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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.
“At the ninth annual Outsound New Music Summit, as Martha Colburn’s monsters reeled on the screen and Thollem McDonas improvised feverishly on the piano, I was reminded of both Slavoj Žižek’s speaking of voices as foreign to the our bo
“The stories I write begin as fragments that spend months or years in the Failure Folder, a limbo where I hide unfinished pieces too raw, unspeakable,
One of my favorite things to tell my students is, The poem is smarter than you. I rarely start writing a poem knowing how it will finish, and even when I think I have a general idea, it rarely turns out to be accurate.
“Because so much of my poetry explores language itself—the ways we shape and are shaped by it—my creative practice often begins with collecting words.
“When I am stuck in the perfection cog—as in, I am rewriting a sentence a million times over even though I’m in a first draft or, I am freaking out and can’t move forward
“When I feel like my identity as a writer is threatened by my flaws, failures, and limitations of health, I can become overwhelmed by fear so profound, I
“Writing itself is such a solitary act that when I am finishing a project I often feel lonely to the point of distraction. I combat that isolation by surrounding myself
“Some of us are in confusion; we labor through it, we perceive it where it isn’t, we see it threefold where it’s thick; we can scarcely say anything at all
“Most of the time when I’m stuck, it’s because I’m trying to get a sentence or a scene to be perfect when it’s too early in the process for perfection. I tell myself
“Walking in the woods helps free my mind. The loamy smell, muted light, envelope of green, and muffled sound help make a space for ideas to germinate.
