Ten Questions for Barbara Crooker
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“The most challenging thing every time I sit down to write is to make the poem on the page as alive as the poem in my head.” —Barbara Crooker, author of Some Glad Morning
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“The most challenging thing every time I sit down to write is to make the poem on the page as alive as the poem in my head.” —Barbara Crooker, author of Some Glad Morning
“Fridays I would slash and burn upwards of 80 percent of that week’s word haul. Anything that stayed had to earn its keep.” —Tommy Pico, author of Feed
“I had to imagine the life of characters who shared some of my own history but had their own unique ways of being in the world.” —Jeffrey Colvin, author of Africaville
“Writing—the writing it down—has increasingly become the least important part of the process. Living in the world of the novel, existing as the characters, viewing the day-to-day from their perspective, is the most important thing.” —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Dead Astronauts
“Sometimes at the end of an eight-hour day I’d have a single paragraph to show for it.” —Dexter Palmer, author of Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
“Much of the book I had no recollection of writing, and it was strange to be confronted with what I’d done, as though I was getting access to parts of my mind I hadn’t known existed.” —Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren
“My preferred notebook is a sharp-cornered, hardcover Roaring Spring black marble composition book with 20# paper, item number 77461, college ruled—I’m a Pisces and need a line to keep me grounded.” —Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow
A debut memoirist speaks up about post-publication blues and offers some suggestions for how to cure them.
“I don’t trust any readers! And readers shouldn’t trust any writers. We’re all scoundrels, down to the last.” —Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love
“In college I had a fiction teacher tell me to make every sentence so good that the reader would have to read the next one. So basic and obvious but I needed to hear it.” —Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours