I was re-reading your essay “How it Feels,” and there’s the part where you write, “Maybe it’s humiliating to attempt anything.” How do you move past that feeling, which could prevent someone from putting work out there in the first place? It’s more about figuring out when you’ve answered some tiny aspect of a question that’s bothered you, and it’s time to move on to the next part of that question. Right now I’m in maybe the fourth iteration of that question. Not just love in the gooey, saccharin way, but love as an actual knife that can be wielded and used to draw blood. I’m still interested in questions of love. Maybe I’m not as interested in how family is both crucial and detrimental to forming identity, but now I’m interested in women who don’t want to start their own families or women who are pressured into starting a family and what that does to one’s identity. You also go through different iterations of questions. Every writer should have questions big enough and pressing enough and multi-faceted enough and unanswerable enough that they occupy their entire life, however long or short it is. I think that every writer should have a question they can ask that there is no end to the pursuit of. It’s very dramatic, but usually if I feel like it’s a lifelong question. When those questions start cropping up, how do you know that something’s worth exploring? I can always trace some theme to my poetry that’s different from my fiction, but there are also overlapping themes. I go through these phases of being interested in something, and they filter out into all these different genres I work in. That’s when I was like, “This project is done and I should look back on everything related to that and see if it has any kind of cohesive core.” Also questions of childhood, and how to form an identity when you’re consistently battered with other people’s expectations of your identity.Īt some point, I didn’t want to write about that anymore. With Sour Heart, it was questions of family, of being born with a debt you have to pay off, how to even the score of love when you’re born into the world, loved. I keep writing until I’m sick of exploring that question.
Whether it’s poetry or short stories, because I am really consumed with some question or series of questions grouped under the same obsession. Then, within those bounds, I can go crazy.įor your fiction and poetry work, is it stuff that you’re working on constantly? I find that with nonfiction, there’s always the prompt there’s always a theme that an editor gives me first. With fiction, it’s usually because I want to tell some kind of story or because I have a character in mind. If I want to say something that isn’t easily expressed by conventional language, it often becomes poetry. It’s really hard to break it down after the fact, but I think there is some kind of animal instinct.
When you’re starting a new project, do you know which one of those it’s going to be?
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