I have a new job of interviewing poets for Fringe magazine (whose subtitle I adore: “The Noun That Verbs Your World”). Interviews upcoming will include Cheryl Dumesnil, author of In Praise of Falling, and Kim Addonizio, author of too many books to name, but most especially the brilliant, new collection Lucifer at the Starlite, with a nice review at Rattle by Jeannine Hall Gailey via the link. Interviewing poets about their work, poems, process, and…
Diane Lockward has a video of the undefinable, majorly talented poet Taylor Mali over at Blogalicious. If you haven’t heard of this guy, take a look and then go to Youtube where you can find lots more. And hope that he comes to your town and you can see him in person! C.E. Chaffin has a blog post that touched me, about dealing with melancholy, including a quote from Lincoln that was moving. If ever…
I was happy that The Pedestal magazine is featuring poems from its archives on its Facebook page and selected my poem, “War News” from Issue 20. It’s now up for the week at: The Pedestal – my poem on Facebook I hate to think how many years ago it was written, and we’re still in Iraq — though we have the hope of our troops being withdrawn by August. A hope. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more…
God help me, I’m being drawn back into my memoir of growing up with the bipolar rocket scientist. Prose, prose, prose is calling me. On top of trying to finish a novel I started five years ago. The thing that often gets me through the hard slogging is Anne Lamott’s wise and funny Bird by Bird. I found another humor piece on writing that cheered me along my prosey way: Lizzie Stark’s blog on Fringe…
Thanks to Julie Ewald’s blog, I found a great article on revising a poem: Sonya Feher’s list of five strategies to take your writing from draft to poem. Revising is probably the most important factor in writing of any kind. I write for a living — grant proposals, mailings, brochures, and other things to raise funds and awareness — and write in my spare time too. I’m constantly up against my own word-blindness. It’s natural…
Perhaps because I am finishing a novel I started five years ago, I found myself jumping back into the opening chapters of a memoir I finished just before starting the novel. The memoir is the reason I started this blog, on the advice of my agent, who thought a blog would be a great platform for building an audience for Rocket Lessons, the story of growing up with the bipolar rocket scientist. After my father’s…
I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, and found an interesting pattern developing: I write poetry in the morning and prose at night, often late at night. Trying to reverse the pattern doesn’t work at all. It seems to me that poetry is so closely related to a dream state (Rilke would agree) that when you first wake up, the subconscious is more accessible — the area of the mind that understands symbolically rather…
I know a poet who locks herself in a room early every morning for three hours to do her creative work. I’m not sure exactly what she does in there. Is it always composition and revision, strictly working on specific poems, or does it include reading poetry, a little lollygagging at the window, watching the deer eat another crop of her roses while she fingers the dust from the leaves of pot of ivy? Does…
New additions to the page I maintain on my website listing these publishers: Black Lawrence Press – also creative non-fiction: novels, memoirs, short story collections, biographies, cultural studies, and translations from the German and French. (no reading fee; electronic submission) Press 53 (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction; query first per guidelines)� Please send me any additions or corrections to the page. I welcome updates and wish to keep the page as current (and growing!) as possible.…
Interesting interview up at Fugue with novelist Anthony Doerr, on the art of being a fiction “alchemist.” Another good interview by Brian Brodeur with poet Sherod Santos. Brodeur’s blog, How a Poem Happens focuses on interviews about the process of writing poems and often on the process of creating a specific poem (included in the interview). I’m thinking about interviews as I conduct several with poets for a couple of journals. An interview can be…