Small Points of Light – Village of Crickets

The Poem as an Act of Naming

by Robin Gow, Editor-at-Large In the light sporadic rain, we huddled under a few people’s umbrellas outside the Dismantle, Change, Build Center in Portland, Oregon for a reading entitled SO Homo/no FOMO on the first night of the Association of Writers & Writing...

Pinkie-linking with CA Conrad: A Workshop of (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals

At eight years old, Conrad sold buckets of flowers outside the Quakertown entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a place I had passed by probably eighteen times in the past month, back and forth from doctor’s appointments about having chest-surgery in January. My first job (lugging baskets of Winesap and Jonagolds at Renningers farmers market) was probably ten minutes away from Conrad’s. I was also selling produce out of a little wooden stand.

Measure of Delight: A Workshop with Kaveh Akbar

At times, not even poets are able to deconstruct their poems and explicitly render their intention, or the meaning behind the chosen structure of the poem. He says this is hardly the purpose of reading poetry. As poets, we owe our readers some measure of delight, and at times this comes from the language or the message of the poetry.

Hip-Hop & Poetic Verse with Victorio Reyes Asili

Hip Hop is written in poetic verse. Not only is it written in poetic verse, but it’s written in formal poetic verse. Every Hip Hop rhyme ever written, good or bad, is a poem. When I say this, I don't mean in the way many songs are poems. I mean that the lyrical arrangement in a Hip Hop track is a poem. That's simply how the genre works. It's not that I relate Hip Hop to poetry; it's that I recognize Hip Hop as a poetic form, one of the most widely travelled poetic forms in human history.

Multilingual Disappearing Acts with Idra Novey

I feel most alive as a writer when I’m living in the syntax of a sentence. I can’t crank out a draft and then go back and refine the syntax. The joy for me is in fully inhabiting the syntax and sensory imagery, in stripping away every preposition or phrase that can be stripped away.

Jhumpa Lahiri at Hofstra University

The greatest challenge, as Jhumpa Lahiri said, is to see ourselves as writers who do not belong to one language, much as the language belongs to a specific place. We can migrate and spread past its geographical territory and develop a cosmopolitan identity.

Jacqueline Woodson at Adelphi University

How can one achieve such a noble goal as a writer? She tries to reach out to her audience, going to the communities, schools, and libraries and sharing her story. When it comes to her books, she confesses she keeps going back to the plots and the characters. In her mind, she is still rewriting them.

Interview with Burhan Sönmez | by Efe Tanci

Creative writing is like flying. If people don’t have wings you can not give them wings. Only if they have their own wings you can show them the ways of flying experienced by others before.

Martha Cooley | Translation

Interview with Martha Cooley on language, craft, and her translation of Antonio Tabucchi's Time Ages in a Hurry "There is always a desire to re-testify to the ongoing power and force and relevance of the original text; to carry it into a new linguistic and cultural moment, to testify to an ever-renewing relationship."

Fiona Maazel | Fictionalizing Family & Friends (without them hating you)

"...I wrote of a woman whose habits and speech patterns were remarkably like my mother’s. And it wasn’t all that complimentary. But she never noticed. And I think the reason is that when we are actually adequately depicted, we just don’t recognize ourselves. It’s also because I’ve depicted her in the way I see her, which is clearly not the way she sees herself, and perhaps not the way anyone else would see her either. So this just goes to prove the point that rarely will your friends and family hate you because they won’t even notice it’s them that you’ve written about…for all the reasons I've described."