Writing is about reinventing yourself, which is very American, and about imagination, which isn't very American. It allows you to be someone else. Writing actually encourages it. And, strangely, by being someone else you realize what you are thinking and feeling. My characters’ experiences can challenge or reinforce my core being and beliefs—then I see who I really am and what I'm thinking.

 

I would be lost without writing. I don't know what I'm thinking deeply about until I bring my subconscious to light.

 

 

I began writing poetry at a young age. I went to the University of Montana and received an MFA, studying mainly with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. I took one short story class with Bill Kittredge and it took me the whole semester to write one story, so I assumed I'd never write fiction again. Boy, was I wrong. When I was nearly fifty, I found that not only had I written a few short stories (and I did find them so hard to write), but I had also started a novel. I had finally stopped working full-time. And I thought: Everyone has one novel in them. But I've gone on to write several now. I also have several unpublished novels and my friends call me a "Novel Machine" because my fiction writing is nearly constant.

 

I don't write short stories anymore. They grow into novels. I will be working on a novel and will also write poems, but the two forms are vastly different. Although my fiction is often very poetic, my poems are only sometimes prosaic. Because novels take so long to write and edit—they are longer obsessions—if I feel something urgently it will most likely become poetry.

 

 

"Approximate" is actually part of a series of post-apocalyptic poems, but is, strangely, one of the least disturbing poems and the one poem that still has a currently identifiable landscape, a cave, a desire to see cars again, pretend bullets. In some ways it is a poem about the process of writing. But I do like to collect rocks and minerals, which takes me to various places, like caves.

 

 

I have been making art for a long time, on and off. I have been in a figure group for about fifteen years and I have shown some of my paintings in juried exhibitions. I've sold a few pieces, but I'm sometimes loath to let them go; I'll miss them. I have used a variety of mediums, but right now I'm attracted to pastels for their ethereal quality, and acrylics, for their brightness and toughness. I made jewelry, too, for a little while and my pieces resembled little sculptures.

 

I think everything you do affects your writing. Often the direction I move in art incrementally shifts my writing in that direction, too. My writing also becomes more visual, full of colors and shapes (and sometimes it translates into portraying artists themselves, as in The Bohemians, which is about a group of artists in the 1920s). I'm currently working on a series of paintings about dancing and dancers since I also practice ballet. My paintings often contain implied stories.

 

 

This is the hardest question to answer because it depends on the definition of "community." I did attend an MFA program at the University of Montana and I have been in a few writing groups since then, but I don't like them and it seems that eventually someone's personality destroys the group. I know a few writers in Seattle and I have two friends who offer me honest, harsh criticism and editing before my work goes out; they propose ideas and suggestions because they have known me a long time. In Seattle there is support from other writers, some grants, some residencies, a few presses, some bookstores, group readings etc. I belong to the Ballard Writers Collective because we live in the same neighborhood, but the group includes all kinds of writers and is mainly about promotion.

 

All writing and art come from wanting to be part of something bigger than just yourself, yet it’s part of yourself. Therefore, all writing and art are contradictory.

 

 

 

 

I was in the cave to change the things to be saved.

A girl was inside the story, then she was the story.

I had to study her before I moved her. Dark matter

smudged her face, her disinterested clothes,

undecided feet. I was an uninvited cloud to her sky.

 

I was there. I smoothed things over, wishing we had cars or

something to watch outside. But nothing could be changed.

My eye/her eye. Interchanged. She didn’t want her body

anymore. She undressed. I had a mouthful of pretend bullets.

I grew lost. I didn’t want to disturb her more than

 

she was already disturbed. Having her clouds, then stories.

My eye usurped hers as I inspected her limbs. I couldn’t save

dreams of rabbits or all the people I had known. I couldn’t help

myself. Lost, thinking about the water outside drowning itself.

The sound it made.

 

We couldn’t leave ourselves with our dangerous bodies.

We didn’t know what lay beneath their surfaces.

I was filled with something cold. Her jellyfish skin.

I didn’t know what to save first,

maybe her contagious echo.

 

 

 

 

1.

 

He lived where subtractions had reasons attached.

Equipped, open-mouthed, air flew away from him. He couldn’t hold onto

the buildings that crawled through poses before falling.

Once echo stood over another, stood over... Sky was too late,

whittling itself into a villain. The world wasn’t finished with him.

It was unanimous and becoming smaller. A day went missing.

Then another. He opened his box of wasted, important things,

removed his cat with her terrible fur, a sooty television,

his windows full of little insults. He was dangerously waiting.

Outside his feet swam in debris, kicking former architecture

in the preemptive light. No more borders to arrange, weeds fused

like gifts in a once-room.

Dear you-are-not,

Dearer pigeons and roads,

Dearest empty weight,

Acknowledge what we have made but keep your hands to yourself.

 

2.

 

The trees, the bodies flew backwards, earth showed

its teeth. He was lulled by seawater rinsing his ankles.

Air translated into an old forgotten language. He wanted to scream

but couldn’t. He wanted innocence not urgency.

He had fallen from the dark throat of a device.

He lost the recognizable landscape, a brutal missing.

He arrived or didn’t arrive. Pieces gathered.

Rain stumbled across his face. A little bit of everything

flung itself at his feet, the world thoroughly unfixed.

Rocks leaking blood. His mind dangled back and forth,

hurling, useless. He unbuckled his shoes, rose without them,

gathered what was left of his body. Nothing remained hidden.

Sky turned away, ribboning end to end. A foot in a shoe ran by.

The field with trees rose to meet him. No time to think

about all that water. He, too, draped himself on whatever

he could. Alive, somewhere, seeing what would happen next.

 

 

 

 

 

I knew him from the outside. Right or wrong.

 

His eye went elsewhere, nibbling at what occurred in the world.

 

Our conversation: chewing the impossible; resembling a window;

 

imagining everything; forgetting itself. We were left here.

 

What was wearing him? We talked around the brutality

 

of so little remaining, fences, unlikely tools, all about wreckage.

 

I was rusting inside. I was still full of birds and small animals.

 

He railed about After-the-Fact. We gathered architecture,

 

opened to – I didn’t know what or who. Skeletons poked

 

at the ground. A soundless horse at the top of some stairs,

 

ran as it could. Leaves stained red with blood. A lullaby

 

from a box couldn’t cure us although it tried.

 

We found water for a reason. I was armed and ready

 

with nothing to do. I was working on all the hours.

 

We poured out the future together. But it wasn’t pretty.