Dean Rader Recommends...

“Writing of any real consequence has to be brave. It has to take chances. For a long time, I thought being brave as a writer meant being experimental. But, actually, bravery is not necessarily about experimenting as much as it is about risk. The biggest risk we take as artists is making art. The second biggest is deciding we want to make art of consequence. To set yourself this task is to admit that you take your own work seriously, that writing is not a hobby, and that (to you at least), what you are writing has to matter. What does that mean? Well, it varies from person to person. For me, it means painfully moving out of my comfort zone. For my recent book, I went in two opposite extremes—both more inward looking and more outward looking. Or, put another way, I wrote poems that were more intimate/revealing/vulnerable than anything in my first book, (like ‘Labor’) but I also wrote poems that were much more overtly political than anything I had previously attempted (like ‘Self-Portrait in Charleston, Orlando’). I guess my recommendation would be to see if you can stretch in seemingly opposite directions. And, I wouldn’t even worry so much if your work ‘succeeds’ or not. Be bold. Be traditional. Be anything but safe.”
—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)