Songwriters on Process

Amy Klein, Titus Andronicus

Amy Klein is the guitarist in the fantastic band Titus Andronicus, whose leader and singer, Patrick Stickles, I interviewed recently.  And she sings her own psych-folk songs under the name Solanin.

And that, my friends, is the last you will hear of Klein's connection to the band. Because this interview is about Amy Klein the poet, the writer in her own right.  We need not link Klein to another band to appreciate her talents.  While you may know her for her work in the band, she's a tremendously gifted writer with a degree in English from Harvard.  As you'll read, we spent most of the time talking about her experience as a poet, not as a songwriter.  We had a fantastic discussion about poetry, from John Donne to the Japanese.  

There was a sense, talking to Klein, that our discussion will be a mere footnote on the way to much bigger and greater things in her life.  There is too much talent in her for me to think otherwise.  And those bigger and greater things, at least from what she told me, do not necessarily involve music at all: when I asked about her legacy, her immediate response was that she'd like to write a few novels.  Read more from Klein after the video:

 

Heather Sellers

Here's how Heather Sellers introduced herself October 14 in the inaugural post of her blog on the Psychology Today website:

I'm Heather Sellers, and you don't look like anyone I know. Should we happen to meet, I would have to tell you right away that I will not recognize you when we meet again. I'm profoundly prosopagnosic: completely unable to recognize people by face.

"Don't worry!" most people say, "I'm terrible with names, too."

"No, that's not it," I say, urgently. I'm fabulous with names. I have to be-I need every single tiny clue I can get, just to make it through a day of students, meetings, errands, and social obligations. I am actually not going to remember your face, ever. Each time I see your face, it's for the first time.

Sellers is Professor of English at Hope College, my alma mater, where she is an accomplished poet and essayist.  Her new memoir You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness (Riverhead Books) recounts not just her experience with prosopagnosia, but her tumultuous upbringing: her mother was a schizophrenic and her father was a cross-dressing alcoholic.  But this is no self-pitying memoir.  

Sellers's book recently received a positive review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, where it is an Editor's Choice.  Mary Roach writes, "Face blindness would seem to be a trump card, but Sellers doesn’t play it that way. On the contrary, it helped her cope with the mood swings and unpredictable behavior of a schizophrenic mother and an alcoholic father . . .  She views prosopagnosia as a gift: 'the ability to live with uncertainty, to be receptive to all that a person might turn out to be, literally and metaphorically.' Sellers believes her condition helped her as a writer by forcing her to focus on 'the essence of the person,' not the surface."

Read my interview with Heather Sellers after the video. 

 

Gregory Orr, poet

I normally avoid email interviews with the writers on this site.  It's a much more rigid format that obviously allows for no follow-up questions.  But I've decided that when it comes to poets, email interviews are better: even the prose of their answers is beautiful.  Their concern for how language sounds knows no bounds. 

It is not a stretch to say that it’s an honor to feature poet Gregory Orr this week on Writers on Process. Orr is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and many pieces of essays and criticism.  He is currently professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 1975.  He was the poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1978 to 2003.  His poetry has been translated into at least ten languages.

Orr has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, and he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. City of Salt (1995) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for Poetry.

Much of Orr’s poetry is informed by transformative—and terrible—experiences when he was younger.  When he was 12, Orr accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident. His mother died soon thereafter unexpectedly, and his father later became addicted to amphetamines. Later, he suffered his own near-death experience: as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, he was jailed and severely beaten.  In an NPR story on his craft, Orr states, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.” (credit to The Poetry Foundation for the biographical information above)

Susan Henderson, Novelist

If you happen to be walking one day in Susan Henderson's suburban New York neighborhood and you see her yammering into her iPhone, odds are that she'll be telling her husband she's coming home soon.  Whatever you do, don't bother her, because it's all a ruse.  She's actually channeling her inner Wordsworth and writing. She just wants people to think she's talking to someone, when instead she's actually composing. Of course, this part of her writing process is far less hazardous than the previous variation, when she really did write while walking, sometimes for as long as three hours. This created problems during those moments when she actually had to see where she was going; consequently, she walked into a lot of parked cars.

Henderson's new novel, Up From the Blue (Harper Collins), is out this week.  It's received a substantial amount of advance praise.  Some of you may know her as the founder of the literary blog LitPark, but her literary accomplishments are many.  She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a variety of awards and grants. Her work has been featured in several literary journals and popular press publications.

Henderson's writing process is a good example of one that actually doesn't involve a lot of writing.  Like any good writer, she sees the actual transcription of words as only a small part of the process.  She recognizes that her process involves thinking, blogging, brainstorming, conversing, you name it.  In fact, if she's actively engaged in the process for eight hours a day, only about ninety minutes of that is dedicated to putting pen to paper.

So read my interview with Susan Henderson.  You'll find out what she has in common with William Wordsworth, why her neighbors might think she's crazy, why she fought being a writer, and more about that iPhone.   And watch this teaser as well:

 

Rhoda Janzen, Memoirist and Poet

Rhoda Janzen is basking in the glow of her recent nomination for the Thurber Prize, the nation's highest award for humor writing.  It’s for her New York Times #1 bestselling book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.  And this is odd, because Janzen has a double whammy going against her when it comes to being labeled a humorist: she is an academic—her area is 19th century moral conventions and Henry James, not exactly the stuff of Judd Apatow movies—and a poet.  Janzen is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan (full disclosure, my alma mater) and had carved out a pretty good name for herself as a poet when she decided to be funny. And this is a funny book. I read the book on my commute on the subway into downtown DC over a period of a couple of weeks.  Most men on that train are not reading books with dresses and high heels featured on the cover.

But it’s not just a testament to Janzen’s humor that I found the book so engrossing.  The book is a memoir about a particularly difficult time in her life: in one week, her husband of fifteen years leaves her for another man he met on Gay.com, and she almost dies in a car accident.  Needing a place to recover both emotionally and physically, she moves in with her parents in California, back to the Mennonite community in which she grew up. The story is about the experience of moving back home. I have nothing in common with any of these things.  But the themes of family, aging, struggling against adversity, and redemption are issues to which most of us can relate.

So read my interview with Rhoda Janzen.  You’ll learn what mark of punctuation she had to resist using in her latest book, the blunt advice she gives for beating writer’s block, and what kind of birds she wants singing to her in her ideal writing environment.

 

 

 

Li-Young Lee, Poet

Reason number one why I am not introspective enough to be a poet:

When I get up in the morning and look at a messy bed, I see a bed that needs to be made.  The poet Li-Young Lee, on the other hand, sees beauty in the absence of a body and the shape of a body simultaneously.

Poets have a different perspective on the world around us.  They see beauty in things that I cannot possibly imagine.  Heck, they just see things that I cannot imagine.  Which is why, I suppose, they became poets.  When Lee says, "I am aware of the fact that there are poems everywhere.  My whole experience, both inside and outside, is one giant poem: my dreams, the things I am looking at.  I am sitting here talking to you and looking at these books on my shelf, and there is a poem there somewhere,"  this is what I mean.  And when he has trouble writing, it's not because he doesn't know what to write about.  It's because he is so overwhelmed by everything around him that he doesn't know where to start.

Li-Young Lee has been a favorite of mine since college, when my professor, poet Jack Ridl (read his interview here) shared some of Lee's poems.  The two have been friends for years. It is no stretch to say that Li-Young Lee is one of the finest poets--no, make that writers--alive. It is hard for me to convey my appreciation for his words, his use of language, and his meaning without losing myself in hyperbolic fawning.  So I won't even try.   You will appreciate the world around you much better after reading the poetry of Li-Young Lee.

Read The Poetry Foundation's biography of Lee here for a good critical introduction and a list of his many deserved honors. 

Before you read my interview, watch this clip of Li-Young Lee explaining his poetry:

 

Jack Ridl, Poet

The poet Jack Ridl is professor emeritus at Hope College, my alma mater. In my time as a teacher (in public schools, in academia, and now in the corporate world), he has been my gold standard for teaching.  Every day I have a "What Would Jack Do?" moment.  As I said in a previous post, this is my enduring memory of being a student of Jack's in one of his creative writing classes:

Each week for homework we wrote a poem to share with the class. I have to think, looking back, that we were awful. Collectively we were only slighter better than a Hallmark card. After each of us would read our poem aloud, Jack would chime in with his thoughts. I can still picture him now:  he would sit back in his chair, take a deep breath, look up to the ceiling, and stroke his red beard. Somehow--somehow--he found something good to say about each of our poems.  And it was absolutely genuine.  He believed in the goodness of our writing. When I taught in both the public school and university settings, my personality and skill as a teacher was a collection of the traits of my best teachers.  And while I do not have a red beard, Jack's ability to see the value in every piece of student writing always stuck with me (of course, many of his other traits stayed with me as well).

Jack Ridl’s newest collection, Losing Season (September 2009, CavanKerry Press), chronicles a year of hope and defeat on and off the basketball court in a small town. It's a fantastic read, and a unique one, too: it's a series of poems that tells the story of one season of a high school boys basketball team.  So it's a narrative told through poems.  All the cast of characters is featured, from the coach to his daughter to his players to the scoreboard operator. You can read one of the poems here. Jack was recently named one of the 100 most influential sports educators in America by the Institute for International Sport.  Jack grew up around sports; his father was the legendary Pitt basketball coach, Buzz Ridl. (More about Losing Season here.)

I have long advocated that if you want to know how to use language—that is, if you want to see how words matter in your writing, whether you are a poet, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, whatever—you should read poetry.  A good poet says more about an image in one line than most of us say in ten pages.  In a poem, every word, every sound, every breath counts.  Nothing goes to waste.

Jack’s awareness of his process and his language is what you would expect from a poet.  Yet his answers are effortless to read.  They just—and I hate to use this word because it’s so nebulous—flow.  Why? Because he is a poet all the time.  Pay attention to the rhythm and cadence of his sentences.  Even his prose is poetic (he writes I’ve instead of I have, for example).  Listen to Jack tell you that, even though he lives on the beach, he never writes there.  He also thrives on rejection.  And his advice when you get writer’s block: lower your standards.

photo by Lou Schakel