How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
About eleven years ago, my three colleagues—Angelique Stevens, Maria Brandt, and Pamela Emigh-Murphy—and I started a writing group, Straw Mat Writers (we all teach together at the same college in the English department). That group has now grown to include one more woman, Jennifer Kircher Carr. We meet about once a month for an evening to workshop poems and then twice a year, we go on a retreat for four or five days where we spend the time writing and workshopping (and drinking a lot of wine and eating a lot of cheese). Angelique and Pam write nonfiction, Maria writes fiction and plays, Jennifer writes fiction, and I write (mostly) poetry. I really love workshopping with people who work in different genres; they bring such an important perspective into the revision process and I know my own writing has strengthened by studying and talking about their processes. Straw Mat has even hosted a salon for area writers so they could network and form their own writing groups. I also workshop with another great poet, Sarah Etlinger, who lives in Wisconsin. We met at a teacher’s conference years ago and now meet on Zoom every few months to give each other feedback.
Often when I write a poem, it starts with a single line. Usually when I’m doing something totally unconnected to writing, like when I’m out for a run. Or when I’m arguing with my teenagers. Or washing dishes. Sometimes it’s something one of my friends say that just strikes me; at dinner one night, my good friend Joe told us a story about a college girlfriend giving him up for lent. I said “That’s a poem!” and wrote “Delilah Scorned,” which has been reprinted a few times now.
Sometimes my poems are responses to something I’ve seen in the news. Other times, I’ll know I want to write a poem about a memory and so I start with that goal. When I wrote Imago, Dei, I brainstormed a list of significant events/memories associated with going to church as a child. I still have at least ten that are still waiting to be turned into poems. I love persona poems, too, so I’ll choose a persona (like The Little Mermaid) and then try to imagine her doing something totally ordinary (like getting her period), and then I just start writing to see what happens. Once I get a draft, no matter how rough, I bring it to Straw Mat or to Sarah to work out the kinks. Rochester also has a wonderful local poetry group, Just Poets, that runs monthly workshops and hosts featured readers and poetry lectures. When I’m able to, I meet up with them.
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