Interviews

“Thinking about the way a river moves while thinking about plot is really helpful, for example. It’s not a straight line. The same way an early draft doesn’t go from page one effortlessly and straightforwardly to page two-hundred and fifty.…

“A lot of the experience of writing a novel was not unfamiliar to me. And I think, at least for me, so much of writing is just figuring out mental tricks to stick with it, because so much of it…

“For me, writing a first novel was defined by having to accept that I was learning how to do it as I went, and that is a very disagreeable experience if you, like me, are one of the world’s great…

“ I was writing poems all the while but writing poems and making a book are different matters altogether. The real question is what it took for me to organize these poems into a collection that held the energy I…

“It often feels like if you’re not on tour or have a current project out that you are out of the conversation. It’s been 5 years since my last book and that’s starting to feel like a long time. I…

“I love building myself a box. I love giving myself a tight space because my plots are, let’s say, quiet and internal. American Fantasy has a bit more of the razzle dazzle, but the plot itself is always personal transformation…

“When I first wrote this, it was very stream-of-consciousness. My story had no plot. It was just dysfunctional people. There were also many multi-year stalls where I stopped working on it, but each time I returned, I could read it…

“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:…