To what degree did you collaborate on the cover image and design of your chapbook? There’s not some magic statement in the ordering (although, in the larger collection I intend these to eventually form part of, there will be). I had a couple of narrative poems in a single block, so I put those together, and a few stanzaed lyric poems, so I put those together. Then I arranged the rest of the poems really just by how they looked on the page. The chapbook is bookended, thematically, by two long poems, so I made them first and last. How did you decide on the arrangement and title of your chapbook?Īs far as arrangement, it was pretty utilitarian. I also like, to keep on with the domestic metaphors, “grafting,” where you take two pieces that didn’t work and turn the best of each into one piece that does and I also like what I could call “bread-making,” where you deliberately leave a draft just not quite finished, then start again, and do that over and over again until you have one final finished project (I find that’s a good way for me to balance the writer’s and editor’s tendencies in me.) That said, I don’t have a specific plan, except that I try to read and write often, if not quite every day. I do have a revision strategy I stole from Darnell Arnoult, called “quilting,” where you build a piece from scraps and sections you don’t try or deliberately intend to compose in an order instead, you just work where the ground gives most, until, eventually, you have the whole thing done. I write like everybody, I think, writes now, although not everybody wants to admit it: listening to music on the computer at 11:30 at night, trying and failing to fight the temptation to check in on your Facebook, and guiltily answering student emails about questions they could’ve got from the syllabus. Do you have a favorite prompt or revision strategy? What is it? The rest of what happens is in the poem, but the whole book I think is based around that idea: write about real things, write about real people-even if you have to make them up.ĭescribe your writing practice or process for your chapbook. It was about 2 AM in July in Grayson County, and I had locked us out of my car at a lake and we were out of phone service, so we had to walk about four miles down the road until we got picked up. The title poem is mostly based on a real story, and one where my friend, Derrick, told me “this is what you should write about”. Some of the poems in the collection are lyric, but others are like little essays or short stories, and the subjects are varied: journalists, septic tank cleaners, musicians, housekeepers, wildflowers, etc.Ĭan you name one poem that catalyzed or inspired the rest of the chapbook? What do you remember about writing it? ![]() Both have chapbooks coming out soon Helton’s with the same press (Finishing Line) as mine, actually.Īt one point I was going to call the thing “More Hillbilly Poems About Flowers And Dead People,” which is probably too close for comfort but if I had to give it a theme, I would say it’s about working people in the mountains thinking and living out things above the day to day. In terms of new Appalachian writers, there are some new (and they’re probably going to throttle me for putting a label on them) ecofeminist poets from Kentucky that are great – and great readers: Melissa Helton and Shawna Kay Rodenberg come to mind first. But the truth is most of the new writers I experience I meet or find at readings. Bianca Lynne Spriggs’ How Swallowtails Become Dragons is good, too. Obviously, as a mountain writer, Wendell Berry’s The Country of Marriage. Now I do like some shorter collections, and some new work by new writers who are just coming up. ![]() Whenever I can, I try to get a poet’s collected works, if they’re dead, and if they’re not I’m going to go for the whole lot or the whole big book. This is probably a horrible thing to say for this site, but I don’t read a lot of chapbooks. What are some of your favorite chapbooks? Or what are some chapbooks that have influenced your writing? Mono No Aware ( Finishing Line Press, 2016)
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