Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Not exactly. I had to heal from my complex PTSD in order to allow myself to be creative. Every time I tried to write fiction before I completed my memoir, had about a billion different healing appointments and did thousands of yoga practices, all that would come out was the story of my trauma. Once I got my memoir written in 2020, I wrote the first draft of a novel in 2021. How fun to make stuff up! And – spoiler alert for both books – end with the protagonist happily partnered!

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I’d have to say Judy Blume. From the gentle expansion that came from reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to the steamy world she exposed me to when I smuggled my mother’s copy of Wifey, Judy Blume’s books opened my eyes and kept me company throughout my childhood.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
On a trip to Mexico in 2008 with my husband and kids, when I knew I was about to get divorced, I was walking by a pool where a woman was lying on a deck chair reading a book, and I had this sudden knowing that someday women would be lying next to pools reading my book(s).

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
This is a hard one. I’m tempted to quote Mary Karr but my favorite sentence of hers is part of a passage, so I can’t use that here. I’m in awe of Jonathan Franzen, and he has so many great sentences that it’s hard to choose. Here’s one that shows off his amazing ability to reveal his characters’ interiority:

“She considered this requirement absolute, and so it was with a confusing sense of self-betrayal, of observing a person she morally disapproved of and didn’t understand but nevertheless was, that she let Tanner kiss her before he’d satisfied it.”- Becky, from Crossroads

What is your most evocative memory?
Unfortunately, my most evocative memories are traumatic, and readers are getting one of them in this essay.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I’d like to have been about twenty in the 1960s, go to Woodstock, and be part of the free love revolution. This fantasy presumes by being from a different era I also got to grow up without sexual trauma and without the gnarly cowlicks that in my real life make it impossible for me to wear my hair long and parted down the middle like the cool kids did in the ’60s.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Does audio count? I waited forever on my library app to listen to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I was told I had to read it because I’ve spent the last 14 months on the road myself. My whole life I’ve known this was an iconic book - and I couldn’t stand it! Couldn’t keep listening! I don’t think it was just the narrator, though he didn’t help. I didn’t care to hear Jack’s drunken tales.

Sometimes when I give up on a book, I end up going back to it later. This is true of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I tried to read it a couple of years ago and didn’t get very far – just didn’t care enough to keep reading. Curtis was recently on the BBC Bookclub podcast talking about the book, and that piqued my interest. I decided to give it another shot, and I’m enjoying it this time.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch is an incredible book that a lot of people have never heard of, and Lydia is such a fun and talented writer.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I mean, I would like to think Mary Karr but that might not be at all accurate? Hard to judge for myself, especially at this nascent stage of my creative writing career. I learned about The Chronology of Water from the developmental editor who read my not-yet-published memoir, and the editor said my writing reminded her of Lydia’s. HUGE compliment.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I started reading at four and knew immediately that a book was the best thing ever. When I knew that, I wanted to write one. It took awhile, but I honored that little girl’s desires.

What is your most evocative memory?
My most evocative memory isn’t a memory but a feeling. I get it sometimes unexpectedly. It often involves religious iconography, usually as I stand in front of an image of Mary or a version of her. I am not a religious person by any means, but I’ve sobbed in Basilicas and at impromptu creches. But I’ve also had this same feeling looking out at the Artic from a plane window or thinking about my children. The Inuit had a name for this overtaking of feeling, calling it “the tears of things,” of course in their language.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
What is so wonderful is that this answer varies. I’ve written poems in the heat of inspiration that in one draft are complete, are accepted immediately for publication, and win awards. Or, I’ve written a novel for over five years, which never was published despite all my best attempts. One reader called it entirely “unpublishable.” The good news is that my forthcoming novel came from a scrap found in that unpublishable novel and is coming out in February 2023. If I count the writing of the novel that produced the scrap and the writing of the novel that worked, let’s call it nine years. Most of my work, though, goes through the usual process of drafting, revising, editing, sharing with readers, more editing.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Every time I imagine living in a historical time, I remember how fond I am of antibiotics and showers, not to mention toilets. I’m also really glad I lived through childbirth, so here is okay. Reading can take me into the past more safely.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I put down a lot of books. Right now, there are three books in my Audible queue that I let go. The stack of books in my office are filled with almost reads. Probably there isn’t anything wrong with these books. I am simply the wrong reader. Life is too short to read a book one does not enjoy. The good news? Someone else will like it. I drop a lot of books off at neighborhood little libraries.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Louise Erdrich gets a lot of recognition, and she deserves it and more. When I was teaching at Diablo Valley College, I made sure to put her on any syllabus I could. She has such an ability to pull us into a world we could not know otherwise, one I would like to stay in. The Night Watchman and The Sentence are two of her more recent works that are staggering in their story, character, and setting. She has a wholly unique point-of-view.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
First of all, I can say that there was no author or artist who created in me the will to be part of the art world, but there were myths, legends, and folklore. Therefore, many storytelling elements are part of my poems and stories. Around the age of 8, I had my own collection of fairy tales from different parts of the world; for me, it was the most precious thing I owned. Many years later, I understand that this tendency of mine also influenced my desire to deal with cultural heritage and collective memory. Anyway, I have to admit that if it weren't for the works of Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, and Mark Twain that I've been reading since childhood, I probably wouldn't have been interested in literature. When I read their works, I had the impression that one day my writings would be the ones that would be able to attract readers from different parts of the world. However, expanding your worldview is a continuous process that continues throughout your life and how many times you encounter the work of a great artist.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I have never considered myself outside the creative field. I remember that being an artist was my first choice since I was 3 years old, first as a dancer, then as an actress, but soon I realized that my future was literature. I even had a photo of me when I was 2-3 years old with a pen and a notebook. Let's call it that this photo was like a witness of a predicted fate. As a person, I was very silent, I didn't ask questions, and I didn't even like to talk or play with other people, but I created my own version for every event and phenomenon of nature. I adored fairytales and myths. Everything I saw and experienced, I tried to retell it in another, more beautiful way, because I always wanted to recreate the way we humans live, because things cannot be so simple or so ordinary. Even if they are like that, for this reason, artists exist so don't let us die from the truth.

I also remember that at the age of 9, before I went to sleep every night I dreamed that one day I would become a very famous writer. But despite the fact that during my childhood and adolescence I sent my poems and writings to magazines and newspapers, I did not see it as a possibility to continue literature studies. At the age of 18, I apparently changed my mind and chose to study literature, but the first weeks of the faculty resulted in a disappointment because I (like many other writers) believe that no one teaches you how to become a writer, the talent that you have, and what you are, are things that no one else can teach it to you about yourself. Literary studies are the right choice for future scholars and critics, but for someone who writes, it may seem somewhat dogmatic and framing, but it is still a mistake that I do not regret. The more I moved away from literature as a profession, the more I got closer to it in essence. All other professional commitments have influenced what makes up my identity as a creator today and will influence my writing tomorrow somehow. Anyway, one day I will give up on all other commitments and dedicate myself only to literature.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
My writing process seems endless. Today I manage to finish writings that may have started to be written when I was a child. There were many phenomena, details, and memories that involved me but I still did not have the proper capacity to turn them into art. There are still many unfinished writings in me. As in poetry, as in prose, even when the works are published in anthologies and magazines, I return to complete them. And I don't give up until it will reach what is called perfect for me.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
At an earlier age, I couldn't finish a book when I realized that I liked it so much that I didn't feel ready to finish it. Such was the novel The Life of Alexis Zorbas by Niko Kazantzakis at the age of 17. As soon as I read the first pages, I thought that it was the book that I would like to have written and therefore I should wait for the right moment to read it. It was the book that I wanted to avoid finishing it. While today I leave unfinished a book that does not include me, that does not inspire me. I like to read early in the morning because from one dream world it seems as if I go to another dream world. It's so hard to break away from dreams, that's why I keep coming back through books. This is the reason that today I do not continue to read any book that makes me break away from dreaming, even if it is a non-fiction piece it should inspire me.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I don't think my work is similar to anyone else's work or I'm not the right person to define it. In fact, I believe that we humans expect others to tell us who we are or with whom we resemble. Being that I have always aimed at the quality of my writings and not at their quantity, and considering my young age, I think it is difficult to give assessments for the similarity of my work with authors who have reached their artistic maturity. In my opinion, every author I have read has had an impact on me, whether by understanding from them how not to write, but above all, I would highlight the strong influence of religious texts and folklore.

I could also say that my writings above all resemble my life, the people I know, the stories I hear, and what I feel, but with the difference that in literature everything is closer to the divine.

What does your creative process look like?
As I mentioned above, my creation process seems endless, going through many stages of editing. For this reason, years ago, I used to say to myself that I was born with a curse, the curse to be a perfectionist. My intention is to bring everything that is simple and ordinary closer to the divine through words. I would say that the process of creation is the purest and most identifying part of me because I identify myself with what inspires me, with what I create, with the people I have met, and with the places where I have been. These four elements make up what my creative process is.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I’m fortunate to be an English professor, so my schedule, though demanding, is flexible and writing/publishing is part of my remit. As a single working mother, it was hard to find time to make the work I wanted to while my daughter was growing up. Plus, my college supported scholarly writing, not so much poetry. I did a huge number of inventive workarounds to meet the expectations for scholarly publishing. During winter break, I’d spend the month writing what I call “scholarly journalism”: encyclopedia articles, reference and study guides, along with the requisite peer-reviewed articles and such.

When my daughter was 12, I was slammed with a life-altering health crisis and once I recovered, I just switched gears and focused full-tilt on my creative efforts. The committee for my final promotion questioned my move to poetry and I was frank about why I chose to do my own work again (a death scare is a good catalyst), which paid off. So, for a long time now I’ve taught creative writing and produced quite a lot of work and garnered quite a lot of publication credits.

My daughter is now 24 and is a fine poet herself – a lot more imaginatively daring than I ever was. When I was her age, I had way too frail an ego and way too misguided a sense of what it meant to be an artist in the world to be able to handle the slings and arrows of a writing career. I never really thought in terms of a career, actually, but I did want to share my “letter to the world” and I did want the world to like what I had to offer.

I had a few early acceptances and went underground the first time I got a no. I never stopped writing, though, and have reams of work produced over a lifetime, some of which was rescued from a hurricane-made flood. I marvel at the constancy of my efforts. What I couldn’t do was manage a career as a writer but now I don’t take rejections as an affront. My daughter is somewhat steelier and gets that no is inevitable, so I feel like she’s benefitting from my experiences.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Oh, probably a childhood love, Louisa May Alcott. I read a lot as a child and swept through Alcott’s books, dreaming of speaking as her characters did, saying “ever so much” and, like every other girl with writerly aspirations, being Jo. I’d walk to the 5 and 10 (I am so old) and used my 50 cents a week allowance to buy these shiny-covered Whitman’s Classics books. Much of her work for children was in that series, though I vaguely recall owning several with actual dust jackets, probably Christmas presents.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I always wrote and thought of myself very early as a writer. My mother says I dictated my first poem before I could write. She still has it: “Oh mother dear. I love you, dear” – Where “dear” came from I don’t know. No one talked like that in my household, but I picked it up from somewhere – probably a book. I was around 6 or 7 when I made a book out of cardboard, stapling in my illustrated poems. The crayoned book title was “My First Book of Poems.” The poems were all rhymed and were bouncy little odes to saints (I went to Catholic school in my early years) and funny little nothings that showed I had a good ear even then. I wrote stories and poems all through my childhood and by high school my sense of myself as a writer was fixed though my notions of what it meant to be an artist in the world were twisted by romanticizing the bohemian raptures of Paris in the ‘20’s and the Village ever after. My burgeoning feminism was very much at odds with my sacrificial subservience to artist boys I decided to fall for.

It took a while to untangle myself from the mess I’d made of my worldview – and it’s still sometimes an irritating struggle to get free of my old notions of success. Now, as an elder, I’d distinguish making art from having a career in the world as an artist. I process experience through writing, so I’ll always write. Writing and publishing are not the same thing, but I still do want to be recognized by my peers and I still do want my work “out there.” Such recognition, though, is a lot less crucial to my life.

When I was in my late twenties or so, I moaned to a friend that I only wrote when I had to – not as a daily practice. He said something that tided me over many a fallow period: only writers “have to” write.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
One sentence? Yikes! Some of my lifelines:

“To me, the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” -The final lines from Wordsworth’s “Immortality” Ode

“It is Margaret you mourn for.” -The final line from Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall

“The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” -Milton’s Satan’s famous lines from Paradise Lost

“for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” - From Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

If I start on the women writers, I’ll be here all day (Austen and Woolf and Alcott and Wharton and and and) but I have to add

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” - Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

“I dwell in Possibility — /A fairer House than Prose —” - Emily Dickinson

What is your most evocative memory?
I write through a haze of memory all the time so I’m not sure I have one that is notably evocative. Usually, it’s a texture or the sound of my mother’s voice singing, or something random conjured from another random here-and-now sensation. When I write, the memories coalesce into another thing that may approximate what I actually experienced or witnessed. I aim for emotional integrity but not necessarily factual accuracy.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I don’t envision or plan a piece beforehand. I just write and see what happens. I tend to revise as I go, rarely returning to a piece for massive overhaul once it’s completed, usually in one sitting. A longer piece may be written over days and I’ve always made game forays into prose but poetry is my natural medium.

The prose is fun but I’ve only had two stories published since a lot of my prose is unfinished. I’ve begun no less than 12 novels – mostly YA – and have published some work for children. I have a goal to finish at least one book but so far, I’m just not committed enough. What happens after a while is that I need to have somewhere to go – a plan, a vision – and I never do.

Years ago, an editor read a work in progress and said very flattering, encouraging things about my writing, but asked, “Where are you going with this?” I had no idea. Still don’t.

I got the same sort of reaction even longer ago when I sent my dissertation off to a well-respected publisher of southern studies. The editor there said their peer reviewer recommended publication if I revised the bulky thing and sent me a list of issues that needed fixing. Essentially it boiled down to: find the missing argument. Arguments and plots are kind of the same in a way and I’m no good at either. Poems don’t need plots. One day, though, maybe I’ll dream up somewhere for my characters to go. Or even dust off my ancient dissertation and thread my chapters more coherently together.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
The 19th century of my imagination – not the 19th century as it was. I’d like a pre-tech time where letters were written and lectures were attended and people dressed for dinner in fine silks. Of course, if I’d really lived then in New York, I’d have been an Irish scullery maid or an Italian wife with ten hungry children and an unstoppable husband (my heritage is half Irish/half Italian), but I like to think of rising above my station and attending gallery openings and joining secret suffragist meetings.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I’ve only very recently abandoned my lifelong rule of finishing what I’ve started and reading every word on the page. It was a jolt to allow myself the freedom to stop reading if I just wasn’t engaged. Since then, the books I haven’t finished are mostly due to my mental exhaustion and not to their lack of merit. I’ve simply shelved them for later when I get my brain back. I’ve plowed through many a disaster of a thriller/popular book – skipping wide tracts of insufferable writing – to get to the whodunit reveal, though. I hate to name names.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I’m in love with Becky Chambers though she has a lot of recognition for her work among sci-fi lovers. I don’t usually read sci fi, so her Monk and Robot series was a revelation to me. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is dedicated to “anybody who could use a break” and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is for “those who feel lost.”

Paraic O’Donnell, an Irish writer I recently discovered in a local library trawl, is also not unknown but was unknown to me when stumbled onto The Maker of Swans and The House on Vesper Sands. I got lost in his exquisite prose and strange, haunting worlds and I felt a kind of ancestral hubris: this is the way the Irish do it!

I read a ton of mysteries and find a lot of newer additions to the genre, especially those that rose to the tops of the best seller lists, to be pretty insipid, formulaic, and dull, so when I read Stephen Spotswood’s Fortune Favors the Dead, I was giddy with wanting more. I am sufficiently enamored of his leading ladies to like his second book, too, but I wish he didn’t feminize the guy in Willowjean Parker, who I’d rather stuck to her mannish guns and continued to be a queer character worth their salt.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
Better to ask who I feel most kin to, maybe. Probably poets like Dickinson with her delirium of dashes and moods, or Hopkins with his lush images and spirit-made-flesh praise songs, or Wordsworth in his reckoning with the natural world and his diminishing capacity to dash all over the countryside like a young deer, or Eliot in his wordplay and wryness and reckonings with the wasteland of regret and remorse, or Woolf with her acerbic observations and hyper awareness of the press of stuff that camouflages “moments of being.”

What does your creative process look like?
Like sitting at the laptop, finding a prompt, and going. In the pre-computer days, I wrote drafts on yellow legal pads. When computers first became available for personal use, I was very resistant to writing on a keyboard. I had a breakthrough at a difficult time in my life. I very much wanted a child, was getting on in years, and was divorcing my husband – not a good time. Off from work for the summer, I forced myself to go out each day to the local library to use the computers to write. I learned to love writing on a computer that way. I felt like I was composing at a piano. I’d slap a title down – I always start with a title – and just went to town, writing poem after poem – many of which were subsequently published. In those days, not too many people wanted to use the computers, so the two-hour time limit was often waived for me. I wouldn’t leave until a poem was finished. This is still how I work now. I open my laptop, slap down a title, and just go.

I’ve never had writer’s block. I only have plot-block.

Another thing I do is check the monthly themed submission calls online and use the ones that appeal to me as prompts. That’s been a lot of fun.

The process itself is a pretty associative one. I am very sound-oriented and though I would definitely stop short of identifying as a language poet, I do love to play with images and these images are sometimes strangely arcane – though I never am intentionally vague or opaque. The older I get the more I want to actually reveal what I’ve learned and be more plain-spoken, more direct – though I find that kind of Mary Oliver-ish writing to be very difficult to do well.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
It was essential for me to leave behind a full-time, clinical social work job to work for myself in order to have the time and spiritual-emotional energy to create.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
When we read poetry in middle school English class, specifically “Kidnap Poem” by Nikki Giovanni, which begins, "ever been kidnapped/by a poet?"

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." By Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese.”

What is your most evocative memory?
Age four, dancing naked to Ella Fitzgerald singing "Begin the Beguine" by Cole Porter.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It can take hours, weeks, months or years and it often never happens, but it's always worth the effort.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Kayleb Rae Candrilli, check them out if you want your heart smashed open: www.krcandrilli.com

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Before retirement, I was a college professor (grading papers and teaching classes), an academic author (writing 13 college-level textbooks), a father, and a husband. I learned to multitask. In retirement, I morphed from teaching and academic writing to creative writing. I morphed from raising children to helping to raise grandchildren. I still multitask. But owning a smartphone allows me to write while I wait in doctor’s offices, wait for my car’s oil to be changed, and wait in lines of cars to pick up school kids. I use all of the spare and rare moments I’m given to write. It’s not a tradeoff. It’s a creative joy.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I have a PhD in English, majoring in modern American literature and minoring in Shakespeare, with a sub-specialization in BIPOC lit. My tastes are all over the map, more like a Jackson Pollock splash painting. I have been influenced by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jonathan Swift on the British side; Melville, Hawthorne, and Hemingway on the American side. My poetry is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s dark trochaic tetrameter, Theodore Roethke’s narrative storylines, and e.e. cumming’s fractured grammar. Most importantly, I owe almost all of my literary impetus to Kurt Vonnegut, whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation about. I’m moved by his pacifism, his acceptance of differences (“Don’t truth me, and I won’t truth you”—Sirens of Titan), and his knowledge that life is crazy and unexplainable (“So it goes”—Slaughterhouse Five).

What word do you feel should be brought back into popular usage?
I love many words, like crenellate, ululation, pilfered, pillory, penury, and usurpation. But here are two words that I miss the most: “Constantinople” and “intermezzo.” There’s nothing wrong with “Istanbul,” but “Constantinople” sounds more poetic, more exotic, more elegant, and more worldly to me, better at denoting a city at the crossroads of civilizations. “Intermezzo” is a perfect trochaic dimeter. I love the sound. More importantly, “intermezzo” refers to music between acts of a play. I find my best poems and my best similes in the moments between thoughts, the brief glimpses I find of beauty and truth.

What is your most evocative memory?
I met my wife on a blind date. The moment she opened the door to her apartment, I was awed! I literally gasped. She was a vision. I have written perhaps 300 love poems to her. She changed my life and is my constant and always muse. Every moment I’ve spent with my wife is evocative of beauty, grace, intelligence, and inspiration.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I write very quickly. I attribute my speed of writing to my short attention span, my impatience, and lots of caffeine. I get an idea and words leap from my mind to the screen or page. Then, I just let them flow, spontaneously. Afterwards, I’ll revise, fine tune, hone, move, delete, etc. But, most of my poems are finished within 30 minutes. If that process doesn’t work, if I can’t find a poem’s rhythm and intensity within those 30 minutes, I throw the poem out and start a new project that fits my need for spontaneous creativity. There’s always something to write about.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
A few years ago, I decided to reread some classics, like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I also tried to reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I hated it! To me, it was ponderous, desperately needing an edit. I felt like I was slogging through mud with Hemingway’s Italian army. I gave up and moved on to another classic Hemingway: “The Big Two-Hearted River.” In contrast to the dull and I’d say overrated Farewell, I’d reread “The Big Two-Hearted River” weekly, forever. It’s perfection.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Vonnegut, again. I started reading him when I was in high school, and he changed the path of my life, not only creatively, but also in terms of career and mindset. His most famous book is Slaughterhouse Five, deservedly so. However, I think Sirens of Titan is undervalued. Most assume it’s just a sci-fi novel. It’s much more. Sirens of Titan, I believe, is Vonnegut’s Dante’s Inferno. In Titan, Vonnegut sends his Dante, a character named Malachi Constant, through galactic levels of hell, searching for his loved one, a woman named Beatrice, just as in the Inferno. Malachi, a sinner characterized by lust, pride, avarice, and ego, must attain humanity, with the help of a guide named Boaz, just as Virgil guides Dante. Sirens of Titan is an unrecognized masterpiece of depth, soul, and humor, pathos, and exquisite craftsmanship.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I began submitting and publishing when I was around 16, so I had an early introduction to the highs and lows of the literary world. When I was a sophomore in college, I made the decision to become serious about my writing. I devoted time daily, at the expense of my social life, to begin building a career. I don't have any regrets about it. Parties come and go but my resume will be forever. Despite being a "young writer," I've always been very serious about building a career. I'm neurodivergent and don't know the meaning of moderation; I threw myself into writing because I've known for a long time I never wanted to do anything else. I'm glad to say a decade in, I'm still as passionate as I was the day I started, even if I have many, many rejections to show for it. (Which is okay! It's part of the cycle, I know).

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I first realized I wanted to be an author when I read Harriet the Spy at age 8. I used my mom's old trench coat and my uncle's tool belt and went on fake "spy routes," much like she did. This was also the point where I started carrying a notebook with me everywhere I went. Unfortunately, my aspirations were written off and dissuaded. Growing up as a gifted kid in a poorer family, certain expectations were set out as for the trajectory of my future career. I had two teachers that really encouraged me in ways I won't forget. My tenth grade English teacher and my 201 creative writing class in college. Both encouraged and believed in me in ways I hadn't fully experienced up until those points. Those words, "You're a real writer," were the push I needed to help me believe I could actually make a career out of writing.

What word do you feel should be brought back into popular usage?
Though it's (I hope) a much less common practice, I've always been a big fan of the word "defenestration: the art of throwing someone out of a window." Again, I would hope people aren't being thrown out of windows for minor transgressions, but the word itself has a weight and a lyricism to it, that I wish it was part of our vernacular solely for hyperbole. Please don't throw people out of windows; that's illegal.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I'm currently planning a novel set in Orlando in 1919, and another set in Orlando in the 1970s, and vintage Orlando history/aesthetic has always been a special interest of mine. I would love to experience downtown Orlando specifically in its younger days, when the local park, Lake Eola, was still in development. There's a giant fountain in the middle of the park that was originally built in the late 1950s. I would love to be around to experience that. My mother recently passed away, and we spent a lot of time in the local hospital. There are many black and white photographs of both this park and Orlando throughout the ages. Seeing those black and white portraits brought me a lot of comfort and I would have loved, more than anything, to reach through the pictures and be in the moments they were taken.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I recently read Tara Isabella Burton's books Social Creature and The World Cannot Give, and they both quickly became favorites. My library has a "new releases section" near the front, which is where I found them. I devoured both books in a day or two. The World Cannot Give, especially, is probably one of my favorite books of all time, because it encompasses two of my favorite topics: religion and the big sapphic mood of, "I met a girl so charismatic I'll put my whole life on pause to follow wherever she goes."

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
My poetic-prose style has been compared to the Beatniks, most notably Jack Kerouac, and to me that is the utmost form of praise. I've always admired the Beats and their unique, albeit intoxicated, approach to literature. Being neurodivergent, I've always experienced sensory stimuli in a unique way, and I feel this reflects in my writing. I love reading about writers who did their own thing, and rejected tradition and what's considered "proper" for what they felt was more authentic. I love the idea of these group of writers in the Leave it to Beaver age, where the men smoked cigarettes and the women wore pants and people were queer and different and didn't care what other people thought. And the very lucid, eccentric lyricism of the work, has truly been a defining force in my own work, especially my poetry.

Name a favorite film or other visual work that has influenced the way you shape your stories.
Believe it or not, The Golden Girls. It's been my favorite show since I was a young kid, and I've rewatched each episode more times than I can count. I've always been a big fan of comedy and older sitcoms. I have always appreciated how they grappled with serious issues while making the audience laugh. Over the course of their seven season run, they tackled such themes as LGBTQ rights, the AIDS epidemic, elder care, and so much more. One episode in particular has been a driving force in the novel I'm currently writing, Just My Imagination. It's about a millennial woman with undiagnosed autism and her experiences with medical gaslighting. The Golden Girls episode that really shaped the direction of my novel is an episode called "Sick and Tired." One of the main characters, Dorothy, struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome and has a myriad of doctors who will not take her seriously. The episode ends with her confronting a doctor who dismissed her and telling him off. This scene, I feel, is a masterclass on authenticity. Dorothy owning her illness and her narrative was inspiring for my own main character, Katherine, and was the driving force in the direction of this novel.

What does your creative process look like?
When I write comedy scripts or screenplays, the posters and hanging pictures on my walls become submerged within a vast sea of multi-coloured post-stick notes, usually with jokes or punchlines scrawled across them in felt tip. I’m one of the very few creatives who still devote themselves to the let’s-see-how-it-goes platitude, where I attempt to write a novel or a full-length film without any planning or guidance. I do, however, base my stories around funny concepts that I think of, which is why my walls end up looking like an unemployed comedian’s stand-up comedy script.

When did you first realise you wanted to be an author/artist?
I've always had an inclination for literature, and my years of youth were undoubtedly spent writing furiously in the depths of my room. I'd devise prose, poetry, screenplays, novels – anything remotely creative or fascinating to me. My love of writing developed at an early age, perhaps three or four, and has persisted with me through adolescence, into my new found career goal of being a successful author.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I miss the purity and simplicity of the 1960s. Times where people smiled for photographs and music actually meant something. Times where the young would go out and get a job, rather than lounging around all day looking utterly fascinating. Although the lack of technology would prove to be a test on my newly social-mediarised self, I think I could learn to adapt to the life of passion and innocence I had always desired.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I think that Morrissey's debut novel List of the Lost has been greatly overlooked in the literary world. It’s a sentimental love letter to the 1970s, facilitating the singer's streams of consciousness, usually regarding music albums or an episode of Cheers. As established by the novel, Morrissey is above chapters and sensical wordplay. Once you fully grasp the undisputed rules of the English language, then you can start to break them. This might seem unconventional or highly bizarre to a panel of Guardian journalists, but their attachment to fixed structure and neat repetition is why we keep having books like Harry Potter going to print. You can't deny the poetry in such a whimsical and leftfield approach to literature.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
The best sentence I've ever read is most likely the Billy Bragg lyric 'How can you lie there and think of England when you don't even know who's in the team?'

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Writing has always been a dominant aspect of my life, so I've always prioritised it over coursework, socialising, and in some cases sanity. Though I don't view this as a great sacrifice. Writing gives me a surge of creativity and a much-needed outlet for self-expression, so I'd much rather remain a back-bedroom casualty than venture out into a subject that is of less interest to me.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
My days have almost always been filled with creativity. For thirty-three years, I taught high school choir—I conducted Renaissance madrigals, accompanied soloists, supervised Broadway-style dance rehearsals, prepared for professional orchestra collaborations, and organized student visits to New York City. I didn’t have time for much writing during those years, but a colleague and I published two choral education books. After retirement, I continued my musical pursuits. I now accompany a professional trumpeter and a clarinetist and perform in an early music ensemble. But without a full-time job, I have more time for writing and have published a memoir, a middle-grade/YA nonfiction book, both with Meyer & Meyer Sport, and numerous essays and craft essays in literary magazines.

What is your most evocative memory?
In 2011, my daughter Gwen raced in the World Triathlon Series–London. She had only been racing for two years and registered just to get experience in Europe as an elite athlete. She was the fifth person on a five-woman USA team. At that time, I didn’t know enough about triathlon to be nervous. Within a few months, I would learn about injuries in open-water swims and broken bones in bike crashes. But in 2011, I simply enjoyed my first trip abroad to watch my daughter race. In the final leg of the triathlon, Gwen upset expectations and came in second to earn the silver medal. With this top-nine finish, she qualified for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It marked the beginning of a journey that would take her to Rio 2016 where she would win the Olympic gold medal.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Since college, I have played in an early music ensemble. Our collection of instruments includes recorder, krummhorn, cornamuse, bowed psaltery, harp, mandolin, bowed strings, and percussion. My personal playlists are filled with music by Red Priest, the Baltimore Consort, and Chanticleer. I would not enjoy the Renaissance era’s lack of modern conveniences, but I would love to go back and hear music as it sounded then.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
When I don’t finish a book, I simply delete it from my reading list, and move on. So, I can’t say what book I most recently abandoned. I have friends who read for emotional effect or a captivating plot. But for me, a book has to have interesting and complex language or I get distracted finding synonyms for boring words and fixing sentences in my head. Before starting a book, I read professional and reader reviews as well as sample pages. I have a good idea of a book’s content before I begin, so it’s unusual to let a book go.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

What does your creative process look like?
My daughter Elizabeth Jorgensen and I are writing partners, editing each other’s essays, articles, and books. We have co-authored two books, the most recent a middle-grade/YA biography: Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete. We worked back and forth in a Google Doc, making comments and edits. One of us sketched a chapter’s draft and passed it off. The next person made suggestions about form, content, and structure. Later, we edited for word choice, sentence structure, and theme. Elizabeth is a high school creative writing teacher with several published books. I’ve learned from her how to give critiques and how to receive them. When I’m working solo, I enjoy starting with a specific prompt. Almost always, when I write for a lit mag’s themed call, that piece will be declined. But then I have an essay started that, after revision, will fit somewhere else.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Absolutely. Mainly what I’ve given up has been professional advancement. My current day job is a lovely 40 hours a week, which leaves me lots of time and energy at the end of the day to work on my writing. But it is sometimes a little saddening when I see friends who are department chairs or deans. I’ve also more recently given up a lot of literary citizenship leadership roles. In the past year or so I’ve quit the board of Anhinga Press and also stopped doing PR for the Poetry Witch Community so that I’ll have more energy for my writing. The only literary citizenship I have going on right now is serving as a reader for the Dodge. I’m loving life at the bottom of the org chart, which is something I never thought I’d say.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author?
I don’t think there was ever an actual realization. It’s just always been something I was. Always making up stories and writing things down. I grew up in a house of limited means and so the only time we really had paper around the house when I was a kid was when my mom would buy school supplies in August. One year I took all the notebook paper and made little books out of them with all these stories I’d made up. She had to go buy more paper for us to take to school. She was not amused. After that I started getting notebooks more because they realized I was just carrying all these stories inside my head and it was probably better to let me put them somewhere else.

But then I also had a lot of doubt as an adult. It really started in college because I was an education major, not an English major. There was a definite vibe in my English classes that there were real writers (the English major) and then us fakes. And that went on for about ten years of me writing, but never feeling like I was really a writer. And then one day I was just like “Listen, stop wasting all this energy on a definition. You’re never going to stop writing, so you’re a writer.” And I have to have that conversation with myself every few years because that doubt creeps on back in like the asshole that it is.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
“Don’t confront me with my failures; I had not forgotten them.” It’s from the song “These Days” by Jackson Browne. It’s aggressive and vulnerable all at once and I love it for that. It also really encompasses how I feel right now as I try to look back honestly at how my C-PTSD has influenced my actions and feeling like shit about them half the time. I think a lot of people when they hit middle age can really feel these lines. Of course, he wrote them when he was like sixteen, so, I guess instead of being an old soul, he was a middle-aged soul?

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It depends on the piece. Sometimes what comes out on the page is exactly what I had in mind and other times I’ll futz with it for years. A poem I had in Rogue Agent last year was first drafted in 2012.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I’ve always had a love of the 1920s and also early to mid-19th century. But also, I know that that’s all built on media I’ve consumed, much of it written by contemporary writers doing a lot of romanticizing. Whichever historical time period I’m in, I’d say what I’d really like is to be rich and with the protection of a family that understands that I won’t be following the general cultural norms for women at the time.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I have a 50-page rule. If I’m not into a book by page 50, I’ll put it down and never look back. I’ve only broken this rule once. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. The voice was sanctimonious and condescending, I just couldn’t take it anymore. But one thing the book did do for me, just the little bit of it that I read, was to highlight an issue in my own narrative of my self. This idea of “getting out” inherently degrades where you’ve come from and also, by extension, who you are. So, that’s been something I’ve been working through. I love my family and where I’m from, but it also wasn’t a healthy place for me to stay. My parents are from Appalachia, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the foothills of Southern Ohio before living for about seventeen years in Southeastern Ohio. The people and places gave me so much, but also fucked me up in so many ways. Allowing those two things to co-exist is important in my development as an adult. And I never would have recognized that asshole part of myself if I hadn’t seen it so painfully plainly in J.D. Vance’s book. But that’s not a reason for anyone to try to read that book. If you feel yourself ever wanting to read it, just pick up anything by Elizabeth Catte or Alison Stine (well, not Stine’s Salon articles, those aren’t all about Appalachia, but any of her books, especially Road Out of Winter). There are also a number of lists of books online to read instead of Hillbilly Elegy, so a quick Google search will pull up tons. Don’t even hate read it, you’ve got better things to do with your time.

Name an author that you feel deserves more recognition.
Oh, there are so many! One person I think deserves a lot more recognition is Kate Mascarenhas. I love the way her fiction takes the concept of “psychological thriller” and is like “but what if the ‘psychological’ part was literal instead of just what it does to the reader?’ The way The Psychology of Time Travel explores trauma is fabulous. She’s also witty and throws twists in that would make Agatha Christie proud. Her next book is out in June and I can’t wait. Though, also the concept of “deserving more recognition” is also sort of a difficult one because Mascarenhas was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so that’s a decent amount of recognition.

I’d also say that I think Alison Stine’s books deserve more recognition. But she won the Philip K. Dick for Road Out of Winter, so again, that’s a fair amount of recognition really. But I think more people should be reading her. So maybe I mean more attention, not necessarily more recognition?

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I’m a bad judge of this, so instead I’ll talk about who I’d like my work to resemble. For my fiction, I’d love to be able to write half as well as Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark. Their ability to capture human interaction and distill it into such a tight package absolutely floors me (in Spark’s case, Murdoch spins it out a bit more, but still, considering all that’s going on in her books I think it counts as a tight package). For my poetry, I don’t really even have anyone I’d like my work to resemble. I have poets I love (Rita Dove, William Wordsworth, Annie Finch, Catie Rosemurgy), but I don’t know if I’d want my work to be like theirs. I want my poetry to resemble the best version of itself, which changes with each poem.

What does your creative process look like?
I used to call the corners before I’d write, but I don’t do that as much anymore because I do it as part of my daily meditation practice instead and just sort of throw in at the end “stick around as long as you want, probably gonna’ fuck around and write something later.”

Entraining is an important part of my writing process. I’ll pick a meter I want a poem to be in and then read a poem in that meter for a few minutes before I dig in and write. It usually takes between twenty minutes and an hour to write a first draft of a poem. During revision I usually have to decide if I want the poem to actually be metrical or if it’s more just vibes.

I sometimes do this process when I’m writing fiction also. I wrote a novel where I would entrain with Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” for about 100 lines and then just write whatever came to my mind, like no plot outline or nothing ahead of time. Once I’d made it all the way through the poem, then I went back to revise and see how to make all the parts fit together. It ended up being about a woman who becomes a literal goddess after she goes through chemo for ovarian cancer which was alittle wishful thinking on my part (post-chemo me is still just me). She goes on a revenge spree while also dispensing self-help style advice to the reader. It’s a wild frickin’ ride with some three-page footnotes and parts where she tells you that if you can’t wait to find out certain information that you can just skip to X page or chapter, as long as you promise to come back. An excerpt from it appeared recently in Shenandoah. I tried to query an agent once and she was at one of the big agencies that has a filter for their email system and my query bounced back as “lewd spam”…it was the first ten pages of the novel. I’ve sent it to a few contests, but haven’t tried to query anyone since. I just love the narrator and her failures with such ferocity, and I’m not sure how to get anyone else to do that in a space as short as a query letter.

Many artists and authors are creative in multiple disciplines. What other types of art do you create?
I started as a dancer, moved to theater and improv. comedy - then to painting and writing. I'm also a naturalist. Mostly I paint and write. I painted for many years before I started and (mostly) switched to writing.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
That depends - I was in a traveling theater company dancing and acting in my early 20's. Then I started painting and within a year I was trading paintings for rent:)

In 2005 I started writed. I wrote a children's book and a lot of people liked it, but I had trouble finding a publisher. In 2009 I wrote and had a short published by Saint Martin's press.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

What is your most evocative memory?
Talking to a cuttlefish while diving in Thailand. It answered me.

What is your biggest creative doubt?
That no one reads my work.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Tricky- Whenever I contemplate other times I fear disease and even worse times for women... also it would depend on if I were rich or poor.

However, I would like to visit the 20's of F. Scott Fitzgerald , the 60's in San Francisco or London and belong to one of the indigenous tribes in America, possibly the Lenni Lenape or the Miwok in the 1600's. Can I come back if I don't like it?

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Margaret Atwood's - Penelopiad - I couldn't stomach the Greek chorus.

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you
Talking to a cuttlefish while diving in Thailand:)

Rescuing Egrets in Bali and having the villages leave me fish for them.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
In descriptive style Alice Hoffman and/or sometimes Raymond Chandler.

What does your creative process look like?
I work with a magic pilates circle between my legs, so as not to go stir crazy. I use a lot of fact in my fiction, so there's a lot of checking google.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
A terrible confession. When I was a full-time mother, teaching and attending school, I didn’t have enough time. Now, I am retired and still don’t find enough time. I am fortunate to be part of a wonderful Detroit writing community which inspires and disciplines me and always hones my work.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
In 1996 I heard Rita Dove. While I had been probing poetry with the children I taught, this was my first attendance at a reading and the Dickenson head lift occurred. Soon after, I attended a reading at a Wayne State bar by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Both these authors examined family dynamics, regrets, ambivalence. While my background was not in literature, I became compelled to write.

I have seen some amazing puppet productions: Redmoon theater out of Chicago combined puppetry with experimental theater and presented a bombastic Hunchback of Notre Dame—scale represented by every type of puppet including a finger puppet classroom embedded in a book. A second production, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was performed by dangling gymnasts in a, you guessed it, a huge cabinet. Another troop, Manuel Cinema, adapted Frankenstein into a silent movie as we watched utilizing, a cranky box, manipulated dolls and overhead projectors. I am in awe of the complete submersion of these performances and the complexity of “high and low” culture; a tone I aspire to in my poetry. One more reference: Julie Taymor—see her movie adaptations.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
So many of my favorite sentences come from children’s authors—the ones who respect the intelligence and capaciousness of their readers, never talking down to them. Any sentence by E.B.White, William Steig, Tomi Ungerer (The Beast of Monsieur Racine), Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak. Lovely, deceptively simple sentences, exact, and unexpected, pushing into contradiction, reveling in normalizing absurdity. Together, my daughter and I, memorized Where the Wild Things Are—the first book she “read”.

“That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” You can’t travel much further in a single sentence.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
Loss would seem to be my impetus. In my early 20’s one of my fingers was severed in an accident. Without insurance, my improvised recovery was a weaving class which led to diversification into other handcrafts. This artistic self did not exist until the finger was lost. Similarly, the parents’ deaths were the great trigger that compelled my writing life.

What is your most evocative memory?
My most evocative memories are the ones I can’t recall. So, I write them into substance.

What does your creative process look like?
Often it is a gestation of desperate images that are compelled to be together. What they have to say to each other is the initiation of the poem. Then I let them evolve. The music of language also guides this combining. The initializing is on paper and is random word associations and drawing, literally, finding what they are saying in opposition or combination.

Then the drafts begin, workshopping, that strange balance of someone “getting it” with honoring where the poem wants to go. Finally, it draws breath or…not.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Most of my adult life has been made up of one trade off after another to have time for writing. Until now. These days, I make trade offs to make time for my family far more often than for writing. I became a dad of three almost overnight a little over four years ago when my now-wife and I got together when she was pregnant with her third child. Being a dad has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. Being stepdad to Eli, Otis, and Siliuna is the greatest gift of my life. I'd trade everything that came before them for them but, of course, without what came before, I wouldn't have them now. I don't write anymore, and I don't miss it. Instead of sacrificing living for writing, I put all that writing time into my wife and kids. Parenting is a creative act in and of itself. The triumphs and failures of parenting require a creative edge that is quite similar to the triumphs and failures of poeting. You have to plan, you have to improvise, you have to learn, you have to grow. If you don't, your family suffers, and being a family is no fun at all. Being a father is far more rewarding to me than being a poet. When you have a bad a day with one of your kids, there is almost always a good day to follow--and quickly. And the good days? My god are they good. Poetry maybe works like that sometimes, but it comes with far more disappointment the poetry community has some problems that are far scarier than any of the issues that arise in the communities I find myself in with my wife and kids. I am grateful for poetry. I'm grateful I managed to write three books before this transformation to fatherhood took full hold. Poetry prepared me for fatherhood. I'll come back to it someday, but, for now, I'm thrilled to be putting everything I have into my wife and little ones.

What is your most evocative memory?
My first: a toddler running up and down the hill that made up my backyard growing up—my father at the top of the hill, my mother at the bottom. I'm wearing overalls. So is my mother. My dad is in jeans and a button up—probably because he soon has an appointment in our basement where he ran a child psychiatry practice until I left for college. It is a sunny day in Nashville. The neighborhood hasn't yet turned into the hell it would become known for until, decades later, gentrification would make it one of the most desired neighborhoods in the city. I'm not sure how the memory tells me this, but there is a clean, crisp quality to the air, the breeze, the street itself that tells m no trash rimes the gutters, no gangs of father-angry teenagers are roaming the streets, no pets are going missing. The memory is in third person, bird's-eye-view as if I am a bird sitting in the giant elm in our backyard looking down at myself being myself—giggling away as I toddle up and down the hill between my parents who seem happy. How can a memory of the self not be from within the self? Shouldn't I be seeing all this through my toddler eyes, not from the eyes of some being floating above? All the more haunting is that the mind of the viewer is not the mind of a child. He is myself at whatever age it is I am recalling this memory. This memory ought to be similar to watching any child at any time running up and down any hill, yet when I have it (when I dream it), I feel the joy of the child I am watching below me, I am inside myself as I am outside myself. This memory is one of the great mysteries of my life. It has always been there. As though it were part of my body.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I don't often have an image for a poem before it starts. The poem arrives because of something I sense in the world (a crow caws overhead and I think it's some other bird then realize it is a crow and something about that moment makes me dive for my pen and paper) and then I write down whatever it is that comes (this aspect of the process might be the most mysterious of all—how words come in lines that express what I'm experiencing with no planning, no thinking, no...nothing...), and through the process of revision, the poem slowly but surely writes itself. How long that process takes has changed over time. Until recently, I would work a poem to absolute death no matter how much I liked or didn't like it or what my mentors and peers said. My theory was that if I threw the kitchen sink at a poem, I would test every single possibility and not miss out on any angles or approaches I could take with it. I didn't refine a poem until I'd worked on it for at least 50-60 hours. Then I'd test every refinement method possible. I used to "meter" poems, meaning I would take a free verse poem and force it into some metrical form or another just to see what I would invent along the way that might be worth keeping before I'd break the poem back down and then remeter it again in yet another form. It was nuts. It worked, but it was nuts. I'd spend an entire day revising a poem purely for what I called vertical music, repeated letters vertically up and down the poem in a sort of grid. The next day I'd revise for horizontal music, repeated letters from left to right. Letters are what, after all, make sounds in our language. So repeated letters was a type of music. The next day, I'd go for rhythm. Then imagery. Then metaphor. And on and on and on. I wrote a lot of bad poems that way, but I also learned a lot about writing a poem, and I wrote my first two books (Ghost Gear & Visiting Hours) within that process. When I set out to write my third book (FIGHT or FLIGHT, forthcoming 2023), I did the exact opposite. I wrote easy and fast. If a poem I wrote struck me as valuable, I'd spend an hour or two getting it into good shape, would type it up, and then hide it away in a folder and forget about it. Kind of like a retirement plan. I trusted that time rather than crafting would do its work and just let them sit for a while and then would randomly pull one out while on a hike in the desert or upon waking in the twelve-person tent I was living in on the California coast post divorce and would see what I had and would delicately craft from there. All those skills I honed with so much intention for all those years in my MFA (2006-9) and in the years following it and before my divorce (2009-16) came to bear on these poems with a grace and simplicity I used to scoff at when I heard other poets talk about it. I was raised to work my ass off for everything. That was good raising. But I had to teach myself that hard work takes various forms and it pays off over time. These days, when I write a poem (which is rare but does happen from time to time), I find myself enjoying the poem (if there is enjoyment to be found) in a matter of hours--a process that used to take weeks. At the end of the day, I think enjoyment is what matters most. That's when I know I have gotten somewhere. We often pishaw the idea of whether or not we like a poem. In workshop, if you say, "I like this poem," people roll their eyes. That used to be me, so I get it, but what else is there but being pleased by language? We can spend a lot of time nitpicking, and that's good, that's part of the process, but I know, personally, that I'm on the right track when I read what I'm writing and I feel an upwelling of emotion in my chest similar to the upwelling I feel when I turn a corner in a museum and encounter a massive Pollack. If I feel something akin to that when working on a poem, I know I'm close.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Easy. Judy Jordan. Her first book, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the Walt Whitman in 1999, and her second and third books, Sixty Cent Coffee and a Quarter To Dance and Hunger, are absolutely wonderful. Her fourth book, Children of Salt, a book-length poem, is forthcoming in 2023 with Tinderbox Editions. You can read some of her work here. She taught me practically everything I know about poetry (apologies to my other amazing teachers), and she has an amazing youtube channel, PUGGED POETRY, where she shares her knowledge in lectures on everything poetry. Her books are like operas, each poem a movement. If you love Beloved, you'll love any of Judy's books. And she works tirelessly with her students. Having Judy as a mentor is like having three. That's how dedicated she is. And she's tough as nails. Don't bring a poem to her that you haven't crafted. Yes, you can talk about an idea for a poem or can look at a line you are struggling with, but she is going to look at a poem you haven't really crafted yet and call you out for it before wasting her time on any real criticism. You learn early and hard to take her time seriously and to take her criticism seriously, even when she might be off the mark. Judy is a true humanitarian who truly cares for her students who can write a killer poem in her sleep. That's rare. I am truly blessed to call her my friend.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
The tradeoff is writing poetry, which allows/forces me to be more concise and focused. Ideally, I'd be writing long fiction, but don't have the wherewithal to get to that level yet.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Probably the very first instance would've been reading Willa Cather—her short story, "The Sculptor's Funeral." The first to do it substantially in a way I kept coming back to was James Joyce. As a poet, William Blake.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
Freshman year in college.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
Last sentence/third stanza of Hopkins' "The Windhover.":

"No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillionShine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion."

What is your most evocative memory?
I'll keep it to writing: the death of a friend of mine in college/ROTC. It was the inspiration for a long poem I wrote.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Usually about a month for a short poem. For a long one, sometimes six months.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
It's a tie between the period of the American Revolution and in the future when we've colonized other planets in our solar system.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
DeLillo's Underworld. I liked it, but got caught up in reading several other things (it's a mega-novel)—I'll finish it this year.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Mary Butts

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
Maybe David Baker? A little bit of Charles Simic and Gail Mazur. I really can't be sure.

What does your creative process look like?
Taking long walks and recording thoughts before I forget them; taking naps, waking from dreams and writing those down before I forget them.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Absolutely. I completed a low residency MFA while working full time. I learned a lot about time management and about the importance of prioritizing space for creativity and writing within a busy schedule.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I’ve always wanted to be a writer: when I was a small child, I wrote and hand-bound stories for my family and friends. Even before I learned to read, I was entranced by the power of the written word and the worlds that could be contained within the pages of a book.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It really depends - some poems emerge almost fully formed, others take years to develop.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Now. I often think about traveling back in time, but I believe that the ability to do so and enjoy it goes hand in hand with privilege. To be a white, straight, wealthy cis-man traveling in a previous era - sure, that might be fun. But for those of us who hold marginalized identities, traveling to another era would actually be wracked with danger. And I’m really not sure what the future holds, and I worry that traveling forward in time would lead to a dystopian hellscape. The present, and all of the possibilities and hope (and sometimes despair) that our current moment holds is the right time for me.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I think everyone should read more work by trans poets - some of my current favorites include Oliver Baez Bendorf, Jos Charles, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza.

What does your creative process look like?
Reading and having fun with language are two essential elements to my creative process. Perhaps doing a collage or an erasure poem, perhaps generating a list of interesting words and seeing what emerges from that collection. Trying to always keep the joy of creation alive and, most importantly, making time to write as often as possible.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Having “that” time has been a constant struggle and still is. It has required (and still does) fierce discipline; it has sprouted as a byproduct a large amount of solitude (due to the necessity of often saying no to outer distraction). Discipline ended up being useful, and I am not sure I had it in my initial toolset, so I’m grateful. Solitude is such a sweet companion. So, I shouldn’t call these tradeoffs—perhaps, bonuses. Other things I apparently sacrificed in order to prioritize creativity (such as, for instance, having a regular income, or vacations, or hobbies) would have certainly been enjoyable. But they were so less valuable to me than art is, and I knew it so early in my life, that I didn’t really “trade.”

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
A few epiphanies blew my mind around the age of 13. For visual art, in the following order: a group show of naïf painters from all over the world, but especially the Balkan regions; Picasso’s last 200 paintings; a retrospective of Paul Klee. Also, a collage by Robert Rauschenberg. For literature, doubtlessly One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. For music, a single line by Bach, printed on the daily paper, that my brothers and I deciphered on the piano, violin and cello. That did it. For dance, popular dance from my native region.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I taught myself how to write at the age of four, and have scribbled stuff since. I don’t think I ever planned to be an author. I probably couldn’t imagine one could live without writing. The same concept applies to all other media.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
There are clusters of words, several, that have remained stuck in my mind. They prominently belong to songs—I have read them, but also heard them. Many are from songs by Leonard Cohen. Let me pick one at random: “and we read from pleasant bibles, that were bound in flesh and blood… “

What is your most evocative memory?
I can’t assign priorities ☺ in this particular domain. Moreover, memories have this habit of keeping it low or play possum, then suddenly rush into the spotlight. I remember… the icy gorges of the river Al-Kantara in Sicily. I remember… the red hair of my son when he emerged from my womb. I remember… the sound of a cowbell at my brother’s funeral, and the sheep quietly passing by the graveyard gate.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Time for realizing a piece varies in reason of the chosen medium. For some media, I have become able to assess an average time. It would take me 3 months, for instance, to prepare a performance with dance/music/words/costumes. 1 month to 6 weeks for a single artwork involving painting, collage and/or assemblage. I usually write very rapidly but—as an ESL writer—editing takes me longer than it does to others. When accepting a deadline, I try to give myself as much time as possible, taking into consideration the habit “life” has of getting in the way of creativity.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
As a child, I liked prehistory and the middle age. Now I like now.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I haven’t learned yet how to put down a book. I hope I will. I can mention a (very) few that I have finished with disproportioned effort—the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante and The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
The Italian author Anna Maria Ortese—who was wonderful, but shadowed by more mediatic figures.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I can’t even count the myriad influences that my work reflects.

What does your creative process look like?
To me, it looks like breathing. Or walking.

Breathing, because there is a methodical in and out. A quiet, almost void instant (inspiration, when voluntary muscles are at rest). Then, immediately, a corresponding action or gesture (expire). Exactly corresponding.

Walking, because that is what I do—I take a step at a time, put one foot in front of the other, with a steady rhythm. I never turn back, I never stop. In case, I briefly pause.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I wouldn’t say that I have made any significant tradeoffs; some compromises, yes, but no tradeoffs so far.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Mark Gimenez. Reading The Color of Law made me understand just how much I could be consumed by a genre I’d never written on before.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I don’t think there’s ever been that “moment.” I’ve enjoyed writing as long as I can remember, mainly as a hobby. Becoming an author (bearing the title) was never really the goal.

What is your most evocative memory?
Reading The Last Leaf by O. Henry. Merely thinking about it makes me want the turn the world on its head with the simplest possible thing.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It depends on the volume of the work, but I would say that almost as soon as the idea is formed in my head.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Oh, easy – 18th century Victorian era. Reading Madeleine Hunter and writing historical fiction myself always has me imagining what it would really be like living in that time.

What’s the last book you didn’t finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Don Quixote. I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate, I suppose for personal reasons.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition?
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was an exceptional read for me as an African writer and I wish it did get more recognition.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I would say two authors – O. Henry and Mark Gimenez.

What does your creative process look like?
Often like giving this ‘second man’ inside of me control by pulling on a loose thread. I don’t always go about seeing story ideas is every event/mishap, but when I need to create, it happens with a small thought that I nibble at/fiddle with until I can imagine it happening (not necessarily to me).

When I’m “plotting,” I can lose myself, talk and argue with myself if there’s no partner involved (something I try to do away from ignorant eyes to prevent confusion). And when the world is built and the stage is set in my head and the plot has been penned down (however long it takes), I get to writing.

But I feel I should add that creating doesn’t ever stop and the “process” never really has an end, because even after the last full stop, you could still see possible twists and turns.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I have always made time for my creativity—writing poetry; playing piano, composing a little classical-style music; visual art work and calligraphy; knitting, crocheting; and creative dinner parties. But marriage, two daughters, employment, and earning four and a half college degrees curtailed my output, especially my poetry production! Retired from much of the interfering activities, I write, revise, research and submit on average four to five hours a day, almost every day, having abandoned some of the other activities in favor of poetry, my favorite.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Polish poet Wisława Szymborska

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create”—from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake.

This has been my guiding principle.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Because I’m a pacifist and there has never been a war-free time, I can’t name any desirable historical time in which I’d be happy to live. In terms of violence, all times are, and have been, bad. And I don’t see that it will ever change.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I don’t know that my work can be accurately said to “resemble” theirs, but my greatest influencers have been Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. And I like to sometimes dance along the line between sense and nonsense.

What does your creative process look like?
In general, I’ll sit at my desk (or at a table in a tea house or coffee shop), open a book of poetry and begin reading. I’m almost always immediately inspired to write something, having gotten an idea. I never experience writer’s block. During the past three or four years, I’ve been obsessed with the cento form and have now written 352 (to date, I’ve published eight of them), using lines from 2380 different poets. In the process, I’ve sometimes combined forms, writing centonnets, centonelles, centinas, for instance. My writing of centos takes different forms: sometimes I just go through books plucking out lines I like and then beginning to build something from whichever lines I can put together in some kind of sense-making way. Sometimes I just begin to create as I go along, finding line after line that will “fit” whatever seems to be developing. And there are other methods too numerous to name. Other formal and free-verse poems have various starting points, regarding form, subject matter, etc.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I read Lolita (1955) by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov as an impressionable teenager. Coming from a dysfunctional family I was captivated by the sexual relationship of a 12-year-old girl and her threatening stepfather. I didn’t realize until much later that the story was fiction.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
It wasn’t a conscious decision—just sort of sneaked up on me in the mid-1970s when I was a stay at home parent. Writing was something to do to keep my brain from turning into strained carrots. My first published piece was a “Letter to the Editor” column of the Los Angeles Times, submitted as a lark. Later, I wrote short stories for second-rate men’s magazines. As my daughters grew older, I became interested in children’s literature. In that arena I’m best known for my Alaskan-based middle-grade adventure novels featuring female main characters: Frozen Stiff and Ice Island (both Random House).

What is your most evocative memory?
Meeting my paternal grandmother when I was 10-years-old. I loved her right off because she lived alone in a house she paid for by herself and dyed her hair a scandalous red. Her kitchen cupboard had things I’d never seen: blackstrap molasses, mineral oil, witch hazel, henna. She let me sniff jars of spice, and asked if I were a spice what would I smell like? I settled on cinnamon because there wasn’t anything better than the smell of cinnamon, sugar, and butter bubbling on toast under the broiler. A personal essay (memoir) featuring my initial impressions of her have appeared in literary journals and anthologies.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I’ve written poetry, short stories, personal essays (memoir), travel articles, novels and more. Each project receives its own individual attention and energy, as if I’m caring for a friend or family member. I’ve been working on a YA novel off and on for years. It’s a creepy story that borders on horror, which is out of my comfort zone. I expect to be working on it for years to come. It takes what it takes.

What’s the last book you didn’t finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I couldn’t get past the first few chapters of Fifty Shades of Gray (2011) by E.L. James—even though it’s considered the top selling book of its decade with millions of readers and has been translated into 60+ languages. The sex scenes are poorly crafted and often laughable. It’s riddled with hackneyed clichés and tone-deaf metaphors. The overuse of exclamation points is annoying. How many times do we need to hear “inner goddess”? Examples: “My inner goddess is beside herself, hopping from foot to foot” and “My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.” Seriously?

What word do you feel should be brought back into popular usage?
I prefer the past use of “sandbox,” as in a low box filled with sand where children play, as opposed to the current use, an environment where software developers can create and test new content.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Sure. I feel like every inflection point in my life I'm evaluating what choices I need to make in order to not lose the ability to be making things, especially because (for me at least) the hustle of trying to find an audience or funding saps not just all my time but also all my creative energy. I haven't found the ideal balance yet.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
This is such a difficult question, because my universe is continually being opened by the authors I read, and a lot of it is through a slow process of constant shaping. I can point to the first that I remember a book punching a hole into my soul, and that was Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It was the first time my fundamentalist Christian self had ever encountered a queer character who wasn't being ridiculed or smited by G-d, and it haunted me. I had not yet figured out that I was also queer, but in retrospect I think that one reason I was so obsessed with the story is that it let me live vicariously as if I were, even though I had zero language for it at the time. I'm still in love with the Flytes, problematic as they are.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
It's very cliche, but I've wanted to be an artist since I was a kid. I never thought I could be a writer until recently, and even now I consider myself more an artist who writes rather than a writer. Maybe its a pointless distinction, but I come to it with a different training and it feels more true to label myself this way.

What is your most evocative memory?
I'm a sophomore in college and I'm awakening from a nap on my aunt's screened in porch. The light is approaching golden hour, Anna Karenina is lying on my stomach, and the air is crisp with the magic of early fall.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It really just depends on the piece. Sometimes something descends on me and it all just flows out in one terrific rush. Sometimes I have to keep circling back around to it, tending to it before its ready to come forth. I also rarely have an exact end-vision in mind. Most of the time I have an intuition towards something, and I write or work with my hands until it finishes itself.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I'm not sure. I will say when I read Yan Ge's Strange Beasts of China, it felt like I was talking to myself in my own head the whole time, even though I don't think my writing is at all like hers in actuality. But something about her (translated) voice on paper and my internal voice resonated.

What does your creative process look like?
I'll have an idea that sticks in my head, and I'll swirl it around for a while to see if it goes anywhere and what form it needs to take, and then I'll start writing or sketching and see where it goes. I spend a lot of time staring at the screen or paper while I'm writing, because most of the composition happens in my head. I was trained as a printmaker, so for my visual work, once I'm through the sketch the whole image needs to be more or less there and then refined through the subsequent steps. Now that I'm thinking about it, my visual work and my writing process are quite different in the sense that visually, I work best with limited materials and set parameters, and when I'm writing, I'm really just following along.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
If by trade-offs you mean over a decade of my life, then yes. As a classroom teacher, and as a school leader, I came home exhausted just about every day. My creative energy was spent designing learning experiences for my students, and my emotional energy was given over to supporting them. When my daughter was born I felt an imperative to find a way to work that allowed me more time with her, and eventually, I did. A biproduct of that impulse was a return to my writing. Now, there are still tradeoffs: I’m a parent, I have other family obligations, I work full time (at a non-profit), but I am more whole and I think it shows in my writing.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Oh wow. There’s not one answer to this. I think of it this way: If I can remember myself in my body the first time I experienced their work, where I was, what I was doing, then they belong on this list: the author(s) of the Psalms, Ray Bradbury, Robert Hayden, Prince, Martín Espada, Julian of Norwich, Hafiz, Li-Young Lee, Isabelle Allende, Margaret Atwood, Brenda Hillman, Toni Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Catherynne M. Valente. While I’m not the superfan sort of person who knows everything about a writer I love, I can tell you that each of these caught my breath in my throat. And in full disclosure, this is the short list. There are so many more. (I’m bothered a bit by the fact that the men’s names come first in my list, but that’s the truth of it: most of the literature I encountered as a young reader was written by men, so they got in first.)

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
What a fascinating question. Most of the time I’m not aiming for a particular end. I know the start, or some phrase in the middle. I know the feeling of the piece. Then I work it over and over until it feels done. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to short forms. Even the novella I wrote was built out of a collection of self-contained stories. When I know how something is going to end, I rarely write it—it’s like a movie I’ve already seen. I know what’s going to happen, and I have to be really captivated by some aspect of it to watch it again. Recently, I’ve been trying to push past this. I have an idea for a collection of flash-fiction stories, and I’ve written the first one, and I’m happy with it, but my momentum has slowed. Even though I actualized one story that I knew the ending of, committing to doing so over and over again feels more tedious than I want to admit.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I picked up Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates while I was grieving the death of my brother. I don’t know if I could have made it through that time and back into myself without that book. Of course, the resonant content of someone grieving a profound loss got me to open it—but it was the enactment of her grief that pierced me: erratic, wrenching. It’s not like she’s unknown, but I’d shine more light on her.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
My friend, Shana Ross, is a fabulous poet who’s themes and interests overlap with mine quite a bit. Our voices are distinct from one another, but if my work interests you, I’d point you to her. Oh! And Amanda Rachel Robins and I share a love of messy content held by formal verse. I feel like her sonnets are speaking directly to me.

What does your creative process look like?
It starts one of two ways: I’m caught by words that I need to write down or I’m responding to a prompt. I’m not a Morning Pages sort of writer. You won’t be surprised to hear me say that the predictability of such a routine doesn’t do it for me. However, a prompt, a question put before me by another writer—that is surprising enough to get me started most of the time. So I write, I play, I circle back over the words until my ear and my heart are in agreement. Then, if possible, I trade. I trade with poets like Shana and Amanda, who know me and my aesthetic, or I find a place like Pencilhouse that offers feedback. I try to get 2-3 readers at least, and let their suggestions bump up against each other and my own thinking. I revise, resend, revise, let sit. When I think a piece is done I move it from my drafts folder to my finished folder. When I’m in the mindset to do so, I spend time sending out submissions. Sometimes I’ll notice that I’m reluctant to send a piece out—that often means it needs more work, and back into drafts it goes. Holding this whole thing together is the reading & the living—that’s what fuels the words, after all.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes and no. The big areas of daily life seem to me to be kids, relationships, work, and art. I’ve done all of these, including fostering a son for four years. But what I’ve noticed with myself and my creative friends is that you can do any two of those things really well or you can do three by slightly short-changing them all. Most people I’ve met who try to do all four struggle. I aged out of the foster care system without any support, so I have always had to work. But I knew when I was seven that I wanted to be a writer. So for now, I choose to focus on work and art. But I enjoy both, so I’m satisfied with this balance.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I have a lot of first favorite author stories. (Don’t all avid readers?!) But I’d say discovering Shirley Jackson was a real game-changer for me. Most of what I write falls somewhere under the “gothic” heading. Jackson was really my first exposure to “horror” writing. She was also my first exposure to writing that would be called “literary” that also felt like something I would choose to read recreationally. And she examined issues that fascinate me like mental illness and the kind of evil that lives between people and in communities on a daily basis. I think every writer has their own personal “cannon” and she was the first member of mine.

Who do you think is the most misunderstood historical figure?
This comes from my time studying Physics, but I’m going to have to go with Werner Heisenberg. One of the most brilliant physicists of all time, one of the main architects of Quantum Mechanics and the entire foundation upon which our modern world is built. And he has been almost universally maligned as the evil German scientist who tried to build a bomb for Hitler. The reality is much more complicated. In fact, when the Nuremberg Laws were instituted, Heisenberg tried so hard to get the Jewish academics their jobs back that he was tailed by the Gestapo. It’s a matter of historical record that Germany never had a serious atomic bomb project. It’s also a matter of historical record that this is almost entirely because of Heisenberg. We can’t really know what he was thinking. But in a closed meeting before the war really even got started, Hitler asked him if a bomb was possible. Heisenberg said “no” so many times and so convincingly that Hitler never devoted significant funds to the project.

What do you want people to take away from your work?
I’ve lived in every region of the US (and one foreign country.) I’ve worked in most industries. I’ve been very poor, and now I’m not. I am very well-educated. I also know what extreme hardship looks like. I am a lesbian. And I was baptized into the church seven years ago. One of my best friends is an elderly lesbian pianist. The other is a ten-foot tall ex-army Libertarian who writes children’s books. All of these people/places/communities/subcommunities are part of me and inform my writing. I would love it if people read my work and came away with a slightly expanded sense of who belongs within their own human families.

What surprising reactions have you gotten to your work?
I think a lot about hardship. About the hardship I’ve suffered, in particular, and about the hardship I’ve witnessed others suffering. And also about the problem of suffering from a theological perspective. (Just why does a loving God allow children to go hungry, for instance?) I don’t think we have enough nuanced, thoughtful, honest conversations about it. So I write about it. Both my fiction and my nonfiction explore these questions, but I’ve found “literary” publishers tend to shy away from real darkness unless it’s nonfiction. Almost like it’s too dangerous to broach these topics unless it’s “my experience.” This has led to another weird response which is people apologizing to me or trying to comfort me for what I've gone through. This is uncomfortable because I'm just trying to make art.

Name a favorite film or other visual work that has influenced the way you shape a story.
I love visual art and am often influenced by it. My novella The Bonny Swans, which is coming out in January as part of Sadie Hartmann’s My Dark Library series with Cemetery Gates Media, wouldn’t exist without the photography of Sara Chmet.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Absolutely; it was only when I recently quit my full-time job as a teacher in a government institution in Singapore that I really had time for my creative endeavours (though I am absolutely glad that I did!). I feel that most aspects of modern life really infringe on one's space for creativity, and I think making a deliberate and intentional attempt to create that space for oneself is often rather necessary, if not essential, toward producing quality work.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I think it was Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet (minus An Acceptable Time, which I could never really get into — sorry! :/), which I first read when I was four or five in 1997, that really helped me to think outside of the box about not just the universe and how one constructs one's own place in it, but how one takes a balanced and nuanced approach to difficult and thorny questions like religion, suffering and abuse.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I was writing since 11 or 12, and then really decided on making it a life thing at 13, especially after I had the privilege of receiving a Highly Commended Award for a short story I submitted to the 2005 Royal Commonwealth Writing Competition and was able to realise that I could make something out of this skill even in very utility- and instrumentally-oriented Singapore, where (at the time at least) everything had to either be immediately useful, usually, by being income-generating or otherwise being a waste of one's time.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
I think a very strong contender for me would be this sentence from Henry Beston's The Outermost House: "For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time." Psychoemotionally I believe this is where I have been since I came out as gay when I was 15; it also made its way into the title of an episode on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, which helped me get through some of the most difficult years of my life.

What is your most evocative memory?
Probably my first kiss, which also happened to be my first kiss from a boy, on October 1, 2008, my 16th birthday; it remains a tortured and painful memory because this boy would later go on to abuse me for five years, but also a deeply poignant and moving one, because it was my first real embrace of the beauty and joy a relationship could bring me, even one that would turn out the way that this one did.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I usually try and complete my short stories in one sitting (so as they are imagined I immediately generate them). Longer prose work (e.g. my first novel Altered Straits) generally seems to take about 3-4 months from imagination to first full draft, and thereafter another one to two weeks for review.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I would like to have experienced life before 74,000 BCE and the eruption of Lake Toba, which seems to have been when humanity as a species generally started forgetting our place within the greater ecology of the planet and generally started trending downwards.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I'm midway through Dennis De Witt's Strange and Paranormal Tales from Malacca; I'm using it as a gateway to explore more of my own Kristang / Portuguese-Eurasian culture, but keep getting interrupted to make notes about fascinating things I encounter, and then go off on tangents that take me away from finishing the whole anthology.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
I think most writing from Southeast Asia in general deserves more recognition, including writing from the region in languages other than English :)

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
Most of my work is very much framed within the marginal/peripheral island/creole context that my community hails from, and with that as well as my own awareness of what influences me, I would say that tonally my work takes after Derek Walcott, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin and Alice Walker, as well as Singaporean writers like Edwin Thumboo, Alfian Sa'at and Ng Yi-Sheng.

What does your creative process look like?
It's usually not very conscious, but from what I understand of myself after five-six years of doing this professionally, new stories, poems and/or music usually emerge after my psyche has unconsciously completed processing some form of trauma or projection; this is because once the creative work is complete, I can usually understand it as a renegotiating of or a response to whatever the other person has projected onto me (e.g. the story that Zoetic Press will publish in issue 30, 'Looking Glass', appears to have arisen from psychological projection from the person I kissed listed under #5; it is probably his story, but with a different 'follow-through', as I see it, or resolution-ending). In the moment, however, I usually just trust my gut and write or compose as the story, poem or piece of music reveals itself to me; for the former two, if additional external stimuli support the development of the work (e.g. a particular piece of music or a place outdoors) I just again go with the flow and let that ecology support the work naturally. Once the work is completed, I always run it by my partner, who I write and compose the vast majority of my work for, and thereafter revise and edit it based on his comments.