Vieve Kaplan, friend, colleague, and poet, invited me to join The Next Big Thing, a cascade of promoting myself (read: my work) and inviting others to do the same.
My tagged
writers for next Wednesday are:
Judith Terzi, Richard Garcia, Dale Wisely, Nickole Brown, Cati Porter,
and, Maria Andrade. I haven’t collected their URLs, but when I do I will post
those here. Check them out too!
What is the working title of the
book?
Burrowing
Song
Where did the idea come from for
the book?
Sammy Greenspan of Kattywompus Press
challenged chapbook submitters to offer her unusual collections, such as a
chapbook of prose-poems. I just so happen to write a lot of those, thanks to
Richard Garcia’s mentorship.
What genre does your book fall
under?
Poetry chapbook, I guess…maybe weird
fables, or dream book.
What actors would you choose to
play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Robert
Downey Jr., Tina Fey, Angelica Houston—those people who can play anything and
anyone they want, and no one at all.
What is the one sentence synopsis of
your book?
Apparently, I look at the world in
strange, or at least unique, ways, and my sense of humor also is tweaked.
How long did it take you to write
the first draft of the manuscript?
To write the poems, a span of four
years; as we all end up saying, to perceive the poems, many more years than
that. When I write, I continue to be surprised how drifts from so many
different things in my life enter my words.
Who or what inspired you to write
this book?
Immediately, Richard Garcia, for
introducing me to the notion of the prose-poem form; more broadly, the Brothers
Grimm, my dreams, German Romantics, Kafka, shaggy-dog jokes, Dada, Mitteleuropa
humor, and people who speak in code because they are in danger.
What else about your book might
pique the reader’s interest?
When I’m being serious, I’m pretty
funny.
Will your book be self-published or
represented by an agency?
Neither; Kattywompus Press has picked
it up (after inspiring it) and tells me that it should be published sometime in
2014.
