“I find that writing rough patches are often a symptom of my not reading enough. I’ll reach for poetry, plays, fiction, essays, biographies—I try to read widely and deeply. Visual art is endlessly inspiring. I love richly designed films, films with style. I’m a sucker for period pieces or amazing costumes. Whenever I travel, I also make it a point to visit the local museum. Recently, I watched the biopic Jackie, a gorgeous study of Jackie Kennedy’s grief and desire to control the narratives of her own life as well as her husband’s. Surprisingly, a poem came out of that film, one obsessed with historical violence against black women and presentations of mourning and violence. One lesson I’ve only recently begun to learn is to be comfortable with those fallow periods. The past few years I either haven’t written very much or wrote work that didn’t excite me. We live in a culture that values and encourages the production of a product, that thrives on publication and exposure. We’re all susceptible to being pulled into that way of being. However, it goes against, what I think, are the natural silences that happen to artists. Sometimes, we don’t have anything to say. Sometimes, our priorities have shifted. Sometimes, we must pause and reflect on what we want our work to achieve and contribute. All of these are fine. There are so many ways to motivate ourselves to write. Though living with that hard silence might be the most important way to keep writing and remind ourselves that the words always return.”
—Derrick Austin, author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016)