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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.
“I used to get really distressed by my writing dry spells, but since I’m also an arts journalist I always have that medium to turn to when my poems are giving me grief. Taking in different forms of art and looking at them critically opens my mind up to different possibilities in my poetry.
“Whenever I feel stuck in my writing, I change up my writing routine. I have kids, so I typically write for twenty- or thirty-minute spurts during the day, usually at coffee shops after I drop them off at school, then on the commute to and from work, or on my lunch breaks.
“Often it feels like overwhelm is a constant heckler and I’m on stage unable to formulate the next joke, word, sentence, line—entire stories robbed from me by this hack clown.
“There are certain writers whose prose is so deft and beautiful that reading them can inspire whatever I happen to be working on, even if the style, setting, or genre are completely different.
“Stuck feelings come to me in two ways: first, a story-level stickiness, when I’m working on a project but don’t know where it’s headed next, and second, a more existential stickiness, when I don’t have a project and don’t know where I myself am headed. The first one is easier to handle.
“I find that the hardest work of my writing is done in my subconscious brain, somewhere in the back of my skull far out of the reach of my control.
“Taking a spin through the Smiths album Hatful of Hollow is one of the things I allow myself when faced with troubles on the page. It’s not so much to inspire as to reset.
“When it’s warm enough in Maine—May through October, mostly—I write in a small attic that sits above a 20-by-20-foot garage/shop building in my backyard. I do a lot of carpentry on the side, and all my tools are in my shop.
“I begin my writing day with a sip of coffee and a vape (or two) of marijuana.
“Seeing is an act of imagination. When I am stuck in writing, it means that I have stopped seeing, that I have reduced the myriad forms to irrelevant background shapes like extras in a film, that I have closed off the sense doors to dwell in an anxious hermitage of bills and paperwork.
