Jump to navigation Skip to content
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
“Three years ago I picked up Marjorie Welish’s third book of poetry, The Windows Flew Open (Burning Deck, 1991), in a used bookstore in the Midwest as I was preparing to move away. I’d never read a word by her nor had anyone recommended it to me.
“One of the hardest things about daily writing is getting back in, reconnecting with the page and your work. Far easier to fall down some Internet rabbit hole, and avoid it all. Meanwhile, your dog isn’t going to write your novel for you (if only).
“When my words are jammed, I like to draw or paint. It’s a relief to let go of language for a few hours and work using light and shade. Drawing always feels more physical than writing—it clears my mind. Many of my blocks come from anxiety about whether I can excel as a writer.
“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.
“I grow concerned when I find myself slipping into the same familiar skin while writing—when my mind reaches for the overworn but close-at-hand images, diction, syntax, and moves. To jostle myself out of my own stale rhythms, I like wading in strange, unfamiliar work and voices.
“I live in the Driftless Region of northeast Iowa. The land here isn’t perhaps what you think of when you think of Iowa.
“When Spike Lee screened Do the Right Thing at Cannes in 1989, reporters at the subsequent press conference suggested that his film was too bleak, offered no hope for race relations and presented no solutions.
“‘Everything will be very simple,’ wrote Thomas Bernhard in a letter to his publisher, ‘so long as we remember to service our complicated, our enormously complicated (mental) apparatus.’ It’s possible when Bernhard wrote about servicing the mental apparatus what he meant was to stop writ
“It’s funny how we can say things to students over and over (ad nauseum!) and only belatedly see how they shape our own approaches to writing. After twenty plus years in the classroom, I find I quote the following consistently enough that they seem driving philosophies.
“In the summer before my final year of grad school, I needed to finish a complete first draft of my thesis, a novel. My loony plan was to do it in one week while I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s unoccupied condo in Colorado. I packed my bags.
