Category: creative process

  • Today I spread my poems on the floor

    (Photos by Lindsey Rae Gjording) It’s what every poet eventually has to do if they’re putting together a manuscript. Spread the poems on the floor. Like the batter of a very rich cake, pour it in the pan, spread it evenly. Let it find its shape and settle. But the recipe is not as clear […]

  • The Next Big Thing: Poems on Climate Change

    Thank you to poet Ti Kendrick Hall for tagging me in the Next Big Thing! I realize now as I’m writing this that I was tagged once before, a year ago, but at that time I wrote about the story behind founding the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop. This time I could probably talk […]

  • What Did You Do On Your Residency? I Sat And I Stared: A Lesson from Seinfeld

    The writing process is notoriously mysterious and hard to describe, especially when one is in it. Writers are used to having to prove to people that they actually work, even though what they do doesn’t look a lot like work, or a lot like anything. Case in point: I’m coming up on the last week of my […]

  • In the Middle of It: Notes from Vermont

    I’m on the other side of the Ides of March, post-Purim (the holiday of reversals), and inhabiting another side of myself. I am two weeks into my first writing residency, with two weeks to go. The first week here at the Vermont Studio Center was long and deep. I started writing immediately on the first […]

  • A Tarot Reading and a Writing Routine

    I recently visited a dear poet friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time in Brooklyn. We drank tea, caught up, and then she showed me a new tarot deck. I’d never done a tarot reading before, and didn’t much believe in it, but I decided to give it a try. I shuffled the […]