Q&A: Jim Tierney’s Inspired Illustrations

A day after he finalized the last of his illustrations for our January/February 2011 issue, Jim Tierney, an illustrator and designer at Penguin, spoke about the inspiration behind his work.
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A day after he finalized the last of his illustrations for our January/February 2011 issue, Jim Tierney, an illustrator and designer at Penguin, spoke about the inspiration behind his work.
Chip Kidd, whose famous designs have graced over eight hundred book jackets in the last twenty-four years, speaks about the cover he created for this issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Fearless, inventive, persistent, beautiful, or just plain badass—here are some of the living authors who shake us awake, challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all, inspire us to live life more fully and creatively.
Author-artists Michael Kimball, Michelle Wildgen, Jesse Ball, Abha Dawesar, and Jen Bervin talk about their "other" creative pursuits—cooking, photography, bookmaking, painting, and drawing—in relation to their writing.
A look at the psychology of writers block and how scientific studies in creativity offer insight into how writers can use the tools they already have to break through.
After a brief but torrential thunderstorm in mid-June, eight writers of poetry and prose, myself included, huddled around a picnic table crowded with three-buck beer and leaves of printed-out poems, stories, and essays in the concrete garden of a Brooklyn bar. It had been almost a year since I'd taken a seat at a table with other writers to talk about the stuff, the meat of our writing and the project at hand every time each of us settles in to confront the blank page.
Ordering poems becomes a familiar act if you consider the lyric poem in its original form—the song. And if you were the kind of incessant list-maker Nick Hornby describes in his novel High Fidelity, the kind who also made mix tapes from your album collection. If you were the kind of geek my college boyfriend, Tim, was and—admittedly—the kind I was too.
Although Janet Fitch's Paint It Black, published this month by Little, Brown, is a work of fiction, the author drew inspiration from many genres, most notably poetry, while she was working on her follow-up to White Oleander.
For the second installment of this occassional feature, in which we ask authors to list the movies,
music, artwork, and books that inspired them during the course of
writing their new books, we asked two-time Booker
Prize–winning author Peter Carey, whose ninth novel was published by
Knopf in May, for his list; he replied with this essay.
It took a long time to write these words. I'm not referring to the psychosomatic affliction known as writer's block. I mean the delays caused by the process of composition and revision.