It was a combination of literary and non-literary influences. I work for Environmental Defense Fund. I have done a lot of work around what it means to engage both with colleagues at the organization and with communities who are experiencing the impacts of the Anthropocene immediately and directly. That’s really shifted how I think about my work as a writer.
One of the things I deliberately left out when I wrote about the island in the book was its size, because in real life it’s like three by two miles. It’s not very big. I wanted to be able to not pin myself down to a specific size because I plan to set more work there.
A lot of these poems were written when I wasn’t well. Poetry came to me later in life. I was really in a weird mental state and one thing that’s common among people on the schizo spectrum is this interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophies, although it’s not always the case.
Lovato: I had several original titles, one of which was Digging for Salvation. Another one was Américan with an accent on the E because I stopped calling myself American long ago. As you read my book, you’ll discover I saw some horrific things done with the support of America…
I hadn’t read many memoirs before I started to write my own. When my agent Barbara Berson said, “You’ve got a nonfiction book here.” It was scary for me to say, “This is not a fictionalized world.” I hadn’t gone out of my way to read anything in preparation for writing it.
Because of the fact that I did my MFA in fiction, I actually hadn’t read that many memoirs. But then I started as a staff writer for Buzzfeed News in the fall of 2015, and one of the first pieces that I wrote for them was a genre review of trans women’s memoirs. That was when I became interested.
Wilkinson: A lot of it was intuitive at first. A lot of it was writing and trauma, writing about difficult subjects. It feels possible to do that by writing in fragments, to take bits and pieces and then try to assemble them into some sort of holistic body after the fact, as opposed to just telling a nice, unified narrative.
I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War, which is why I started in 1951, but I was mostly interested in the aftermath. When we think about how we learned about war in our history textbooks, it’s always delineated as a discrete period of time. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953, but the effects on the people took time to manifest, especially when we’re thinking about intergenerational trauma. . .
My novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, or woman depending on your nomenclature, who, in a summer, has two emotionally complicated sexual relationships with men she hasn’t known very long. I wanted to write an adventure story like the adventures young men get to have all the time. . .
I don’t prefer one over the other. They are quite different in the fact that they allow for different types of information to be imagined and communicated. They are the same in the sense that both of them have a wide variety of modes attached to them. You don’t write just one poem. You can learn to write an elegy, an ode, a sonnet. . .
I do really identify with being a poet, obviously. And I definitely don’t identify as an academic. I don’t know if I’ll ever identify as an academic. But right now I’m working on fiction, actually. I’m interested in disrupting these boxes that we’re asked to put ourselves in–or not boxes, but categories. . .
Laura Buccieri is the Director of Publicity at Copper Canyon Press. During the December 2020 Antioch MFA residency, Laura gave a seminar on poetry and publicity. I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Laura over Zoom about her writing, her career in the publishing industry, and the film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon Ho.[…]
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman wanted to be a professional violinist when she was a child, and in a way she kind of got her wish. Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named a Best Book of 2019 by Amazon, details Hindman’s life as the violinist in an orchestra whose performances pantomimed playing instruments to recorded music. Music that, yes, sounded vaguely like the soundtrack to Titanic. Hindman’s memoir recounts her time traveling with the orchestra in the early 2000s, a time of political turmoil that resonates with the early 2020s.
Julia Kardon is an agent at HG Literary who began her career in high school while shelving fiction at the Strand Bookstore. She received degrees in comparative literature as well as Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago and has used her experiences to help forge a path as an agent and, occasionally, as a crossword puzzle maker. She is the cofounder of Inkluded, Inc., an independent nonprofit organization that provides tuition-free publishing education. Julia Kardon is a loyal advocate for those she represents.[…]
I write about my friends and people I love. We establish a relationship on the premise, usually on the idea that I’m a writer and I would like to learn and I would like to write about what I learn. So, there is a conversation about representation and trust. […]
I really didn’t start writing what I thought was really good, good poetry until I was in my early twenties. I’ve been reading consistently, voraciously—everyone—not just Black poets, but every poet I can get my hands on, so I give that advice to other people.[…]
What I really appreciate about agenting—and you can’t say this about many jobs in the world—is that my job is to represent authors and projects that I love. I can’t and shouldn’t take on a project unless I genuinely love it. […]
think too many writers don’t do enough research about the business of writing. They focus so much on the craft, writing their books, polishing them up and then, they don’t know what to do. Also, the all-time end goal cannot be how to get published, but rather, how to stay published.[…]
As painful as it is to dig inside these memories, there’s something larger that I’m trying to explore. I want to examine it because my family is not the only one who has experienced it. Just like my brother’s death didn’t just happen to my family.[…]
In terms of isolation, I try to counteract that by building community, which I’ve done from the beginning, and by collaborating pretty heavily on a lot of projects.[…]
No one ever tells you, “Dying can be pretty hideous.” I don’t know if it’s because that sort of fear of dying oneself, you know? If you think too much about it, it can be scary. I think about it all the time, but that’s because I’ve lived it, and it was around me all the time.[…]
There’s this belief that if you apply enough technique in all these different ways, that you will end up with a novel. Technique is not everything. There’s a lot to recommend it, but the spark of life is something that the reader feels through the writer, and the writer has to feel it first.[…]
Genevieve Hudson is, both, grounded and a force of nature. She is wise beyond her years, genuine, insightful, and fierce, with a hint of ineffable magic. This special alchemy infuses her teaching, enabling her to engage students on a technical and emotional level simultaneously, meeting everyone exactly where they are while encouraging expansion and elevation […]
The things that tend to happen in some of the worst situations elsewhere, also do occur here, even though Americans pretend they do not. It is, in some ways, what Deaf Republic is about.[…]
The most important piece of advice I got from my first mentor was to get as broad of an education as possible without diluting it.[…]
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