“If I don’t write for a few days, I feel hungover, like my muscles are tight. Creative and intellectual exertions parallel, for me, physical exertion. Having run cross-country in college, I spent thousands of hours and miles on roads all over Illinois. I still spend a lot of time running, witnessing the landscape, and finding my solitude mirrored by the Midwest. Writing after a run creates a dialectic between landscape and the personal thoughts I want to express. Sometimes it’s the corkscrew-tin gutters beneath a gravel driveway or the cinderblocks lifting up a mobile home. By the time I arrive home, I usually have the outline to a narrative or enough concrete images to form a concept, or intuit something beyond those individual images. Running sheds any internal blockage and allows me to write more emotionally inclusive poems by letting me see more of the world we all live in. My nightstand writers who inspire me include: Julia B. Levine, Sandy Longhorn, Austin Smith, Tracy K. Smith, and Bruce Snider. Their art exemplifies the duality of the mind’s lyrical capability and the physical landscape where my body feels safest and most at home.”
—John McCarthy, author of Ghost County (MG Press, 2016)
Photo credit: Andrew Hemmert