Jump to navigation Skip to content
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
I record myself reading a poem while completing it, and in the process of the recording, I start singing. The goal isn’t to get the recitation right, but to bring song into the poem when it’s missing. This often gets me from one draft to the next.
It was early June when my dad, who was also a writer, passed away this year. Sitting in the hospital weeks before, beneath the florescent lights, I read him a few chapters from In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, which he had given me when I was a teenager.
When I wrote my debut story collection, Good Women, I had moments where I ran into walls of uncertainty and froze. At these roadblocks, perfectionism began to guide me rather than intuition or craft. I balked. I felt pressure to search for something missing, something extraordinary.
When I’m stuck, I let myself be stuck. I don’t put imperatives on how many pages I need to generate or what being a writer looks like. I’ve learned not to fixate on the stuck-ness. I allow myself the breath and time to simply not write. So much of writing to me is about patience and allowance.
I sort of deal with obsessions when it comes to reading poetry and the creation of poetry. At any given time, I have a poem or two that I am drawn to on an emotional and sometimes ineffable level, in which I reread and return to the poem multiple times a week.
In the early 1990s, I moved to Berlin, Germany, fresh out of a failed marriage, heartbroken and friendless.
“I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.” Perhaps no other lyric has enthralled and sparked my imagination more than Robert Johnson’s mournful plea in his song “Cross Road Blues.” When my debut novel, The Carnivale of Curiosities, was in its nascent stage, the first thing that I
It’s silly, but it’s honest: When I’m stuck, I play The Sims 4. Over the last few years, my academic job has stressed me to the point of stagnation in my poetry. I’ll sit down to write, with ideas and inspiration in my fingertips, and after an hour, nothing.
I am one who experiences frequent hypertensions and palpitations from a racing heart and mind, so I often find myself both activated and lost. Although these parts of me are quite realized and muscular, their speed and capacity to hold so much can feel staggering.
Too often, I am losing myself in my work. Sometimes that feels like all I am: someone who wakes up and writes and pushes himself to read difficult books, then goes to sleep and does it all over again the next day.
