Writers Recommend

"After years of thinking setting didn't inspire me at all, I have come to realize that it does—but only after I'm gone. I've learned not to try to write about a place until I've left it, whether I was traveling or living there. For instance, I have written two books set in Madison, Wisconsin, but I didn't feel an urge to set anything there until I had moved to Westchester, New York, to get an MFA. Once I was gone, Madison leapt into focus, and instead of looking out my window and going nuts trying to capture every little thing before me, distance let me edit and reimagine. But now that I am living in Madison again, I no longer feel a need to put it on the page. I've been picturing Yonkers instead—a place I lived for school and cheap rent, a place I fully intended to leave every day of every year for the entire seven years I lived there. I never really thought it would do much to inspire me, but I began thinking about it again the other day, wondering if the same pattern would hold true, and sure enough, it has."
—Michelle Wildgen, author of But Not for Long (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009)

"When I first moved to Philadelphia, a friend of mine was very excited to show me Marcel Duchamp's assemblage Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage... in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I won't describe it here—if you haven't seen it, reading about it would lessen your first encounter. I have to go back a long time, though, to remember another work that so completely upended my sense of what one piece could do. What exactly is so terrifying about it? Is it also funny somehow, how we peep, how we admire the little twinkling waterfall in the background? Ever since, I've been wondering, how might a written work implicate a reader as Duchamp does the viewer? I don't know if one can go around museums and galleries looking to have one's notions shattered, but in the meantime, perhaps I can think of the page as a space for an elaborate, unsettling installation."
—Catie Rosemurgy, author of The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press, 2010)

"It helps me to remember that inspiration needs courting; it won't come if I wait passively. Also, let's say I get inspired but have a rusty hand...then the inspiration plugs into a faulty outlet. So, when I've time to write but no mojo, I count. I write iambic pentameter or sapphic stanzas, or I make up some rhythm pattern and repeat it for a while (like writing lines with spondees, which is way hard!). If these attempts fail, then I go to a park or a café for an hour or two and write down what I see—not trying to say anything, but just attending to shapes, juxtapositions, data. These things all help, plus, lately, reading John Ashbery—this shakes me alive."
—Joanie Mackowski, author of View From a Temporary Window (University of Pittsburgh Press, January 2010)

"I'm thoroughly inspired, moved, agitated, elevated by music (mostly hip-hop). My first collection, Lobster With Ol' Dirty Bastard, situates rap heroes, culture, and iconography inside the four walls of fourteen-line quasi sonnets. Writing based on music has almost become a compulsion of mine. When I listen to old Smiths' albums with names like Hatful of Hollow or Meat Is Murder, I think "literature!" When Morrissey sings, "I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine / And it owes me a living / Ask me why and I'll spit in your eye," I immediately think remix. Remix is a term most commonly used in hip-hop music or, more recognizably, from grad school imitation poem writing prompts ad nauseum. Imitate it, re(in)state it, reconfigure it, say it in Braille! My forthcoming collection, Vacations on the Black Star Line, remixes the whole Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star album through the lens of race, privilege, whiteness, and exoticization. I could take a song like Lupe Fiasco's "Dumb It Down" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Et1siZhTk) and spend hours trying to dissect each line, each metaphor, each double and triple entendre. The stuff of good hip-hop puts language in a rocket ship!
—Michael Cirelli, author of Lobster With Ol' Dirty Bastard (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)