Last month, I was tagged by Erica Goss to participate in a virtual blog tour of writers. The goal was to answer four questions about my current writing process. What a great exercise for inquiring into the springs of my creative life. Here are my answers.
1. What are you currently working on?
A messy poetry manuscript loosely organized around the title Arabesque. Like the ballet pose and Islamic calligraphy, it dips and swerves, echoes in rhythms and themes and has no straight lines. I'm also deep in revising my time travel novel involving the great Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. The time travel device is a gold pen. Seems suitable for a writer. And points to my process of explorating meaning through traveling back into memories.
2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?
I seem to be working a territory of affect I don't see out there a lot: poetry and prose that curves around and into epiphanies, joy, and ecstasy. I'm interested in the marvels that hide in plain sight, in the quotidian of daily life and landscape, and that if attended to can spur sudden music in the soul. I feel a continuity of that pursuit in the Romantic poets of the 19th century, but hope I can express it in 21st century language. My concerns are similar.
3. Why do you write/create what you do?
Poems present themselves to me through compelling images and a sense of how they are connected to my internal processes at levels below awareness but which can be reached into and brought out by writing. It's a compulsion to self-discovery through delving into the images and memories burned most deeply into me. These images present themselves in terms of a resonance that lets me know there's rich material in them and I should explore. As Rilke said, childhood and dreams are great sources. They are for me, especially childhood. The dreamlike lens of poetry refocuses memory in a fresh way that yields self-discovery. I assume I'm not that different from anyone else and that my experience in the form of writing will resonate with some readers. So I go ahead and undergo this sometimes laborious but rewarding process.
4. How does your writing/creating process work?
See above! The why and the how are for me intertwined.
This was a great exercise in examining how and why I write, and I'm going to tag a few of you to follow suit with these, if you feel like it. Thanks, Erica, for inviting me!
Labels: poetry, Romantic poets, Writing
