
- #Mountain goats i write in my spiral notbook professional
- #Mountain goats i write in my spiral notbook series
In all stages of the writing process, I need absolute silence. Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process? Still, its landscape and flora and weather impressed themselves upon my imagination early, so when I think of rain, I still think of northwest drizzle when I imagine a tree, I see a Douglas fir. I grew up in Seattle and, since leaving for college in 1978, have lived mainly away from the city. Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing? I suppose I have therefore lessened my chances of salvation, but I didn’t have much of a shot at that to begin with. I considered it a challenge to do exactly what scripture commands me not to do. In Ecclesiastes, I happened upon the instruction, “Say not thou, ‘What is the cause that the former days were better than these?’” I took this personally, since comparing former days to these is something of a vocation for me. With most of my poems, the inspiration is murky, difficult to determine, but with this one, the evidence is in the title: the poem originated in my reading of the Bible.
#Mountain goats i write in my spiral notbook professional
When I was in elementary school, it was my understanding that I would become a member of my hometown professional basketball team, the Seattle SuperSonics. What did you want to be when you were young? The contemporary poet I most wish I could write like is Laura Kasischke. I am willing to say that the most important poet for me is Stevens.

During my early years of taking writing seriously, I read many poets with passion-I became fanatical about them, absorbed them, then moved along, although what they taught me is probably still somehow in my system: Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevens, Roethke, Ashbery, Plath, Kinnell, Strand, Simic, Charles Wright. It is always difficult to differentiate between writers I merely love and writers who have actually influenced me. What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now? With no small amount of clumsiness and melodrama, I wrote, in the final sentence, that they would forever be trapped “in the slimy mitts of time.”
#Mountain goats i write in my spiral notbook series
In the story, heavily influenced by the TV series The Time Tunnel, two friends travel through time and get stuck, unable to return to their original era and place. A couple of years later, I wrote a short novel that my fifth-grade teacher thought impressive enough to read aloud to the class. I put a carnation in the poem so that I had a rhyme for “celebration”-already I was letting form determine content. My earliest extant poem is one I wrote when I was eight and gave to my mother for Mother’s Day. Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. from “What Is the Cause That the Former Days Were Better Than These?”, Spring 2019 (Vol.

They said dragoon and sconce and prithee thenĪnd cursed not their work-rock-hauling, hog-murdering, thatch-gathering,Įven as it stiffened their fingers, wrenched legs into question marks.
