Saturday 16 February 2019

Emily Banks : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I share a lot of my roughest drafts with three friends from college: Sarah Huener, Hannah Riddle, and Liana Roux. We went through our undergraduate creative writing program together, so they’re really the people I feel the least shame with. I mean, they saw the poems I brought to workshop at eighteen about like, skinny dipping in various apartment pools. From time to time, we do a “grind” in which we send each other a poem a day for a month. We don’t critique, just offer encouragement and point out lines we love. Since I’ve finished my MFA and started a critical Ph.D. program, this practice has been such an important way for me to stay connected to my poetic community and keep writing. A handful of poems in my book originated that way.

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