Interviews

“This isn’t advice but it’s helpful. I’d heard from so many poets I admire that it was hard, sometimes really hard, to get their first collection published. Some poets I know even published their second books before their first books…

“Ecopoetry’s role keeps changing for me, is as much in flux as I am. I wonder if one role of ecopoetry can be to mark that flux, to find a language that honors the transience and ongoingness of the environment,…

“ I envisioned this novel as a series of Trojan Horses on the topic of identity: a feminine novel inside a masculine one, but then a human one inside that. I wanted the novel to work on all three levels:…

“Some might think poets go out “looking for metaphors,” like the world is a giant writer’s prop closet. I don’t start with metaphor. I start with observation, an image. I’m not asking, “wWhat does this bird stand for?” I’m asking,…

“The books are for who they’re for. I’m not trying to make you understand. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to convert. I knew who Harriet’s was for. I knew who Ida’s was for. They’re for those who walk…

“For a character to really come to life on the page they have to retain a kind of mystery for you as a writer. Of course, there are some characters who are much more flat, who are comic, or just…

“Blackness and queerness and masculinity are cultural artifacts that we teach each other and that evolve over time. They’re incredibly hard to pin down. Poetry allows you to blow language open and think in terms that are so much less…

“Trust that the reader is intelligent enough to hop through time: moving back and forth between child and adult speakers. Freed of chronology, I immediately felt like “The Pact” would be a great opening for the book: intense, aggressive, grounding…

“I look at the paragraph as its own little work of music. I need to make sure the repetition, any sort of rhyme scheme, meter, consecution – everything needs to be clicking within the paragraph form. Sometimes that alters the…

“Horror and satire are incredibly proximate genres. They both nourish the over-excitement of the reader—either through terror or laughter, or both—which I was hoping to do. Sometimes these are the only genres that are allowed to tell the truth about…