and university adjunct instructor for ten years, then went back to graduate school, and that’s when I started publishing poems in journals. I also translated poetry, and my first book-length translation of poetry was published before my first book of poems.  As for my poems, I just kept writing them, editing them (by which I mean throwing most of them away and cutting the others quite a bit) until one day I had enough that weren’t completely awful to start thinking about a book.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

In sixth grade my teacher introduced me to her friend, Mrs. Mickey Huffstutler, who was a “real poet.” I think she even drove me to meet her at her house in another town the first time. Mrs. Huffstutler introduced me to prosody and received forms, and told me I needed to frame my highly subjective impressions of the world, and to write more concretely—to use nouns and verbs instead of adjectives. Also, I needed to give the reader a frame or a place to enter the poem, thereby introducing me to the idea that my poem might have a reader apart from me. She also introduced me to the concept of a writing community, by introducing me to the Poetry Society of Texas.

At the University of Notre Dame, where I received my M.F.A., I was greatly aided by John Matthias, Sonia Gernes and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, and later, at the University of Texas, where I received a Ph.D. I was aided by studying prosody with Tom Cable, and poetry with Tom Whitbread, David Wevil and Khaled Mattawa. They were all exceedingly generous and helpful. When I was an undergraduate, Joseph Malof and Kate Frost both at the University of Texas, taught me to close read modernist poetry and Shakespeare, and that has been life-changing.  Today I am helped a lot by the writers with whom I’ve studied, and with whom I remain close, and writers whose work I’ve admired.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

I am inspired by Veronica Franco (1546-1591) a Venetian courtesan who was one of the most eloquent writers of her period; she also was a prolific writer in many genres. By her eloquence (and perhaps her connections) she defended herself against accusations of witchcraft before the Inquisition and was acquitted. She allied herself with the most distinguished families of Venice, and all who traveled there, yet she publicly defended her fellow courtesans and spoke out against their mistreatment by men. I love how she lived by her wits; indeed, she often wrote for her life.

Veronica Franco (Image from wikimedia)

I admire those who look beyond their own difficult lives and give voice to those whom no one else defends.  To do this well, you have to use new forms in fresh and energetic ways, so as to give the reader a stake in the story. Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright and Lola Ridge write the kind of documentary poetry that puts the reader in a sort of jury box.  And perhaps most of all I an inspired by Nazim Hikmet and Taha Muhammad Ali, whose writing reaffirms their deepest humanity despite the fact they were placed in the most dehumanizing of circumstances—imprisoned and evicted from their home, respectively.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Read as widely as you can the best books, poems, stories and essays you can. Try to be as compassionate as possible. And write every day. I learned a lot by imitating the poets I admired in order to learn their tricks. Also, only send your work to journals you yourself enjoy reading.

How David Meischen Became a Writer

You could call me a late bloomer.
I was forty-three before I had a poem accepted for publication,
sixty-two before one of my short stories made it out into the world.

David Meischen’s stories and poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Talking Writing, Prime Number, Bellingham Review, The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. As a founder of Dos Gatos Press, he is co-editor of Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry. Meischen has an MFA in fiction from Texas State, San Marcos.‪ Winner of the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest in Mainstream Fiction, 2011, and the Talking Writing Fiction Contest, 2012, he is currently serving as a juror for the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.‬

Featured at Talking Writing: This interview is part of a partnership with Talking Writing magazine. The How to Become a Writer Series here at PhD in Creative Writing now includes interviews with Talking Writing’s featured fiction writers.

Read more by and about David:

Story: Agua Dulce, winner of the Talking Writing Fiction Contest

Story: Yellow Jackets at Talking Writing

Story: In the Garden at Superstition Review

Edited book: Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry

Interview: Blood Jet Radio

How David Meischen Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to David for saying yes! And thanks to Talking Writing magazine for sharing their writers!  ‪

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

I’ve been in  love with stories for as long as I can remember. Two of my grandparents were storytellers—Lillie Bruns Meischen and Edmund Frank Henry Morgenroth. As a child I loved listening to them; I loved weaving stories of my own. I wanted to be a writer because for me there is no magic more powerful than the magic of stories.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

You could call me a late bloomer. I was forty-three before I had a poem accepted for publication, sixty-two before one of my short stories made it out into the world. My apprentice ship in poetry occurred quite by accident when I decided that I was going to teach my ninth-grade students about poetry by having them write poems. Frequently, during a writing exercise, I sat down to write with my students. I learned with them. My apprenticeship in fiction was more intentional. Seven years ago, I enrolled in an MFA program. I put short stories front and center, reading as many of them as I could and channeling my energy into the writing. I love revision. With rare exception, my poems and stories go through draft after draft after draft before I send them out.

 

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

I’m indebted to dozens of fine teachers I’ve known dating all the way back to the fall of 1955, when I entered first grade. More recently, I’ve been able to study with some remarkable teaching writers. For poetry, I’d have to name Laurie Kutchins, author of Slope of the Child Everlasting. Laurie helped me open up when I write poetry. Thanks to her encouragement, I have a poem in The Southern Review. For fiction, I’ve learned much from Debra Monroe, Tim O’Brien, and Daniel Mueller. They’re remarkable writers. If you’ve not read On the Outskirts of Normal or The Things They Carried or How Animals Mate, get yourself to a bookstore. Debra, Tim, and Daniel are much more than really fine writers, though. They are remarkable teachers. They know so much about the how of good writing—and even more about encouraging the best from their students.

 

As a practicing writer, I owe much to monthly meetings with two remarkable writing groups, one focused on poetry and the other on fiction. Fellow fiction writer Twister Marquiss has been generous with his time and insights. Finally, I have the incredible good fortune of sharing my life with a writer, the poet Scott Wiggerman, who inspires me by example and, when he reads my work, holds me to a high standard.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

More than thirty years ago, I wrote a Master’s thesis on the style of Ernest Hemingway’s early fiction. I read as much of the available biographical and critical material as I could get my hands on. What struck me then—what continues to inspire me about Hemingway—was the remarkable intersection between the events of the life and the stunning sentences a young man carved out of them. Hemingway’s brief but profoundly affecting experience in the First World War might have disappeared into a minor footnote somewhere about what was then called shell shock. Except for Paris. His early years in the French capitol, the people he knew there—Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Scott Fitzgerald, to name only three—these might have fueled nothing more than drink and revelry. Except for the discipline a fledgling writer somehow brought to the page.

 

Hemingway in Milan 1918 // Image courtesy Wikimedia

Ernest Hemingway was a profoundly damaged man. Psychic trauma exacted its toll, as did fame and its siren song. Between them, they destroyed his talent. In the meantime, what he was able to accomplish with words! I am inspired every time I read the first short chapter of A Farewell to Arms. Every phrase, every word, every comma counts. At his best, Hemingway turned sentences into poetry. That’s what every practicing writer should aspire to.

 

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Carve out time and space. Sit down. Let the words come. Practice the art of tinkering. Find at least one other writer with whom you can share your work and your passion for writing. Revise. Then revise some more. And read, read, read.

How Mark Brazaitis Became a Writer

When I was growing up, I didn’t have posters of rock bands on my bedroom walls. I had pictures of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of five books, including The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame Press. Brazaitis’ book of poems, The Other Language, won the 2008 ABZ Press First Book Prize, judged by Heather McHugh. He is also the author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel published in 2000 by Van Neste Books. His second collection of stories, An American Affair, won the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press and was published in 2006. A former Peace Corps volunteer and technical trainer, Brazaitis is a professor of English and the director of the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University. Born in East Cleveland, Ohio, he lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, with his wife and two daughters.

Announcing: I’m pleased to announce a new partnership with Talking Writing magazine. The How to Become a Writer Series at PhD in Creative Writing will now include interviews with Talking Writing’s featured writers. This is the first of those interviews, which will also be co-published by Talking Writing.

Read Mark Brazaitis’s story, “Cancer Is a Killer, and So Am I” at Talking Writing.

Read more by and about Mark:

Story: “Cancer Is a Killer, and So Am I” at Talking Writing

Book: The Incurables

Short Story: “Blackheart” at Witness

Short Story: “Truth Poker” at Carve

Short Story: “Barbados” at H.O.W.

How Mark Brazaitis Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Mark for saying yes! And thanks to Talking Writing magazine for sharing their writers!  ‪

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?‬

Writers, particularly poets, were revered in my family. My maternal grandmother spoke of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats as if they were gods. (She met Robert Frost at a Bread Loaf conference. It was one of the high points of her life.) My paternal grandmother said she was particularly proud of one of my first published short stories, “The Liar,” because it appeared in the same journal (‬Western Humanities Review‪) as a Joyce Carol Oates story. She loved Oates’ work.‬

My father was a reporter and columnist for ‬The‪ (Cleveland) ‬Plain Dealer‪, and even when I was too young to know what he was up to, his work seemed to me significant. Later, he invited me to follow him around on various assignments, and I loved the whole process–gathering the facts of a story, writing the story, seeing the story in the newspaper the next day.‬

When I was growing up, I didn’t have posters of rock bands on my bedroom walls. I had pictures of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yes, I was strange. But to do what they had done–create such vibrant and potent worlds between book covers–was something to aspire to.‬

‪2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?‬

I thought I would become a journalist, like my father. In college, I wrote for ‬The Harvard Crimson‪. I wrote about sports, thinking the sports beat offered the most creative freedom. While I couldn’t invent facts, I could be inventive in how I reported them. I sometimes wrote as many as six stories a week. It was excellent practice. I had summer internships on the ‬Richard Times-Dispatch‪ and the ‬Detroit Free Press‪. I also wrote (or ghostwrote, mostly) for a magazine my mother published for the collision repair industry of Washington, D.C. It was called ‬Hammer and Dolly‪. I had more creative license here than anywhere. I once wrote a column under the byline of the office cat, Frumpkin.‬

‪I also wrote stories, poems, and, in my senior year of college, a terrible novel. ‬

‪So: practice, practice, practice.‬

‪3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?‬

In my teens and twenties, I took a number of writing classes, and my teachers–Lewis Hyde, Charles Martin, Philip O’Connor, Richard Messer, Robert Early, Howard McCord–were excellent. I have an M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University, and that experience was good. ‬

‪But the place I learned to write was Guatemala, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1990 to 1993. To step out of one’s culture and one’s language is to see oneself and one’s country and everything one has ever believed in in fresh and even startling ways. ‬

‪And of course great writers have helped me become a writer because I have absorbed their voices. ‬

‪4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?‬

I recently finished George Orwell’s ‬Homage to Catalonia‪. He was willing to risk his life for a cause he believed in (the Republic in the Spanish Civil War). He was also willing to tell the truth when the political infighting in the Republic made it impossible for him to continue fighting for it–and impossible for the Republic to win the war.‬

‪Leo Tolstoy was an aristocrat who insisted on making his own shoes. ‬

‪John Steinbeck’s ‬Travels with Charley‪ shows the decent, thoughtful man behind the writer.‬

‪Adrienne Rich did so much for human rights as well as for poetry.‬

‪Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. wrote beautifully as they changed the world.‬

‪5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?‬

There’s a lot to be learned from doing all kinds of writing. Don’t pigeonhole yourself as a fiction writer or a poet. Call yourself a writer, and write about everything you can, in as many genres as you can.‬