How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I went to a NYC elementary school that had a partnership with Teachers and Writers Collaborative...maybe in 3rd or 4th grade. I was "good" at it. At first, this was an external motivation. But I found I was drawing on writing more and more as an outlet and a way to feed myself. I like how poetry allows you to eddy around ideas and have this dynamic fluidity.
How does a poem begin?
I often take a line from another source as a beginning point. It could be poetry, but also something someone said, or line from the newspaper, or Wikipedia.
Do you see your writing as a single, extened project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
I don't see my writing as a project that I design. Everything else, the mess of words and worlds all around me...I'm pulling those threads out and (hopefully) they kind of shimmer in this fake/made thing outside of all the real stuff. It's important to have that liquidity of writing and reading it, because it comes from a live thing.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I have a fabulous job as a school librarian and 2 kids at home and 2 abroad. So this is squeezed in between things. Like a snack. But I appreciate the short bursts of writing. I love that concentrated intensity.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I learn about journals by following (stalking) the authors that I like. https://thegravityofthething.com/ Big Other, Dreampop, E-ratio, Horse Less Review, Blaze Vox Journal http://wp.blazevox.org/
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I have been reading fiction by Louise Erdrich and
Elizabeth Strout and Cormac McCarthy (which I have to read aloud because it is
so hard for me). I have been amazed by David Hadbawnik's translations of the Aeneid.
Nava Fader is the author of two poetry collections: All the Jawing Jackdaw and Hitching Post and several chapbooks. Most poems begin with a line by someone else, and has cribbed from Rimbaud, Dante, Rilke, with great joy. She is also a practitioner of false translation. Lately, she has been working with Wikipedia and poems in grid format.