Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
The trade-off is less TV time for more time invested in me and the creative endeavors that have eternal value.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
You can’t win, if you don’t play. In June 2012, on a whim, I submitted a poem, “March of the Snowbirds,” to The News of Sun City Center (FL) and it was published. I was sixty years old. Addicted to the taste of success, my poems appeared monthly for five years! I stopped submitting when the Poetry Corner morphed into advertising space.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
"...I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." (“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost) As a woman of color, I've grown accustomed to, yet saddened by the fact, that I was usually the only one wherever I was.

What is your most evocative memory?
The pit into which I was thrust when my first husband left me. This memory has made excellent poetic fodder.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It takes as long as it takes. Something inside of me says "It's done...for now." Or a deadline, like this one, speaks louder.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I'd like to live in ancient China. I find all things Asian fascinating, especially the beauty and complexities of their written language. Each Sinogram looks like a poem.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I've never been an avid reader. I read what I had to in order to graduate eight times - (Locust Manor Nursery School, P.S. 156Q, Springfield Gardens JHS, H.S. of Performing Arts, BA (George Washington University - Secondary Mathematics Education), MA (Nova Southeastern University - Secondary Mathematics Education ), Ph.D. (University of Miami - Teaching and Learning Mathematics), and AS (Miami-Dade College - Sign Language Interpretation). Even in retirement, I continue to reward myself with much lighter reading. In spite of leaving it in the bathroom, after nine months, I haven't finished reading I Didn't Do the Thing Today (smile). Why? I spend more time in front of the TV than in the bathroom.

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you?
I'm still alive. I've made choices that, without divine intervention, would have resulted in death.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
No one's. Each of us is, literally and biologically, one-in-a-million. There has never been anyone like me; there's no one like me now; there will never be a "me" in the future. I'm doin' the best me because all the other jobs are taken.

What does your creative process look like?
"Understand your right-now habits, interests, needs, and idiosyncrasies. In amazing or awful circumstances, write from inspiration or routine. Just pick up a pen and write! You’re one-in-a-million. No one else can do you! Considering you started with blank paper, you’ve done well..." (Except from Craft of Writing, 42-Word Stories Anthology, Bam Mullin, scheduled for publication in 2024.)

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I had an introspective and creative mind from early childhood, but I had to prevail over poverty, provincialism, physical abuse, and religious indoctrination. I also had to compensate for reading and writing disabilities, so my lifelong focus was on developing good mental health, getting educated, and attaining higher education degrees to establish my career as a college professor and trauma-informed psychotherapist. I also chose to devote much time, energy and creativity to family life and raising my daughter. Finally, I withdrew from my career and began to focus on getting my writing published. The writing was always there; making time to pursue publication was a challenge and tradeoff. .

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I was very shy about speaking and didn’t learn to write until 5th grade. Then I wrote a poem that was published in the elementary school bulletin. It was called “The Ballad of the Sickly Sot,” about a kind drunk man. I think my teacher was impressed and appalled.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
The single best sentence I have ever read was penned by William Carlos Williams: “So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.”

What is your most evocative memory?
My most evocative memory is from my Peace Corps days in the late 1960s. In Northern Thailand I came across a field of American B52 bombers poised to drop bombs on peasants in Vietnam and Laos. I talked with some young American soldiers on R&R from the base housing those bombers; they told me they had no idea why they were in Southeast Asia, they just wanted to go home, and they did not want to kill or be killed The image of those planes and the memory of the tears of those boy-soldiers left an indelible imprint on my soul,

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
For my forthcoming novel it took me decades to get a sense of completion. Fortunately, my essays and short stories only take weeks or months to edit and hone. Sometimes, however, I don’t submit them for much longer periods.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I was a teenager in the late 1950s during rock ‘n’ roll and the civil rights movement, a college student during anti-war activism, soul music and acid rock of the 1960s, and an independent adult woman during the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. I would not even consider living in historical times other than those.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
The book I last stopped reading was by the late Kary Mullis and is titled, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. I chose the book because I love surfing and science. I put the book down because Mullis’ tone was arrogant and bombastic, and he seemed misogynistic. Furthermore, his pontificating disclosed that he was an OJ Simpson defender and an AIDS denier. The book was an affront to surfers, scientists, and women, so I decided not to plow though it, something I rarely do when reading.

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you?
I live in viewing distance of the World Trade Center. On 9/11 I saw the second airplane hit the North tower. I walked over to St. Vincent’s Hospital and waited for the survivors to be brought in for treatment; no one from the fallen towers arrived that day. Everyone in Lower Manhattan was left in total silence and shock, inhaling the ashes and debris adrift in the air from the site.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
My favorite authors are Joyce Carol Oates and Barbara Kingsolver, and I wish I could write with their artistry and complexity. My work somewhat resembles the more straightforward writing style and themes of John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.

What does your creative process look like?
I don’t use prompts or ruminate about what to write. I perpetually scribble down ideas and images that are already in my head or that I have researched. From childhood I have liked to make up titles for imaginary books or stories. I used to have notes and slips of paper all over the place, but now I usually make entries on my computer or even on my phone. When I accumulate enough ideas or a viable theme emerges, I begin sorting and organizing. I don’t even try to publish most of the stuff I write; I send it to friends or let it be used in some way as commentary for the Greater Good. Writing comes through me, even when most of my time and energy is focused elsewhere. Essentially, I am writing—and editing—all the time; sometimes I weave the ideas, notions or experiences into a story or an essay.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes, absolutely. Family obligations and having to commute to, and work at, full-time jobs for many years consumed a lot of time. If I worked on art, writing, or music at all during those years, it was late at night, and I was never doing more than one creative pursuit at a time. Now that I am retired, I am still amazed to find that a day can contain practicing the piano and working on a collage or short story. Theoretically it could contain all three creative pursuits, but for some reason it usually doesn’t work out that way.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
The artists who illustrated children’s books, such as Ezra Jack Keats. I loved the combination of words and images. I wanted to write an illustrate a children’s book and win the Caldecott or Newberry prize, plus be exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I remember thinking both those things at age four.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist?
I always wanted to be an artist. As a child I was always drawing. I carried pencils and paper and chalk around everywhere. I have memories of sitting on the asphalt of the playground and drawing while games of tag and jump rope swirled around me. However, I was not accepted at Cooper Union, and for various reasons I ended up majoring in English. I didn’t decide to start writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction until I was in my 20s, although I was a reader as soon as I learned to read. I still remember going to the library to get six books (that’s all people could take out at one time then) and then asking to go back for six more.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
I tried to choose just one, but I can’t. There are so many.

What is your most evocative memory?
My mother walked extremely fast, so fast that one day, when I was about four years old and holding her hand and she was hurrying along a city street, for an instant I felt as if my feet had left the ground and I was flying. It felt wonderful.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Generally several months from idea to finished collage. Some collages take longer because I put them aside and return to them.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I don’t want to mention a specific book because everyone has his or her own relationship with a book. I primarily read literary fiction, and I am a very fast reader, so there are always a lot of books traveling to and from the library from the coffee table. I bond with some books but not with others. Recently I tried a book that was well reviewed and had a good story embedded within too many pages, but I didn’t want to spend the time digging to find it. I want writing to captivate me fairly quickly with its language and story. If I like how something is written, I’ll tend to follow it.

What does your creative process look like?
Messy. My art table in the basement has lots of paper, pastels, colored pencils, photographs, glue, scissors and more on it. Generally an idea for a collage or the title of a collage hits me over the head, and I wander around in a daze trying to visualize the collage. I take frequent chocolate breaks during the creative process, and often I take a walk or practice piano to clear my head. I tend to work in short bursts of time—an hour here, an hour there, but I think about what I’m working on for more hours than I’m working on it. I guess that’s work, too.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Maybe the main tradeoff is how lonely it can be to keep up a poetry practice. I am not one of those people who can sit in a busy coffee shop and write. I get too distracted. When I’m writing I go into a kind of altered state my husband calls Poetry Land, and I need to be alone.

To balance the solitude, I look for semi-social pursuits that dovetail with the writing. Is Zoom social? I don’t know. But it’s better than nothing. I am in several kinds of writing and reading groups.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Yikes. That goes back to childhood. And it sounds trite, maybe, but I will say Emily Dickinson. My mom—she was a former English teacher--gave me a small book of her poems long, long ago, and I remember sitting in my room thinking that I was reading something strange and wonderful. I also remember wondering if I had to come from a rich East Coast family to be able to get books published. Seriously. That was on my mind. Things seemed so out of reach then.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
In elementary school I thought about being a visual artist. I was good at drawing. But then this kid named Doug bested me in drawing, and I turned to other ideas that kept floating around. For the longest time I was going to run an orphanage. That said, I kept getting encouragement about the writing. Being an author seemed like something other people did, but eventually I came around. I got an English degree in undergrad, with a concentration in creative writing, and earned a master in written communication after I had my kids.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
Not sure I can pick one. Maybe the Hemingway one about the broken places and how the world breaks everyone.

What is your most evocative memory?
I remember trying to walk and falling face-first into red linoleum. It hurt, but the main sensation was something else. I had this very strange sense of being someone, and maybe that was a new feeling because I can recall that it was a bit wonderful.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
That depends. Some poems start strong but sit on the desktop for years before I pick them up again. There needs to be something more to a poem than a strong start. There needs to be a sense that something was said that would have been impossible to say in any other way.

That said, a few poems have come to me as if they were delivered from somewhere. I have one now that came in one piece. I keep looking at it to see if I change my mind. I have not shared it.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Maybe they all have something good about them, but I am fine with the time I have. I think it’s historical what’s happening. We have been getting used to new forms of media. We are finally serious about space again. There are scientific breakthroughs happening all the time. Sure, humanity is a disappointment to me some days. But there is some reason for being alive now.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
That would be long list. For one, I know I was glad to read that Edgar Kunz had finally placed a New Yorker poem this year. I loved TAP OUT.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I have no idea. Someone tried to tell me that I write like Diane Wakowski, but then I read her and had no idea what they were talking about. The poem you guys selected is a bit unlike a lot of my writing. I am a jumpy writer. I make leaps. In trying to reflect internal states, the things we cannot seem to say, the narration can get jumpy.

What does your creative process look like?
It starts with reading. I have worked as a writer and an editor of nonfiction for a long while, and I have always tricked myself into getting down to business by reading first. Reading—and that can be a book of someone’s or online news or any one of the number of newsletters I get, anything, really—works like a gateway to word land. I like to start poems by writing in notebooks and have several notebooks going at any one time. If you look at those pages, there are blocks of text and arrows and other blocks and lists of phrases that come to mind. There are different colors of pen. Anyway, when one of those messes seems to come into focus, I will try typing something down by looking at it and typing. The rest of the honing and editing takes place on the computer.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes, absolutely. My most important job right now is raising my kid, being present and available for him. He’s nearly five now, so I can do things like read or crochet while he’s playing. But if I want to write, I can’t be distracted. I typically wait until he’s in bed or he’s out on adventures with my husband. I have it easier than other parents because my husband is retired, so if I need the time, he’s probably already planning an outing. We regularly trade off like that so we each get the down time we need, but we’re still recovering from the first year of parenting.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
The very first was J. R. R. Tolkien, which is to say he broadened my view beyond American lit and contemporary narratives. It was really my first experience of a mythos dating back thousands of years, yet invented within the last century. I had read Greek and Roman myths for school, but those were almost like dead myths. Tolkien’s Middle Earth feels very much alive in comparison.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
“Karen had plenty of time to get out her own copy of Sarah’s book. It still had Karen’s bookmark stuck in it at page 131, commemorating the point at which the end had come, in Karen’s opinion.” (Trust Exercise, Susan Choi)

The reason this is the best sentence I’ve ever read is because this is the second section of the book, the first being a pretty standard fictional narrative about teenagers in a Fine Arts high school. The second section’s tone and narrator changes dramatically, which was very confusing at first. Until you realize that the first section is from a “fictional” book written by Sarah (the protagonist of the first section) and the second section Karen (a side character we barely saw in the first section) preparing to confront her high school friend about it. And page 131 is where the first section ended. I have written in the margins “GODDAMMIT Susan Choi THAT’S FKN BRILLIANT.” I literally had to put the book down and have a lie down.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
The first draft is usually pretty close. I try to get a whole piece down in one sitting so I don’t lose the thread of it. I walk away for a few days once its finished, then go back to see if it still makes sense or if I can refine it in some way. Then it’s just reading it backwards for spelling/grammar mistakes. I can keep tinkering with a piece forever, but it’s basically done after the second draft.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Every time I think about this, I get grand ideas. Like I would love to live in the Regency Era in England or the late 19th century in Paris, or pre-colonialism literally anywhere. But then I remember that being a woman in most time periods would suck. If women weren’t second class citizens, they still had to deal with real primitive healthcare (still do even in “rich” countries). Living it up like Jane Austen would be great until I died in labor with my tenth kid at 25. And the clothes are gorgeous, but I am absolutely a jammies-all-day sorta person. I can’t be putting on six layers of clothes plus a corset just to have breakfast. And that’s not even getting into personal hygiene. I like my showers boiling-lava-hot and my toilets to flush and my water clear and tasting of nothing. Plus, all my time traveling fantasies involve me being in the upper crust. It’s one thing to be Eliza Bennet “poor” and quite another to be the Bennet maid.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I actually have 2 right now. I was reading a novelization of Kingdom Come by Elliot S. Maggin (adapted from the comic by Mark Waid and Alex Ross). I normally love superhero novels, but I wasn’t really captivated by it like I was the graphic novel. I also started Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyemi. I definitely want to finish both books, but I do a lot of my reading at night to get to sleep, which is just easier to do on my phone. It’s actually harder to read paper books now because I can’t read and multitask like I can with crochet. And after the kid goes to sleep is the only time I get to watch the TV shows I like. During the day, the tv time is all for the kid. I know some people watch regular tv shows with their kids all day, but I’m not comfortable catching up on The Walking Dead with a four-year-old.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Besides all the amazing BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled writers who are fighting tooth and nail to get their craft out there? (That’s a huge, systemic issue, I know. Luckily, there are lots of people out there who are cheerleading those authors on social media and I cede the floor to them for expertise.) Honestly, the one book I always think of is Sunshine by Robin McKinley. McKinley is a successful writer already, with a long, established career and several books in publication. However, Sunshine is my absolute favorite supernatural urban fantasy story because it undermines a lot of the toxic tropes I see in the genre. You see a lot of “women as leashes for dangerous, supernatural men” and “he’s so violent because he loves her too much” sort of crap. And obsessive stalking. And borderline rape. And really, really old monsters hooking up with 20-year-olds (or, hey, high schoolers, yuck). What bothers me is that this kind of “he just needed the right woman to tame him” nonsense takes all the responsibility away from the supernatural character and puts it onto their often human partner. I love the genre, but Sunshine really had me looking at some of the “love stories” in my other favorite books a little differently. Also, the main character is a baker, which I identify with.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I don’t really know, but according to my husband, who is also my editor, I write very similar to Christopher Moore. Kind of funny, splicing in supernatural elements pretty casually, lots of f-bombs. I’m more shy about sex scenes than he is, but mostly because they are (excuse the pun) hard to write. There really is no way to write the scene without feeling either silly or embarrassed, because I either have to go full euphemism and hyperbole (romance novels) or realistic (uncomfortable). In a fiction writing class I took ages ago, we talk discussed why violence is easier to write than sex. Objectively speaking, they should cause the same amount of discomfort. They’re both physical acts, obviously, so the trick is in getting the staging right. Except that’s not it at all. Violence, however we feel about it personally, is not something everyone experiences, but we all have the potential for it. Think of all those people who use true crime podcasts to relax, for instance. It is also very much an exterior experience. You can describe the sights, sounds, and smells of a fist fight with varying degrees of accuracy or specificity. The only creativity really needed is describing pain in new and inspiring ways. But the point of sex is the interior sensations, explaining how everything feels. I can describe sex physically, that’s not the problem. It’s describing the interiority where the writing fails for me. Also, a lot of my writing is being read by classmates who are ten years younger than me, who are then going to have to discuss my writing out loud in front of everyone else. There’s only so much blushing I can take from people before I start giggling.

What does your creative process look like?
I get this question a lot in my MFA program. People are always talking about process like it’s some kind of workout regimen or trendy diet. For a long time, I was rather baffled because I feel like I just sit down and do it. But that’s not really true. I often get the seed of an idea, maybe a sentence or a scene or even just an snapshot image, something that will eventually become a story or a blog post. But I don’t always get a chance to just sit down and write, so I have to sit with it a while. I might talk through the dialogue while I’m doing errands or simply ruminate on it for days before I have the time and mental space for it. Then I get comfy, make sure I have snacks and a quiet space, and word vomit until I’m done. Or, if I have a deadline, I just prep my writing space (snacks, quiet, comfy) and start writing. Sometimes it’s crap, sometimes it’s something I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking on, sometimes I have no idea where it comes from. Probably just the characters making demands on my muse. Luckily, my process is pretty minimal. I know a lot of people who have to have things just so or they can’t get the words out.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I have two children and they need to be fed, I need to prepare them breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the kids are very fond of something tasty to eat during the breaks. They are children and it is important to them. Also I have a husband, he is independent, but I am happy to cook delicious meals for him and me. It turns out that I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It has a cozy chair and a TV, so I moved my mini workshop into it. An easel, paints, canvas and everything I need. I open the window in spring and summer, the birds sing, the sun shines, I make myself a cup of hot coffee with milk and (especially while the kids are at school and my husband goes to work) I am in a good mood to start to create. Such a compromise.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist?
It was a slow but steady push from above to paint. Now I can clearly trace it and analyze the moments that showed how periods in my life directly indicated to me - go and buy paints, go and buy canvases, start painting. This has been going on since I was a kid. But people are blind, and I'm a member of the human race, too, after all. Well, apparently nothing helped, and I did not want to see the obvious, that this is my vocation (I even went to the fortune-teller in the Tarot to ask what is my vocation in life in terms of profession, because my field of education is not something that I really love). One sunny but very tragic day, a terrible day for me, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack. Oh my God, how hard it was for me. I know that she is in a better place now, because life does not end with death, I believe, but the realization that I will not see my mother soon, that I will not talk to her anymore - how sad it is. After the funeral I really wanted to find some kind of art school, a painter, I really wanted to be taught how to work properly with paints. I had always been good at drawing, but the smell of oil paint, the whole process fascinated me so much, but without training, without someone to guide me, to show me how to do it right, it is simply impossible to become a professional. I found such a person. I did it and I am going forward on my creative road .

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I am close to the Victorian era. A time of morals, ladies and gentlemen. The rising standard of living, literate women were able to get jobs for the first time. There were trains. The trains of that time are fascinating. Sobriety, punctuality, industriousness, frugality and thrift became the norm of life. And I have a special admiration for Victorian architecture! In general, I love this era.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
It was one of Agatha Christie's books . While working on a painting, I like to turn on audiobooks - classic detective stories. I was working on a portrait of my husband and at the same time on a second painting, nothing foretold trouble and I relaxed with one ear listening to an interesting and intricate story, in the middle I pressed pause and went to bed, and in the morning the war began. The Russian troops bombed us and we hid in the basement, but that's another story. So the literary and creative idyll was interrupted and Agatha Christie's story was interrupted, but I'll definitely come back to it after the war.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.” — Albus Dumbledore, Goblet of Fire

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
An image is born in my mind, it is like a germ, it has not yet a clear form, it is vulnerable, it is fragile and easily changes and grows. As I progress I get new ideas, new meanings that I add to the original embryo, and the result is a completely new, different painting that I couldn't have imagined at first. Two days and you can put the painting to dry. If the inspiration goes out, then comes back, the painting is created for several weeks or months. "A writer in the highest moments of inspiration feels as if someone is dictating a manuscript to him." the same is true of painting.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes. Like a lot of writers, I often need to find or actively carve out time to write. That’s often meant writing before work, writing during lunch, jotting down ideas while on public transit or waiting to meet up with someone, etc. I think all writers want to get to a point where creative projects become a full-time job, but I’m like a lot of us in needing to balance the work we enjoy most with the work that pays the bills.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
The first was probably Peggy Parish, who wrote the Amelia Bedelia books. My mother read a number of those to me when I was as young as two, and even then I loved the way they played with language – the multiple meaning of words, the idea of taking things too literally.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
Genuinely, as far back as I can remember. As a kid who loved books a lot, I was imagining further adventures for characters or fleshing out stories I’d read.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
That’s a really hard question, but I think it might be a Richard Adams line from Watership Down: “My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.” It does so much work in so few words, and might be the perfect encapsulation of grief.

What is your most evocative memory?
Right out of graduate school, I took a short-term reporting job in Sydney, Australia. I hadn’t traveled abroad before that time, much less lived and worked in another country. I had one day there to get settled and adjust to the time zone before starting the gig. The airline had lost my luggage (it came two days later) and I hadn’t slept well during my first-ever night in a hostel, but I got up early, bought a cheap t-shirt and a coffee, and decided to explore the area around me. On a short walk with no particular plan in mind, I took a right turn and right there was the Sydney Opera House, and then the Harbor Bridge and Circular Quay. And suddenly I was standing in the middle of a postcard-worthy shot of a place I’d wanted to go since I was a little kid watching National Geographic specials about marsupials that my parents taped for me. Something that seemed impossible my entire life suddenly felt normal and comfortable, and like the start of a new chapter.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Because I’m a mix of the “pantser” and “plotter,” there isn’t much of a gap. I might have scenes in mind, or an ending, or a character, but I’m almost always adding things to and developing a piece throughout the act of writing it. So the work in my head is always changing, and the final story is the natural endpoint of that. For me, it’s more like a seed becoming a plant than a blueprint becoming a building.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
There were books I had to pause because things I had to read for deadline got in the way, but I intend to go back to those. The last one I put down and probably won’t be back to was Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I don’t necessarily need to like characters in a story; plenty of books I love have unlikable characters. But for that to work for me I either need the story itself to drive my interest, or for the characters to be highly motivated in ways that make them compelling. I didn't feel either of those things in this case.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
There are so many, but the first book that jumps out to me is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W.P. Kinsella. He’s best known for Shoeless Joe, which is the basis for Field of Dreams, and while I love that movie, the book has a lot of weird and wonderful subplots it didn’t have room to include (that's not a criticism; it wouldn't have had time to give everything enough space). Iowa Baseball is even weirder in a lot of ways that I really enjoyed; I picked it up knowing nothing except who wrote it and that it involved baseball, and I don’t want to say much more so as not to spoil anything.

What does your creative process look like?
I usually keep lists of ideas, possible titles, bits of dialogue, etc. What works best for me is having dedicated time to sit down and write at a computer. I tend to edit as I go, building a full draft, and then I put it aside at least a few days before revisions. I’ll usually read it out loud, mark up a copy, and then go through and start making actual changes.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I would think that for most of us tradeoffs are inevitable. We are creative souls living in a creatively challenged world. When I was younger and raising a family, I had to be extremely disciplined about how I spent my snippets of free time. This often meant saying no to many social activities, even those that sounded enticing. I still will often say no to things in order to have time to write.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
That depends on how you’d define my first work. I’ve been writing poems since I was eight. My parents loved them—or, at least, they said they did. But then they made me show my poems to their friends, which made me feel that they weren’t taking the content of my poems seriously. They were just showing me off.

So, I think the real first reaction to my work that I can take seriously (even if it wasn’t my first work, or even my first publication—I’d been published in my high school literary magazine) was when I was 21. I went to an open poetry reading in Greenwich Village, and despite being terrified, I read a few of my poems, and I could tell that people were listening with interest and respect. That was an amazing experience. More amazing because the woman running the reading asked me if I would be a featured reader at an upcoming reading. And because I met the man who would become my life partner (though, of course, I didn’t know that then.)

What is your most evocative memory?
The importance of various memories has always ebbed and flowed, and evocative seems like a hard thing to measure on any comparative scale. I will say that my childhood memories are weightier than those from later years and I believe this is a great place for writers to mine as source material. In prompts that ask you to call up a memory, I often go back to images from the summer weekends we spent visiting my grandfather in his country house, perhaps because everything was so different from my childhood in ultra-urban New York City. When I think about that, I can still feel a clean chill in the air, the cool crispness of the sheets on the bed, and the foreboding and mysterious greens of the woods that surrounded us, which we were forbidden to wander in unsupervised.

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 a few days or it can take years—especially for longer projects. Often, I’ll put work aside for quite a while if I don’t feel it’s going where I want it to go, and then when I come back, I can see it with fresh eyes. Although sometimes, those “fresh eyes,” give me a clear message that a piece isn’t worth pursuing. Other times, I’ll be able to see where a piece needs to go and be able to bring it there. And other times, I can bring a piece further along on its path and then come to the conclusion that it’s as good as I can make it at the moment, even if it isn’t exactly what I perceived.

And of course, there are times that a piece will completely surprise you and take you in new and better directions than what you originally imagined. Those are my favorite times.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund deWaal. This book was well-written, and I enjoyed and appreciated the language but I just wasn’t interested enough in the story or the premise to keep going. It’s still rare that I’ll put a book down and don’t finish it, and I’m trying to do this more for books that don’t grab me, because there are so many books out there and so little time.

What does your creative process look like?
Now that I’m retired, I try to write for at least an hour or two most days—maybe 5 out of 7. I generate a lot of material from prompts and I participate in several on-line writing communities. I find myself most in the zone when I’m not censoring and simply letting the images tumble out.

After that, I focus on revision. I actually find this easier and more satisfying than generating material. I will generally work on poems for several days in a row, then put them away for a while, and then revisit them again before deciding whether or not to put them in the “send out,” “keep revising,” or the “inactive pile.” When I’m writing prose, I aim for 2-3 pages per day, and then I usually start the next day revising the pages I’ve written the previous day before continuing on. Once I have a completed draft, I usually put it away for a while before tackling more revisions, which could take weeks, months, or even years for a book-length project.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes. My husband will often ask me, "When are you coming to dinner/bed/etc.?" and I will be nose-deep in the flow of things, unable to answer him or even come up for air. Sometimes, I'll sit down at 7 pm with the plan to "just read something over," and suddenly it will be 2 in the morning, and the tradeoff is that my dinner is cold, my husband's asleep, and I've missed out on precious moments of togetherness.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
It's funny, but I don't define myself as either author or artist. I think of myself as creative. And, because I don't have any skill whatsoever in the visual arts, I especially enjoy tapping into the part of my brain that can do as painters and sculptors do and make something out of nothing.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I can write in a rush or flow as I described it above and get a ton down in a short period of time—something I became more adept at since taking up a free-writing practice at the start of the pandemic—but then I can nitpick and nitpick and edit and edit and obsess and obsess, swapping out a word here or punctuation there until I'm blue in the face. I am both fast and painfully slow all at once and never truly feel "done" with anything. I'll continue to make changes on a piece even after submitting it to literary journals.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
If I start a book, I'll finish it. I vet my books carefully before choosing them, and they tend to be works of memoir or personal essay because that is what interests me most. (Creative nonfiction is what my own MFA focus was as well.) That said, I'm like the kid at the dinner table who heaps all of the mashed potatoes onto her plate and then only takes a few bites. My eyes are bigger than my literary stomach, and I have many more books on my bookshelf than I have gotten (or will likely ever get) around to reading.

What does your creative process look like?
My creative process is to immerse myself in a supportive writing group. I like accountability. I like community. I like knowing I need to show up somewhere, even if it's just on Zoom. Right now, I'm taking a six-week virtual course taught by Jeannine Oullette called “Writing in the Dark” for the third time, and it's fabulous. The format is, we read something short and analyze it together. What makes it literary? What makes it work? Where is the heat? And then Jeannine sends us off to write something of our own, inspired by that piece, as our optional but encouraged homework.

We had just finished exploring the works of poet Sharon Olds—searching for the beauty and simplicity in everyday moments—when I wrote "The Weekend Breakfast." It was my goal to turn something ordinary into art, as Olds does, and I do hope I've succeeded and that it resonates with your readers.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author?
It all started with bedtime stories for my daughter in a misguided attempt to help her Go To Sleep, taking classic tales and making her the protagonist: Beatrix the Brave. After several years of Just One More Story, I started writing things down to keep my storylines straight. Children are ruthless at finding inconsistencies in their fairy tales. Those stories turned into two and a half (currently) unpublished novels. I've been writing ever since.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
My timeline varies wildly. My winning story for Writers of the Future (Volume 39, pending publication May 2023) took almost three months. "A Properly Spiced Gingerbread," which was my first published story in DreamForge Magazine and now my first reprint published here by Zoetic Press, initially came together in one afternoon during Wulf Moon's Kill Your Darlings Master Class. I then spent about a week polishing Gingerbread before sending it out to market. On average, I spend about two to three weeks per short story.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
My dear friend and Indie author Kenley Davidson writes romantic fantasy and science fiction. Her books are so amazing that even though I don’t normally read romance, I devour her books! Plot twists, wry humor, realistic engaging characters, unique speculative elements—they’ve got it all.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I find myself writing primarily light-hearted speculative fiction in the styles of Sir Terry Pratchett and Jim Butcher. I love Pratchett’s characters and have fun weaving in Butcher-style wry sarcasm into everything I write.

What does your creative process look like?
I try so very hard to be a plotter, but my stories usually go off the rails about halfway through when my characters do something unexpected. I’ve learned to just go with the story flow even as I try to wrangle them back on track. So, my process is: plot, write, panic-as-I-pants, re-plot, panic again as my characters insist on doing their own thing, then sit back in surprise at what came out. Then I edit to make it look like that was my plan all along.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
As an undergraduate student studying literature at the same time as trying to write my own work, finding time to even get into a creative headspace is constantly a challenge. For me, sometimes I need to clear my agenda if I feel the start of inspiration that could become writing. Ultimately, I think happiness is about balance more than anything else, and there’s nothing wrong with shifting your schedule around to make room for creativity, and actually my brain really needs it.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
In an article I wrote for my college’s newspaper earlier this year, I described the mental condition of artists (specifically writers) as a “passion-blindness,” by which I meant that they necessarily possess a certain voraciousness that makes them hyper-involved in the world of their creative work. For me, this passion-blindness manifests as tunnel vision; once I start a piece I begin to be constantly thinking of it and basically just toil away at it until I finish it or I’m forced back into reality (which usually results in unfinished projects).

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
On a general level, I’ve always known my talents and interests exist within the realm of writing, but I started ransacking the “classics” sections at bookstores when I was in middle school and once I discovered Oscar Wilde and John Keats the world just started expanding and I’ve never been the same since. Walt Whitman wrote about the sentiment of passing the torch of poetry down to future generations, and I’ve always felt that it was my (and anyone’s!) vocation to take it up as well as I could.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
My answer to this question is probably a largely unpopular one, especially amongst French students, but I am always surprised at the under-appreciation of Marcel Proust, even in literary circles. His work is extremely long-winded and complex, but so incredibly rewarding. Proust (in Swann’s Way) is responsible for some of the most wonderfully crafted and emotionally evocative sentences about pastoral scenery that I’ve ever read, even in translation—and he’s so witty. This past summer a friend and I went to Paris and found his grave in Père Lachaise; not a flower or mark on it! My goal is to spread the joy of Proust to more and more people—perhaps the Parisian authorities will have to put up a fence to keep the lipstick kisses off of Proust’s grave too one day.

What is your most evocative memory?
I find it close to impossible to pick just ONE most evocative memory, but there is one that returns to me very frequently that is a favorite. There’s a house in my hometown that close friends of my family lived in when I was growing up—it was (and is) situated deep into the woods, only accessible through winding one-car paths past brambles. It has walls made of raw wood that smell intensely of camphor in the summer, when rays of warm sun come through the many windows on the higher floors and illuminate every room with golden light. My memories of this house are through childhood eyes, though the sentiment behind the memories is distinctly grounded, and contentedly profound; emotions I only came to fully experience later. The windows where the sun comes in overlook a wide swath of verdant, springy grass where the trees have been cleared, and the sounds of fellow children laughing and shrieking as they chased each other around the green floated up to me as I stood before the window. This memory resurfaces often, though I don’t know why this one in particular. To me, it is enormously representative of peace and beauty.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
When I started to read Keats in middle school, I was initially attracted to his work because of how unabashedly passionate it is. Keats is overtly extreme in his rhetoric about love and poetry; constantly writing verse about how he’d die for both (and eventually, one could say he did). I have always been an intense person, and reading Keats’ intensity display itself through the passionate adoration for beauty and humanity itself was radical for me in that period of time where I was newly growing into my own mind and learning how to wield it.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Sure, but everyone has to make tradeoffs. Writers are no different than parents, business owners, bakers, soldiers, etc.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I was late to creative writing and only started earnestly writing when I was 23. That said, I do have a few early experiences, all of which resulted in disaster. In elementary school, I wrote a story about a dog with a severe flatulence problem, and my teacher said the topic was inappropriate. In middle school, I wrote a gothic story for English class, “The Dead Wendy,” which landed me in the guidance counselor’s office, where I promised him that everything was fine at home. And in high school, I submitted a collection of poems about using drugs to my creative writing teacher, who subsequently gave me an “F” for the quarter because I’d “crossed the boundary between good art and bad taste,” as she rather confusingly put it.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
In my opinion, the best sentence writer in the English language is Garielle Lutz. One of my favorite stories of hers is called “Susceptibility,” and it’s a six-sentence story about a father and son that contains this gem: “One of them wanted to know where he could buy some of those rubber squares you stick under the feet of furniture, either to protect the finish on the floor or to keep the furniture from sliding away, whichever it was.” The sentence works sonically; the tension between the s’s and the f’s matches the tension between the father and son. And the metaphor of the furniture, and whether it’s going to stick or slide away, also gestures to the characters. But I suppose what really fascinates me about the sentence is how it so perfectly represents the positive and negative aspects of American literature in the MFA era. It’s carefully constructed, it’s obviously been revised, and the metaphor is there, but it’s not cheaply made. In other words, the craft here is tremendous, and yet, it leaves me feeling…empty. There’s no room here for mysticism, metaphysics, or a search for ultimate truth (whatever that might mean). While the sentence is brilliantly written, there’s very little wisdom here. In that sense, it’s a great representation of the state of contemporary American literature.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I’d choose a place and time wherein literature functioned in drastically different ways. For example, 14th century Persia would be a great for exploring poetry and contemplative spirituality, and 18th century Japan is where I’d go to write about losing myself in the natural world.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I stopped reading The Mahābhārata last year because I felt I need more historical, cultural, and philosophical context to appreciate. I intend to go back to it at some point.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
It’s got to be Harold Jaffe. I probably have more regionalist tendencies than him, and my work is more heavily influenced by magical realism, but he’s always been a model for me in terms of how to fundamentally challenge the definitions of fiction, nonfiction, and literature.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Absolutely. It is difficult to balance all aspects of life, from family to career to learning and creating. I spent a month in 2021 resetting my priorities and blocking off time on my calendar for what is most important to me. I have yet to stick to it 100%, but it has helped me make sure I’m spending time on the things I want to and keeping balance.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Sylvia Plath changed my life as a teen. Prior to discovering her, I was only familiar classic literature. Her work changed my worldview and my personal lens.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I was creative from a young age and have written poems and stories since I could read and write. It’s definitely a part of my identity.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Sometimes minutes, sometimes years. On rare occasion a poem comes out of nowhere like a true gift and is nearly finished with the first draft. When this happens, I know, because I’m physically exhausted when it’s finished. Others may ruminate and change for years before I consider them good enough for publication. Sometimes they change again after they are first published. It takes a lot for me to just leave a poem alone and call it done.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Another Country by James Baldwin. I never had enough time to read enough at once to really get into it and so after several months of trying, I set it aside. I got about halfway through and hope to go back to it when I have longer blocks of reading time to really invest in the story. I really love the language and character building. I’ll get back to it someday.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes, I have had to make serious tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in my life. For several decades, in order to get everything done [a full-time job, night school, staying on the Dean's List, launching a writing career at the same time that I was training to be a professional athlete, etc.], I only slept for three hours a night, from 1 AM - 4 AM.

Additionally, I never owned a TV set, which I don't think of as a tradeoff or a sacrifice as much as my enduring the hardship of sleep-deprivation. Sleep restores you whereas television dribbles away your writing time.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
Thomas Malory and Geoffrey Chaucer both demonstrated the polyphonic technique of storytelling and persona playing as these applied to poetry.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author?
At 3 1/2 I first became aware of boring, dreary rhymes printed in greeting cards that people would mail to my family. I thought the metrical mass-produced rhymes printed inside Hallmark cards were inferior. With my aunt, an artist, we launched a greeting card line of one-of-a-kind handmade cards. She would illustrate and I would compose a short poem. Obviously, this was a poor business model — not scaleable — but our unique greeting cards were widely praised and we kept it up for a year (until my parents bought their first house and we moved away from this larger household of grandparents, aunts, etc.).

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
"Away from the abyss, all height's revised." (This philosophical iambic pentameter line is from one of my poems.)

What is your most evocative memory?
My senior year in high school was mostly spent in a hospital, where I drifted in and out of consciousness, feverish, misdiagnosed, scheduled for needless surgery, terrified, bewildered, languishing alone with hardly any visitors.

Realizing I rarely had company, the nurses would use their breaks to come and sit at my bedside to cheer me up.

The nurses spoke about other difficult cases in the hospital, drug addiction, suicide, incurable diseases, near fatal homicide attempts — and my eager teenage mind absorbed this strange knowledge. Months later, finally discharged, and recuperating in bed at home, I wrote a very good story, based on those riveting conversations with nurses.

My short story was published and my high school awarded me their gold medal for Literary Achievement.

Moral: What doesn't kill you makes for a stronger narrative on lined paper.

However, years earlier, at age 9, I was already convinced that I had "one with Shakespeare" when I wrote my first one-act drama and my 50-minute play ran onstage in New York City for several months.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
That would depend on if it is a full-length stage play (a script that is 100-110 pages), a short story (2000-3500 words), or a poem. Whatever it is, the piece will be revised over and over again. Some of my plays have gone through 19 serious rewrites.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
1342-1450; I earned my first graduate degree in Medieval Poetry.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
"The Warning" by "anonymous" because it was mainly a rehash of newspaper articles and parched of insight. Or so it seemed to me in 2019. [Eventually, Miles Taylor claimed sole authorship.]

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Marge Piercy.

What does your creative process look like?
It always begins the same way: the spark of an idea, then the urgency of pinning it down, in longhand scrawl, on a scrap of paper, an index card, or in an old-fashioned composition book (by Mead, 9.5 inches x 7 inches, bordered by black tape).

It will be crossed out, revised, marked up with 4 different color inks until I can barely read my own writing.

At this point, I'll either rewrite it by hand, starting on a clean page, or I'll start typing it.

Unfortunately, many poems never leave the composition book. They're still finding their way.

There is a narrative poem I have been trying to write for over a year. I have all the old pages torn out and clipped together — there must be approximately 8 or 9 sets of my first, second, and third stanzas at least.

Often I am "not over" an idea after finishing a version created in one format.

A short play might be expanded into a novella. A story could be revised as a poem.

I just wrote two very different pieces about making pummarola with my family every September. The prose version, 360 words, has been accepted by ELJ and the lineated version — a 37-line poem with a different mood, different perspective, and a fresh ending — is still being sent around. It could be a 10-minute play, too.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Yes. I chose to try to follow the creative path and that my work would be that most of the time and with that I had to turn down more "formal" jobs and go along believing that I would have a return in some time, but it is never an easy choice.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I believe that my parents, who are artists, and have always inspired me and my brother.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
Even though I have an undergraduate and a master's degree in arts, I believe that only recently (last 5 years) I have been fully aware that my best way to express myself is through art.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
I think this is difficult to translate into English, but it is a Yoruba saying that 'Exu killed a bird yesterday, with a stone that he threw only today'.

What is your most evocative memory?
My childhood on my grandparents' farm: the smells, flavors, and colors that impregnated me at that time, I still carry with me today.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
It depends a lot on the job and the type of research it demands, but usually I take a lot of time elaborating the idea and have a creative burst to execute it.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
A historical time that still doesn't exist, when women's existence was respected.

What does your creative process look like?
It feels like a dive into unknown waters that always changes me.

Description text goesHave you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
Absolutely. There’s only so much time in the day, so I try to balance work and self-care and reading and writing. It often helps to start my week by looking at the calendar and looking for the times when I’m going to say no to everything but writing. However, if an idea shows up, I’ll stop just anything to at least write for a few minutes.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I’ve spent most of my adult life with the dream of being a writer tucked away as some kind of dirty sock in the back of the drawer. It wasn’t until I started meditating in my early forties that I realized, look, either the sock comes out into the sunlight or it gets thrown away. So I started a low-res MFA program and began to actually write. My first publication came at the very end of that program. Friends and family received it well, but honestly, at this point, it’s about how I feel just knowing that I’m wearing that darn sock.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
What a great question. I’ll choose one from the many I have strewn above my writing desk. This one comes from Annie Dillard: Seize it [your own necessity] and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

What is your most evocative memory?
Seeing my son’s face for the first time.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Does that gap ever get closed? It seems as soon as I think it might, something new makes an appearance. Or if I do close that gap, it is only temporary. In a week or so, I’ll read something and think, now how did I think this was finished.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I’d love to see this amazing planet before western civilization grabbed her by the neck. Hard to imagine trees like skyscrapers, air full of flowers, and water as pure as the stars.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Secret Santa gifted me Louise Penny’s Still Life. Perhaps it’s a murder-mystery, which isn’t what I usually gravitate toward. After three chapters, my hand instinctively started reaching for something else.

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you
Being born. Seriously. What a crazy treat of a ride.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
I like to think it’d be a combination of many wonderful writers—Lia Purpura, Annie Dillard, Ernest Hemingway, Dr. Seuss.

What does your creative process look like?
It’s non-linear, but it does have a rhythm. I draft in pen in a notebook. I do a lot of revising as I move a piece from notebook to computer. At some point, I have to see the whole thing, so I either print it and lay it out or at least change the view on Word so I can see all the pages at once. I read everything out loud. If my ear isn’t happy, then it’s not ready. However, I think my process, like my writing, is still evolving. I suspect it always will be.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I used to protect writing time the way some people protect their bedtime. With the advent of Blackberrys and laptops, I’m now able to go anywhere, write any time.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
The guys from The Posies moved to Spain in the late 90s. They introduced my friend Alicia to their music, so when Alicia and I met in a Napster chatroom, I was suddenly attached to someone very far away who had the same musical tastes I did. Everything else I needed to know about the world I learned from soccer.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
We had a huge maple out front our family home. It’s still there. Every fall my Dad would rake up the leaves and I’d jump in them. Then I’d clear them around me, making an office with a typewriter. I’d feed a big leaf into the typewriter and start pounding away. I was five or six.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
Being a constant reader they’re constantly coming at me. I read a sentence in a Lee Child short story this week about ‘the note of the engine’ that struck me as perfectly accurate.

What is your most evocative memory?
No one wants to know that. If I’d had kids I could say ‘the birth of my first’ or something. No one wants to hear about shopping for snow chains with one of the Stone Temple Pilots or walking through a car show in Santa Paula, CA while one of your plays is being performed two blocks away. That’s stuff you get to live.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Sometimes hours, sometimes decades. This week I rewrote something from 2003. When I wrote it I liked its potential. Wasn’t until this week I found a market for it.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I’d fit into the Depression and the 1940s. If I survived the war I’d be writing radio.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Why promote shitty writing? I’d rather say I lost a lot of sleep reading Lessons in Chemistry and Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl.

Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
Putting all his music aside, John Mellencamp’s interviews are addicting. That is one interesting guy. Also Charles Webb.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
Chat GPT. Anyone can do what we do, right?

What does your creative process look like?
The term is hypergraphia. Usually using a cell. Dump it in the laptop. A market becomes available, usually themed and I keyword search, find something I wrote down in 2019 and expand it to their parameters.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I think I am in the process of doing that right now. In the summer I typically overwhelm myself with gardening. My husband and I grow a lot of food because it's important to us to eat well, but often the daily hours of labor involved wind up consuming me! And that's not the goal. As food provides fuel for the body, creativity provides fuel for the soul. I'm making plans to add balance so that I can reap the benefits of both.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
ee cummings

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
Probably when I was ten years old and had my first poem published in the Green Bay Press Gazette.

What is your most evocative memory?
Being present for and witnessing the unexpected death of my mother.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
That really varies. Sometimes a poem arrives finished, but more often it's a skeleton that needs its flesh. It can take hours or days or weeks to revise a poem, but what's most important to me is to get words on the page. After that I can breathe and take whatever time I need for the reshaping.

What historical time would you most like to live in?
I love the 1940's for the fashion and films, but women were still far too oppressed for me to want to live in that time. I was a child in the 1970's, but would choose to go back to that era as an adult because I love to travel and have always longed to experience the landscapes of this country in a more unspoiled, accessible condition.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
Acceptance by Emi Neitfeld. Emi is my husband's second cousin so I was really keen to read her memoir. In it she chronicles abuse, manipulation, inherited mental illness, and the systematic child protection failures that nearly killed her. I put it down (for now) because it is so emotionally disturbing, but that doesn't mean I won't pick it back up! Sometimes a book needs to be read at the right time and this just wasn't the right time for me.

What does your creative process look like?
Poetry is happening in my head all the time. I will often consider one word choice on a one-hour walk. I keep a journal and thrive on crossing words or lines out and then writing new arrangements in the margin. I transcribe each piece, store it in the folder-of-the-year, meaning 2022 or 2023, etc., and along the way I hope for a collection to reveal itself. I've learned to be more patient with my process. If I walk away for a while the answer that I'm seeking usually comes.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I have a day job but a less ambitious day job than people expect. Sometimes I’d like to work at a job that earns me more money, but worry it’d keep me too busy to write.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I was in my teens and writing fanfic of my favorite cartoon show. I sent it out to my penpals who enjoyed it. Eventually I came to send out my work to fanzines. (This was before the internet.)

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I have a 250 word count for short stories and 500 word count for long form pieces. Individual stories happen in increments but I can work at more than one project at the time.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I tried G.R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Unlike most books I liked the show more than I liked the book. They had to make the story more marketable to make it a TV show and this process made the characters more likable to me.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
There’s works I wished mine resembled but I’m not up to their level. I wish I had Edith Wharton’s sheer literary skill. I wish I had C.S. Lewis’s imagination. I wish I had local author’s Emily Pauline Johnson’s courage to experience life for her art. Alma Green is another local author that I admire for her thorough knowledge of her subject matter of Indigenous knowledge. I also admire Anais Nin’s boldness though I don’t want all my works to be autobiographical like hers were. They inspire me.

What does your creative process look like?
I get inspired by books and movies that intrigue me whether or not I enjoy how they’re executed. Either way I write a story that incorporates an element I found intriguing and see if I could do a version of my own. I use a tablet and voice type my daily word counts on my projects and will have at least one long form and short term project going. The voice typing is faster than regular typing but I often have to make corrections while I dictate the story so I don’t forget what I meant to say.

Long form projects often come in 1500 word chapters. I will do a clean up of the chapter and add it to a master document on my laptop.

I wait until short stories are finished before I clean them up in a master document.

I often see a need to tweak the beginning of the writing. Whether it be long form or a short story. By the time I finish the story I get a firm idea of what the best beginning would be but when I start out I have to start somewhere. Though the the opening would be considered weak if I left it as is.

Then I self edit the piece with a multi-layered edit with Hemingway Edit, Prowriting Aid, Ginger Software and then proofread with read aloud text. Then I will submit it.

Have you had to make tradeoffs in order to have time for creativity in your life?
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had to make tradeoffs to have time for creativity as I feel I bring that aspect to everything I do. However, I have had to find ways to support my writing and visual art as neither of those branches of the creative life tend to sufficiently pay the bills that go along with raising a family.

Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I was lucky to grow up in a large American city where access to the arts was widely accessible. So it’s hard to recall who my first influences would have been. Marc Chagall was definitely important though since I grew up as a second generation immigrant, and his work was validating in that he brilliantly used his own personal history to inform his art.

When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I think I always felt that writing and making art were just part of normal activities, but I didn’t conceptualize the idea that writing and visual art could be a life choice until high school.

What is your most evocative memory?
My grandparents had a summer business and home in a rural area of Michigan. My cousins and I spent summers with my grandparents until I was 17 years old. I’m in the process of completing a poetry manuscript inspired by those years.

What does your creative process look like?
I no longer try to imagine preconceived ideas of where a piece should go as having done that in the past, the work tends to get hemmed in and stultified. I often just get curious about a phrase or an image and just start writing or making quick sketches if it’s a visual piece. I keep a journal that gets full of snippets of observations about my daily routine, memories, dreams, issues like ecology or social justice that concern me. These entries often act like prompts.

How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
Once a piece is written, I leave it alone for at least a couple of days, more often longer before looking it over for potential edits. I try to listen for what the work itself is saying during this part of the process and respect that.