Magic Tricks and Interviews

On her blog, Leslie Pietrzyk writes about a trick that kept her writing when she came to a stuck place in her novel writing: "So I told myself to come up with three things that could happen, just really quickly: “You don’t have to use them,” I assured myself. “Just type three things really fast even if they sound ridiculous. Then you can go off to lunch.”

And it worked! Go here to read more.

And Deborah Ager reports here that it's a trick that works for writing poetry too.

While you're at the 32 Poems blogsite, scroll down for a great interview with Mary Biddinger (or go here directly, if you don't like scrolling. I love her discussion of wearing her administrator hat and her poetry hat, hats which struggle to control my own life on a daily basis (I worry I might end up wearing the hat of the nearest insane asylum on some days! oh, it's probably not politically correct to call them that anymore, is it?). She also talks about her ideal writing space, which might involve a wrinkle in the universe. The interview, conducted by Serena Agusto-Cox, is full of gems.

I think I've posted about other interviews conducted on the 32 Poems blogsite, and I suspect my favorites have been done by Serena Agusto-Cox. I've established in earlier blogposts on my site (based on my very unscientific survey of my bookshelves), there are very few book-length collections of interviews with poets, when compared to interviews with other types of artists. If Agusto-Cox ever collects all her interviews that she's conducted into one single volume (or 2 or 3), I hope she'll let me know!