Ben Dolnick

How did you become a writer?

I would say it started when I was eight or nine, first writing stories for school (on a giant Apple IIE attached to a dot matrix printer, incidentally). I discovered that I felt a greater freedom when I was writing than I did just about any other time -- I could do what I wanted to on the page (which happened to be largely tell stories about Nazis and dinosaurs) in a way that felt enormously pleasurable to me. Then when I was thirteen or fourteen my parents gave me Slaughterhouse-Five for my birthday, and I discovered that you could harness the pleasurable freedom of writing to an actual character, a voice, a set of concerns. At that point I was pretty much done for. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

The writers who have meant the most to me, at various times, are: Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Penelope Fitzgerald, William Maxwell, Denis Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth. I've also had some great teachers in my day -- a high school English teacher named John Burghardt (who happens to be a great writer) stands out in particular. But mostly it's been books for me. 

When and where do you write?

I do my best writing in the morning, usually from the time I get back from the park with my dog until lunch time. That's when it's quietest, and I don't have any appointments, and my mind is more or less clear. Then in the afternoon I tend to do less focus-requiring stuff -- short pieces, or copy-editing, or research, or whatever happens to be needed.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a novel about which I won't say too much except that it involves ghosts and insanity and the 1800's. I'm at that point where I've been working on it so long, and still have so long to go, that it feels like the only thing I've ever done or ever will do.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not in the sense of being unable to get anything down on the page, I don't think. I've certainly suffered from months- or years-long periods of not being able to really find the wind in my writerly sails, though. This for me just means casting unhappily about, not knowing who or what I want to write about, writing lots and lots of pages that do nothing much for me except, I hope, get me closer to the place where I will actually feel some sense of being impelled forward.  

What’s your advice to new writers?

The main thing is to read a lot and write a lot. That will teach you just about everything you need to know. Also, get yourself a copy of Bird by Bird. I avoid 99% of all books about writing and craft and etc., but this is one I turn to again and again, more for its compassion and wisdom about the process of writing than for its particular nuts-and-bolts advice, though it's good on that too.

Bio: I grew up in a suburb of Washington DC and went to college in New York City, where I studied English. I now live in Brooklyn with my wife and our beloved but insane mutt.

Norman Dubie

How did you become a writer?

In 5th grade, my English teacher held up a Webster's dictionary saying there are only two words in it that defied definition. The first was the point in geometry and the second was the poem. I told the little girl sitting next to me that it would be difficult for me to become the point in geometry but that I was going to become a poet. She asked why and I responded it sounds like there's no bosses in that world.

I think I was always intoxicated with the language of Shakespeare and the King James Version of The Bible. So I also blame the Elizabethan underground for sixty years of writing verse! Ha!

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

When I was in my early twenties, John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet pointed me in a direction--call it ventriloquism or whatever--that I've yet to abandon. In terms of strict lyric poetry, I moved from John Donne to Sylvia Plath to Denise Levertov to John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Among the Moderns, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens were very important to me. But I must confess to being an omnivore who's clearly read across a couple hundred years of world poetry. And I'll finish by saying that I will not in this lifetime ever recover from my original experiences with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

With regard to teachers, I was blessed with having studied with Barry and Lorraine Goldensohn. I also studied with George Starbuck and Marvin Bell.

When and where do you write? 

I've always written at the kitchen table and usually in the middle of the night.

What are you working on now? 

I'm working on a manuscript now that remembers my childhood living on a peninsula on the coast of Maine.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

The truth is, I've always found it fairly effortless writing poetry and it gives me great pleasure. So it is not a torment for me! When I published my first book, The Alehouse Sonnets, I did suffer writer's block for one year, thinking I may never write again. I've now written some thirty volumes of poetry. It's also true that I walked away from the writing of poetry, but not from the teaching of young poets throughout the 1990s. I dedicated this decade to my spiritual life as a Tibetan Buddhist. I think at the beginning of this "silence," I'd already published ten book-length volumes of poems and I was concerned that I would soon be writing caricatures of my own work. So, following the example of Robert Duncan, I just stopped. Since that silence, I've published a big volume of collected poems and six other works of poetry in addition to a 400-page poem written in the tradition of Science Fiction--it's called The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake (Blackbird Online archives).

So I was briefly blocked early on and then chose to be silent for a while--I don't regret any of it.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read everything! Write fearlessly!

Norman Dubie was born in Barre, Vermont in April 1945. His poems have appeared in many magazines including The American Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, Crazy Horse, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. He has won the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems won the PEN Center USA prize for best poetry collection in 2002. He has published with Blackbird, a book-length futuristic work, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake. His most recent collection, The Quotations of Bone, is from Copper Canyon Press. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, and is a teacher at Arizona State University.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

How did you become a writer?

It was all I ever wanted and want to be. An artist. A witness. At a young age I kidnapped the sky blue Smith-Corona typewriter in my family’s house but even before that I was always scribbling and drawing. As a writer and an artist, I’ve got quite a long way to go and I’m so very glad for that. It’s the attempt of becoming a writer that continues to fulfill me: the imagination and the voice meeting on the page.

It’s hard as hell but I’m not going anywhere. I’m excited for the writers in my life I am fortunate to call my friends. This includes writers I’ve never personally met but with whom I share an intimacy on the page through shared language. There’s great writing happening everywhere. There’s so much to say and to learn. And I don’t want to learn or know it all – but I do want to read and read!  I’m fortunate.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

My writing influences are very fluid but there are some writers and visual artists that remain consistent companions in my process. Some of the poets and writers I often return to include James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rainier Marie Rilke, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Marilynne Robinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Octavio Paz, Audre Lorde, Carl Phillips, William Faulkner, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Lucille Clifton. Also, I often include visual artists as writing influences. It’s difficult for me to segregate genres because I work across forms. So I’d like to include several visual artists as influences, such as Carrie Mae Weems, Joseph Cornell, Lorna Simpson, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Frank, Romare Bearden, Hank Willis Thomas, and Graciela Iturbide. In a category of his own – Miles Davis.

When and where do you write? 

I create during daylight hours, usually in the morning. I revise in the evenings. I read and write at home for several hours a day. I take a lot of walks and showers and baths while I work. I think better near or immersed in water. On days that I teach I spend more time reading because I give a lot of energy to teaching. Then I have weekly studio days where I work at my art studio. I treat my workday with intention. Lately I’ve been on the road so I will often set up my hotel rooms or residency spaces as micro studios and do both writing and visual work. There are Moleskine notebooks all over my house, crammed into my five million tote bags with paintbrushes and cameras. Moleskines under my pillows. Maybe even in my fridge. It’s ridiculous!

What are you working on now? 

My first novel is nearly completed. I’m also curating several books of photography. I have some fragments and imagery for stanzas of poems but it will likely be some time before I’ll actually think of them as poems. I want to explore a number of shapes and forms where they’re concerned and if I lock that energy into stanzas prematurely it’s more challenging to move the ideas and feelings around. I’ve also returned to painting, which helps me balance the density of prose.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve evicted that phrase from my vocabulary. It’s reactive and doesn’t provide me with enough oxygen. What I try to do is set up a number of spaces where my mind can go when I’m unable to access (what I think) comes next. Usually, when I’m snagged on a thorn, I overload myself with reading, music, visual arts, and films. I double my time out in nature, looking at rivers and trees and light. I coax myself away from panic. Sometimes I can’t. Really, what I’ve begun to understand is that I have to listen and get very quiet when I feel a certain kind of silence approaching. I have a small set of questions I pose to myself about the work itself and about how I’m feeling specifically about the work and then I look outward through the windows of those questions. And I turn to other writers.    

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read everything, especially the things that make your ego nervous. Be open to words, dreams, memory, sensations, politics, and feelings. Push the alphabet toward your desires and your fears. Push the grammar until it breaks open in (re)discovery. Value your voice and your mistakes. Supporting other writers’ work means you value your own work and presence. Balance community and solitude. Make sure your competitiveness is constructive and useful. Read and read and read. Write to the living and to the dead. Take your good, sweet time.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books), was published in 2015. Currently, Griffiths teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.