Stephen C. Pollock

How did you become a writer? I began writing independently of schoolwork when I was nine, scribbling rhymed poems in pencil on the cardboard that came with my father’s laundered shirts. (“Yertle the Turtle” by Dr. Seuss was a strong influence). Concurrently, I wrote essays on the structures and functions of the human body. By the end of that year, I had drafted enough material for a child’s illustrated manuscript on human anatomy and physiology. This of course was never published, but it did anticipate my future career as a physician.

In my sophomore year of high school, my English teacher had his students maintain a poetry notebook for half the year. My notebook was a repository for poems by favorite authors, personal reactions to those poems, photos and illustrations cut from magazines and pasted onto the journal pages, and my own abysmal attempts to write verse.

My interest in poetry intensified in college where, as a biology major on the pre-medical track, I took four rigorous poetry courses. All four were lit courses; none involved creative writing. During the last of these, in an act of love masquerading as mania, I stopped attending classes, isolated myself from friends, ate and slept reluctantly, and spent five consecutive weeks writing a metaphysical poem on the theme of subjective vs.objective reality. I remember breaking down in tears and sobbing uncontrollably when the last few lines came together — a combination of exhaustion, relief, and the beauty I perceived in those final lines.

After graduating from Amherst College, I trained for ten years to become a physician, ophthalmologist, and neuro-ophthalmologist. In 1987, I was recruited to Duke University as Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology and ended up serving on the full-time faculty for seventeen years. Some physicians are able to write poetry throughout their medical careers. I didn’t belong to that group. For me, maintaining a consultative practice in neuro-ophthalmology, training residents and fellows, publishing papers in peer-reviewed medical journals, and carrying out a variety of administrative responsibilities was all-consuming. While the instinct to write poetry was suppressed during this period, it was not extinguished. As I cut back on academic responsibilities during my last year at Duke, that instinct began to slowly reassert itself. Nearly all of the poems in my mature oeuvre were written between 2003 and 2023.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). These five books have had the greatest influence on my philosophy and on my writing: Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi, Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, and A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass.

One might reasonably assume that my influences would also include certain poets and their books of poems. However, upon reflection, I realize that only a limited number of poems comprise my list of “favorites,” and I suspect that it’s those works that have embedded themselves in my subconscious and, in the aggregate, constitute an eclectic influence on my writing. With apologies for the length, here’s a relatively complete list: The Weed and The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop; The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats; Design, Stopping by Woods, and A Patch of Old Snow by Robert Frost; Hope is the Thing with Feathers, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, and I Felt A Funeral in My Brain by Emily Dickinson; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot; Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces by Seamus Heaney; The Force That Drives the Flower, Through the Green Fuse, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, and Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas; Nick and the Candlestick, The Moon and the Yew Tree, The Applicant, and Cut by Sylvia Plath; Song by Muriel Rukeyser; Convergence of the Twain by Thomas Hardy; The Flea by John Donne; To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell; Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish; Wish by Caitlin Doyle; Sonnet Nabokov by Daniel Bosch.

When and where do you write? I have always been undisciplined with respect to writing poems, as evidenced by the fact that I have no set writing schedule. In contrast to most other poets, I lack the ability to sit down daily at my desk and call forth ideas and/or personal experiences to serve as the basis for new poems. Nor have I ever relied on writing prompts to prime my poetry pump.  Instead, I wait for lightning to strike in the form of: a) a vague idea that bubbles up into consciousness; b) a dream; or c) an observation of some natural phenomenon that seems to be a metaphor waiting to happen. The unpredictability of this approach means that I never know when the next poem will materialize.

Once I begin writing, however, I become intensely focused. I often begin as I did in childhood, with pencil and paper. After sketching out a preliminary concept or drafting a few auspicious words or phrases or stanzas, I transition to composing in Word on a laptop.

The key for me is to occupy a mental space where words, sounds, rhythms, conceits, and metaphorical possibilities freely and continuously enter the mind, while at the same time applying critical filters to eliminate the 99.9% of options that lack usefulness or merit. Those filters are internal, personal and idiosyncratic. They don’t relate to prevailing trends in poetry, to contemporary poets, or to the work of most historical poets.

When fully engaged and maximally productive, my efforts typically result in four new lines of poetry per day (derived from perhaps a dozen pages of notes and drafts).

What are you working on now? Promoting my new collection Exits! Once these marketing and publicity activities are behind me, I look forward to resuming the writing life.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Given that so-called “writer’s block” describes my natural state, I allow it to persist until it no longer does.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best writing advice I ever received was when I was drafting my long poem at Amherst. Every few days, I would drag myself up three flights of stairs in Johnson Chapel to the office of David Sofield, a poet and professor of poetry.  He would patiently listen to what I had written in the interim, make gentle suggestions, and provide encouragement to continue writing. That poem, which represented my first serious attempt to write poetry, would never have come into being without Professor Sofield’s support.

What’s your advice to new writers? Write poems that represent your unique aesthetic sensibilities. Try not to be overly influenced by prevailing trends or by contemporary poetic styles.

Edit mercilessly over an extended period. Satisfying first drafts often begin to show their flaws only after sufficient time has elapsed to afford an objective assessment.

Begin your foray into publication by submitting poems to literary journals. This will help you determine which of your poems resonate with experienced reviewers. Before each submission, make sure that your poem is a good fit for the journal.

When you publish your debut collection, be prepared for an abrupt shift from writing mode into marketing and promotion mode.

Stephen C. Pollock is a former associate professor at Duke University. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, including “Blue Unicorn,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Live Canon Anthology,” “Pinesong,” “Coffin Bell,” and “Buddhist Poetry Review.” "Exits" (Windtree Press, June 2023) is his first book.

Sonora Jha

How did you become a writer? Out of desperation. In my childhood, it was the only thing I could do. I'd write little stories and my classmates would sign up to take turns reading them. Then, after an undergrad in business in accounting left me miserable, I did a postgrad in journalism and became a news reporter for around 10 years. Then I went into academia, which drove me desperate for creative writing (very different from academic publishing), so I started writing fiction as a guilty pleasure. Now it's all I want to do. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). British children's books author Enid Blyton was huge in India, and I was a fan. Her writing was later understood to be problematic and racialized, but as a child growing up in India, I was enchanted by her storytelling. Then I read South Asian authors like Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Ismat Chugtai, Manto. Then contemporary authors like Zadie Smith (On Beauty), Vikram Seth (The Golden Gate), Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) had me dream my way into being a novelist and essayist.

When and where do you write? With a full time job as a professor and associate dean, I have to steal time — two hours twice a week — to sit down at a cafe and write in the company of writer friends. Over the pandemic, I bought myself a new fuchsia velvet sofa with a chaise, and now I sit and write there, with my dog at my feet. I also absolutely love going to writing retreats so I can stay with my story for extended periods of time. 

What are you working on now? A new novel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not quite "writer's block," in that I haven't had a situation where I can't put words on the page. I may suffer from poor writing every now and then, though.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Don't wait for the perfect conditions or what you imagine to be "the writer's life." Whatever life you are living as a writer is the writer's life. 

What’s your advice to new writers? Use your anxieties as fuel, but also remember to reward yourself and celebrate every milestone. Read in other genres, read voices dissimilar to your own. 

Sonora Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter (2023) and Foreign (2013) and the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021). She was formerly a journalist in India and Singapore and is now a professor of journalism at Seattle University and is at work on her next novel. Read more about her at www.sonorajha.com.

Jacqueline Holland

How did you become a writer? I became a writer the same way children grow up and become parents, the way all life continues on Earth: by the lure of pleasure and the subsequent bridle of responsibility.

When I was a very young child, my single mother was in college. She was an elementary education major, and she would read to me all the books on her syllabi: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, My Uncle Sam is Dead, The Little Prince, and a hundred others. Some of my earliest and most powerful pleasures were sitting nestled against her, listening to her read these stories aloud. I distinctly remember my five-year-old impressions of The Little Prince; I understood almost nothing of the story, but my mind was filled with endless sunsets, sulky roses, knobby-kneed sheep, foolish men on small lonely planets, a plane crash in a dusky desert. It was a waking dream world, strange and vivid, placed in my mind by a book. I felt positively drunk on the wonder of it.

It was the pleasure of the story that first hooked me, and I believe that is generally the way with artists. Artists encounter the pleasure of a story, a song, a picture, a dance, and find it so intensely pleasurable that they want more of it, so they begin groping their way closer and closer to that pleasure. They consume more and more of it, greedily, breathlessly, as much as they can get, until, out of the inevitable frustration of this horribly unquenchable appetite, it occurs to the nascent artist that it must be inside the story, (the song, the picture, the dance) where the height of pleasure is to be found. It’s no longer enough to stand outside the beautiful thing and behold; union is what must be had because if a story can electrify you so powerfully from without, what must it feel like to have it flowing through you and pouring out of you?

So, the artist begins the work, and the work is hard, and it feels nothing at all like nestling next to your mother while she reads to you aloud. You’ve moved, artistically, from childhood to parenthood. Now it is something like responsibility that keeps you moving forward; all those stories and characters tucked up inside you like eggs in ovaries are yours. They need you and only you. If you don’t bring them out, raise them up, no one else will. They won’t exist, and that, you know at your core, would be an unspeakable tragedy, even worse than children who never existed because even the happiest family has an upper limit to the allowable number of children, but there is no such limit to stories. The world needs every decent story it can get.

Funny, but I believe every writer, feels now and then that he or she has been duped by the pleasures of story, just as every parent with bags under their eyes or poop on their hands feels, at least occasionally, that they have been nature’s fool. Most of us, I imagine, would be tempted to return to childhood, when we only ate the food, and did not cook it. Union with a story is only rarely the ecstatic experience we imagined; more often it’s tempered by the mundane and onerous. And yet, as with the parent, Nature and Story are victorious. Exhausted as we are, we wouldn’t trade the role for anything. We know we’ve never done anything else so deeply worth doing, and it makes us feel rich and proud.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). As is probably clear from my previous answer, my young reading years were the most powerful and formative. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to that feeling. The ones who got me hooked young were Ray Bradbury, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Victor Hugo, William Steinbeck. R. L Stine made writing possible by providing formulaic and delightful stories, which I very seriously view as invaluable. As much as I loved it, I could not have imitated The Hunchback of Notre Dame at eleven years old, but I could and did, imitate Say Cheese and Die. Denis Johnson’s Train Dream and Jesus Son make me want to try harder, and Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov makes me want to go deeper. All of Toni Morrison reminds me to say what I mean and mean what I say, and Ray Bradbury insists that I express my love, shout it from the rooftops! Or else get a new job.

When and where do you write? I am a mother of two children and I have spent most of my writing life in teeny tiny apartments and rentals where space was limited, so I’ve always written when I can, where I can. For years that was during my children’s afternoon naps, then it was coffee shops during their school hours. I now have an office for the first time (that I share with my artist husband) and I’m still trying to get used to writing in it. It’s not been easy. I have so many plants that are always asking to be watered.

What are you working on now? I’m currently working on a science fiction novel, which means that in addition to being a writer, I’m now also an Olympic sprinter as I race against the daily monumental changes and developments of technology and its shaping effects on society.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I’ve suffered from not feeling clear on what to write next, feeling sort of lost among projects. I’ve also suffered from what I might call a kind of artistic acedia, or sloth, where I knew what I had to write, but it was an extraordinary struggle just to lift my hands to the key board.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? This is very brass-tacks practical, but when I started out, I was a summary junkie. A tell-er rather than a show-er. One of my writing instructors described a story as being like a quilt. The large patches ought to be “scene” (people talking, moving about, making choices, doing things). The summary (where the narrator explains, analyzes, comments etc.) should be the needle and thread stitching that holds the larger patches of scene together. Those are the proper proportions, otherwise the story will be slow, cumbersome, and likely irritating. Wrenching my hands free from the overuse of summary was a complete revolution. It transformed me from a fictional essayist to a story-teller.

What’s your advice to new writers? I generally exhort writers to take themselves seriously, even if only secretly. I’m not sure there is anything more embarrassing than being an unpublished or under-published writer. If you dare to tell people that you are a writer, they will smile at you like you are just the sweetest and most harmless lunatic. They nod and coo a lot, indulging you generously in your delusions. Be very nice and polite to these people, but in your head, feel free to say screw you! I am a writer and I don’t need your stamp of approval to know it and believe it. Whether it every makes me money, or not, whether anyone ever knows my name or my book titles, or not, I’m doing something beautiful and extraordinary and meaningful and valuable and daring, and you’re quite welcome. Being a writer is dangerous and costly. Survival requires a good dose of impudence. But do be very kind and polite on the outside. It’s not their fault. People like us, stupid reckless heroic fools living enflamed by passion and purpose, are a rare thing to encounter. How’s anyone to know what to make of us?

Jacqueline Holland is the author of the novel The God of Endings, which came out from Flatiron Books in March. She received her MFA from the University of Kansas. She and her husband, Peter Holland, are a couple of high-strung itinerant artists who live (for now) in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with their two remarkably patient sons.