Articles

Poetry has been my artistic and spiritual medium since I was a child. There were many talented musicians and visual artists in my family but I had aptitude for neither of these things. My outlet was always words and their relationships in sound and sense and beyond the 5 senses.

This illustration is the result of a great process Etgar and I went through. Working with him closely on this piece was truly a wonderful and enlightening experience.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “non-writing aspect.” Everything influences me and relates to my writing.

The collection piles one surprise on top of the other; just when you feel you’re getting a grasp on what the book is, it subverts your expectations yet again, with a writer who chops off his thumbs, or an act of arson motivated by love, or a society whose members all have two hearts, an upper and a lower.

I like to approach a new story with a question in mind, one that I don’t have an easy answer to.

The poems I write tend to begin and end in a place of faith, though the faith involved is a particularly fluid and changeful sort that borrows from both Eastern and Western traditions.

Only three days ago, I failed my driver’s test.

I tend to piece poems together from stray phrases and images, discovering as I proceed, Dr. Frankenstein-like, what shape the poem will take and whether it is, finally, alive.

I write mostly at night and usually after midnight. If I write during the day, then I prefer moments when I am not supposed to be writing, such as when I’m in a faculty meeting, at a seminar or on the phone.

The Fates never claims to have answers to any of these questions about death, spirituality, and fate. Instead, the questions vibrate both implicitly and explicitly around the poems’ descriptions of physical moments and spiritual explorations, like the moment of death in a hospice bed, an evening when a young girl kept watch over a dying bird, or five women holding a seance around a creaky table. The collection leaves its readers reflecting on the hand they play in their own fates, and the effect they have on the fates of others.