Meme I was almost too chickenshit to answer

Reading & Writing

1. What are you currently reading and what's on your to-be-read pile?

Currently reading:

Ordering the Storm
Geography III
The Dig
Ghost Money
Ariel (both versions)
Rose

To Read:
Behind My Eyes
Dismal Rock
From Garden to Garden (essays on Lent)

Everything I'm reading except for the essays is purportedly to help me order my thesis.

2. What type of writing influences your work most: fiction, poetry, or non-fiction?

I'd have to say my work is more influenced by poetry, then nonfiction, then fiction. I'd rather read fiction than anything else, because I can still read it discretely. I can be just a reader, and I can read quickly and without a deeper awareness. It's an autonomous function, like my pulse. (I've been reading for as long as I can remember, so sometimes it does seem autonomous--thank you, Uncle David, and your comics!)

When I read poetry and nonfiction/memoir, I'm reading critically, as both reader and writer. This takes work and makes for a slower read. I'm breathing it in, and I'm conscious of the breath--aria or snorkle. I have to stop and read sections aloud, to hear their voices, or the music my voice takes on when I incant their words.

3. What 3 characteristics, elements or themes are prevalent in your work?

Childhood as a way into a poem
Art as a way through a poem
Being voiceless as a condition I struggle with daily

4. As a writer and a reader, does gender matter?

Absolutely at times; at others, absolutely not. I think the careful love of language matters most--and I don't care if you're female/male, bi/straight/gay, poet/ novelist/ essayist/pamphleteer, if there's love of language, there's the tectonic plate.

I do think that gender matters to me as a writer. I come from a family where women are Echo only. I'd like to be Narcissus sometimes, or Orpheus. I write about the powerlessness I feel as being born into a family where women weren't encouraged to speak at all, much less tell stories or secrets about their family, or hint that there's a body beneath the Iron Maidenform brassiere. I still feel words have to be squeezed out sparingly like toothpaste at the end of the tube--leave some for the rest of us!--and there's no taking back those words, just as there's no replacing the Pepsodent. The thing of which I'm proudest in my life is that my children feel no such need to squelch their opinions, that Raleigh has things to say and will say them, that Daniel listens actively to women and encourages them (and me!). I understood nothing about this idea of conversation coming from the root word lifestyle. Harvey understands everything about it, and this is the greatest gift he's given me--to have a voice in my own family and to have the nerve to take that voice to a wider audience.