back to writing/week 3 check-in
How has your week been? Did you try out any of the tips and suggestions from Rachel Mans McKenny’s interview on Monday? This email is your friendly end-of-week nudge to take a look back at your intentions for this week, think about how you’re making space for your writing, and consider anything you’d like to adjust about your practice.
I’ve been reminded this week of the power of pomodoros, especially for writing that feels hard or overwhelming. (I use the “tomato clock” extension browser—the simple pressure of that time counting down in the browser window is often enough to keep me focused for just a little bit longer!) 25 minutes really is enough to start to make some headway when writing and/or finding time to write is hard.
notes and reading suggestions
Virginia Sole-Smith does great work at the intersection of parenting and diet culture, and she’s had really good conversations going in recent weeks about school lunch. Her newsletter is great, and she’s always warm and informative on instagram.
I loved this Rumpus interview, To Gleam at the Periphery: Talking with Kendra DeColo, about Kendra’s new book, I Am Not Trying to Hide my Hungers from the World. Kendra’s work proves how deeply hilarious and smart poetry can be. I dare you to read the opening lines of “I Hope Hillary Is Having Good Sex” and not cackle and then zip over to BOA to buy the whole book:
I hope Hillary is having good sex
I say to myself at the farmer’s market
While fingering the over-ripened bustier
Of an heirloom tomato
Also in The Rumpus, an interview with my dear friend and MFA cohort member, Jacques Rancourt, whose second book, Brocken Spectre, is out now with Alice James. I loved the way Jacques talked about finding the form for each poem as he writes:
I don’t consider myself to be a formal or experimental poet. I always approach poems without any invention of any sort. They’re always written directly in a paragraph at first. From there, I chisel my way through to find the line, and once I find the line, to find the form that breathes life into it. “In Fátima,” a poem which is in twenty-four sections, was not originally written in twenty-four sections. If one would ever find that issue of Prairie Schooner where it was originally published, they’d see it presented in more traditional tercets. A poem like “June 12, 2016” was not written in syllabics originally. As I revise and draft, part of that process is finding the form that creates the right tension and life for the poem. I think a really good example is “The Wake,” which didn’t start off punctuated by periods in places where they don’t belong. It began as a poem with enjambment. Not satisfied by the lack of punch I was getting out of that enjambment, I played around with end stops and eventually found my way to the final form, which uses those end stops in a way to create double meaning, to create stops in places to give pause, to create fractures, double reads.
For this book, I was interested in movement between lines. In a lot of the poems, every other line is indented. I wanted to think about the friction of past and present, of speaker and subject, of not belonging, whether through memory, through place. Having those offset lines added to that sensation of friction and disjuncture.
How is your writing going? You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).