1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

The impetus for this poem came out of reflecting on a time when I was part of a group that traveled together.It is a compilation of places but Spain in particular. One young woman and I would gather up tomatoes and olives, bread and olive oil, and find a secluded spot by the sea—it was rare that we could get away from chores and kids so it really felt magical. Her friendship meant so much to me but once the group broke up, we didn’t stay in touch. I feel nostalgic for that friendship and those beautiful seascapes. The title “Recuerdos” can mean memories but I called it souvenirs because it was a tangible turning point. Trust later turned into disillusionment. My memories are souvenirs from a time before heartbreak and loss.

2.  What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

Oh I loved books since I was a very young child but I wrote a story in 6th grade about two teenagers in love (as if I knew anything about teen-aged love!) called The Sun Came Shining. I can still picture the construction paper cover I designed. The boyfriend saves the girl’s brother from an oncoming bus and dies at the scene. At the end, she goes to their special look-out spot and the “sun comes shining” again. I had every girl in my class sobbing. I thought, “This is what I want to do!”

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing has been a way to have a voice. It has given me a way to connect. Most importantly it also was a way to reclaim my voice when it had been silenced, because of being a woman, being told that my opinion didn’t matter, being a caregiver instead of a partner. Writing has been cathartic in coping with multiple losses and painful memories; it helped me heal and move on to joy. It is a way to grapple with the world’s injustices. Writing is a form of meditation for me. It nourishes my imagination. I teach writing workshops, which keeps me on my toes to find new ideas. In particular, facilitating writing for healing workshops always uplifts me because I witness the resiliency of the human spirit. My motto is “The shortest bridge between us is a story.” Turning trauma or grief or tragedy or loneliness into story is like the alchemy of turning lead into gold.

4.  What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

I am very eclectic. I go through phases of becoming entranced with a particular writer. As a young writer, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, and [Fyodor] Dostoevsky were my favorites. In terms of other artists and role models, I admire Frida Kahlo’s determination to portray her inner truth and Georgia O’Keefe’s fierce independence. I read everything: my range is from Alice Hoffman, Susan Power, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Donna Leon, Louis Penny, and Anne Perry (I admit it, I read murder mysteries for entertainment). In poetry, from Pablo Neruda to Danez Smith, from Anne Sexton to David Whyte, from Joy Harjo and Naomi Shihab Nye to local poets Julia Klatt Singer and Athena Kildegaard, from Denise Levertov to e. e. cummings, from Sharon Olds to Kazim Ali. I love reading international poets: Miguel Hernandez, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, Simin Behbahani, Zeina Hashem Beck. I get poems in my inbox from Split This Rock, Poets.org and a group called Panhala. I love the dynamics of spoken word and the spiritual depth of Rumi and Hafiz. I am either ingesting poetry because it touches my soul or because I admire playfulness with language and want to try it out for myself.

5.  What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

My novel Catch a Dream that takes place in 1980s Israel [is now available], so thinking about how to get it out into the world. When working on a short story, suddenly two characters popped up: one is Irish and they have a child with a birth defect. I don’t know how to write this story yet but I do know what it is like to have expectations crushed. I am putting together a collection of essays called Unlikely Predicaments and a “how to” craft book for writers who teach in community spaces. I enjoy experimenting and trying things out—sometimes they work, sometimes not. I have a pile of manuscripts: memoir, novels and poetry, so I am always submitting, revising, reading at open mics and overcoming writer’s fear of rejection and failure!

Visit Wendy’s website and follow her on Facebook.

1. Tell us about your essay in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

“Alive Girl Walking” is about a trip I took, alone, when I was eighteen years old. That trip basically shaped my view of the world as I entered college. There were moments in that trip that seem to me, even today, so vivid and poignant. I wanted to try to capture those days when I was walking into adulthood. Looking back on the person I was then, I now think that I was a bit of a spoiled brat, and I wanted to capture the voice of that brat who subtly began to understand that the world was a much larger place than she had ever imagined.

2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

When I was twelve years old, my best friend Lara suggested that we send away for pen pals from this international organization that would hook you up with a child your age somewhere in the world. Of course, this was years before the internet or email, so we started writing actual paper letters to children around the world. I got carried away, and at one point, I had amassed eighty-some pen pals, which meant that I was writing nonstop, maniacally, multiple letters every single day, constructing my identity in different voices, a range of styles.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing makes me more observant of small moments; writing helps me to sort out the past; writing gives me a purpose and makes me feel connected to other people. I always imagine that history is this huge bonfire that burns eternally and when you write, you throw your words into that bonfire. Whether those words matter to anyone else is irrelevant. Just the fact that you’ve helped to keep that fire burning, this gives your life meaning and purpose.

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

When I first started reading Joan Didion’s essays, a whole unused part of my brain sparked to life. It was liberating, the idea that I might write about topics like migraine headaches or drive-through wedding chapels. I also take a lot of inspiration from Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. I just love the music in their prose and the richness of their sentences. Neil Young has inspired me to embrace the quirkiness of my voice. Some critics said that Neil Young had a terrible singing voice, but he didn’t care. He kept right on crooning.

5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I am writing more essays, much like “Alive Girl Walking.” I’m hoping that they’ll add up to a new collection, a second book. The essays are, again, mostly autobiographical. I am playing around with form a little bit more these days, trying to tell my stories in ways that best suit the subject matter, so we’ll see what happens.

Visit Angela’s website here, follow her on Twitter here, and learn more about The Girls in My Town here.

1. Tell us about your essay in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

“On the Other Side” is the result of a lengthy contemplation. It began when I heard the news about my cousin, and it took about two years for me to finish the thinking process, find what was there for me to find, and shape the writing.  

2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

I am not sure if there was a particular experience. I am a classically trained piano teacher, but I have always found writing to be my strongest creative outlet. In my late thirties, as I was about to finish a piano pedagogy book that I had been working on for ten years, I knew that my next, lifelong project would be creative writing.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing is a way of thinking for me. It is a tool that leads me to discover what is hidden inside or around me.

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

I learn a lot from painters. I love seeing [Claude] Monet’s work in museums. I learn a lot from the way his art progresses throughout his life, and the way he repeats the lilies and the cathedral themes in his late work. I learn from [Henri] Matisse how to write. You see how he leaves the shape of that dancer’s hand unfinished in his Dance? You might ask yourself, “If he is not trying to paint a hand, what is it he is trying to show me?” Inthe same way if an essay is not trying to tell you a story, it might make you think what is the writing trying to tell me? And I am very interested in that question.

My other source of inspiration is my best (deceased) friend, Ludwig. I play Beethoven’s music and strive for the perfection that he achieved in his music. The fact that I am very far away from it encourages me to work harder, keep revising, and not be satisfied quickly. That is how he wrote music.  

5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I am working on another play, and I am revisiting an old piece of nonfiction I wrote about eight years ago. I feel that there is more for me to discover in that piece.

Katrin is the Artistic Director and Head Teacher at the Golden Key Piano School in Berkeley, California. To learn more about her musical work and books, click here.

1. Tell us about your essay in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

“Another Way” is a lyric essay about the acceptance of life as it is, a letting go that opens new possibilities for discovery and love. I remember when I wrote it that I wanted to draw on a lively mix of experiences to capture this openness to possibilities, stories that could fold into each other such as skinny dipping at Martha’s Vineyard, Julius Popp’s amazing water sculpture, dissolving sand dragons at Coney Island, and the canals of Mars to name a few. I shattered and rearranged these stories of art and public life in order to form a new whole that slowly emerges for the reader, a single story of acceptance and affection in a fallen world.

2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

I think I became a writer because of the suicide of my mother when I was eleven years old. Writing became the way I could come to terms with experiences that otherwise have no shape for me. Eventually, I was able to write the story of my mother’s life and death in the memoir The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a cathartic experience that shook me to the core but offered consolation.

  3. How has writing shaped your life?

As I shape the writing, it, likewater etching sand, shapes me. It continuously teaches me to look harder, think beyond received ideas, and open up to fresh possibilities. Its hours of silence make me a better listener and teacher. The intellectual challenge goads me. The research pushes me into the world. Through my website, The Humble Essayist, I meet new writers that I admire which enriches my life as well. I agree with Annie Dillard that it is a privilege to muck around with words each day. I learn so much!

4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?

I write less about myself now and more about the world, especially the world of books and art. My goal is to get as much of the world in my writing as I can. A reading of Henry Thoreau in college—the passage from “Walking” where he climbs a pine tree and sees his world in a new way—hadan enormous impact on me when I was young and Annie Dillard is the writer who introduced me to the contemporary essay. I admire the wide range of reading that informs their work. I’m also a fan of many of my contemporaries, writers such as Judith Kitchen,Charles D’Ambrosio, Eliot Weinberger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Elena Passarello—to name a few favorites—who bring such varied subject matter into their writing and transform it elegantly.

5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

This desire to write personal essays about public experience, mixed with anxieties about democracy in America,has led me, inevitably, to writing about politics. In an essay called “The Beloved Republic” published recently in the Antioch Review, I consider the role of art and culture in a world threatened by increasing authoritarianism. The title comes from an essay written by E. M. Forster in 1939 with Europe on the brink of World War II and describes “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who lay low during dangerous times, continuing their creative work and resisting from within if possible, until the danger had passed. In my next book I am looking for fresh ways to explore art and literature as a tool for transforming a world drifting toward autocracy.

Visit Steven’s website here.