Kate Gaskin : part one

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, which won YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, Passages North, Blackbird, and The Southern Review, among others, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, and in 2017 she won The Pinch’s Literary Award in Poetry. Currently, she is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal.

Photo credit is Dominic Gaskin

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I struggle with self-doubt. It can be difficult to get out of my own way. I also struggle with needing to process my own emotions and experiences for long periods of time. It took three full years of incubation to write the flagship poem of my book Forever War, but once I was able to write it, a whole flood of other related poems came spilling out, and those poems ending up being over half my book. Right now, I’m in processing/incubation mode instead of flood-of-poems mode, and I’m trying to practice patience and faith.