Articles

Writing is that trifecta between love, obsession, and need for me. I write because something inside howls until I do. I evolve every day when it comes to writing: learning something new about myself, the world, and words all the time. I guess I am always molding and molded-from as an artist. Lots of societal questions right now, political and historical happenings shaping the world—some terrifying and some inspiring.

My house appears to be the main character in my work. It provides a fund of images and activities, from dust falling to water boiling. Memory is another great source for my writing—memory of travels, raising children, childhood. And I confess, in spite of myself, I’m frequently drawn to loss, an impulse that I’ve stopped fighting.

As we age, we lose the ability to hear certain tones and pitches (remember when everyone was obsessed with that ringtone with a frequency so high apparently only young people and animals could hear it?). I found this explanation totally heartbreaking. I began to think of it as that tone’s final song, or the last echo of it making itself known before it burns out.

Ideally, the writer is one upon whom nothing is lost, as Henry James once said. We are the antennae of the world. Obviously, something happens in the soul that seeks an echo. When the echo is heard, the poem begins.

Maya Jewell Zeller partners with artist Carrie DeBacker to create a multimodal work that weaves together themes of ecofeminism, colonization, astronomy, medicine, biology, and mental-health, among other things.

Chelsey Clammer’s Circadian equally delights the analyst and the poet in me. Clammer’s book is a lyric essay collection that draws on disciplines as diverse as biology, linguistics, genealogy, and nomenclature and combines them in unexpected ways to reevaluate her world and her place in it.

To my former landlady in Santa Cruz, I stole the seashells. It was an accident, the movers wrapping your basket of giant conus, conch and murex into boxes with my broken clamshells and scuffed sea glass from more northern shores. I still hold the conch to my ears, hear  the crashing sea. When you read …

Truth is a relationship, not a static group of fixed points. But so often poetry has been described as a beautiful illusion, a construction, and it helps me, as a writer, to think about honesty and accuracy much more than to think about making something beautiful. That also strikes me, right now, as radical—to find beauty in the attempt toward truth, not just in the attempt toward beauty.

I write because it’s how I respond to the world. Even little happenings keep me writing. I also write because I love language more than I can explain.

My husband and I work overseas, so we cannot help but be influenced by the people and places around us. Land is important to me, as is history and language.