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.

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

My third child was born in the springtime. The weather was absolutely luscious, and I spent a few days cuddling her in bed as my milk came in and I recovered from her birth. We left the windows open day and night. 

Between naps and nursing sessions I read the paper, watched the baby yawn and stretch after her months in increasingly cramped quarters, and listened to the gaggle of neighborhood children sweeping in and out of the downstairs rooms with my older children. The ideas began to percolate then but the poem was not completed until my daughter was in preschool.

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

A few years ago my father sent me a photocopy of a page in a journal he kept when I was eight years old. He described me running around with a notebook and the stub of a pencil in my back pocket and recorded my explanation that I planned to be a poet and write about my feelings. Capturing the emotional resonance of an image or experience is still a driving force in my work.

3. How has writing shaped your life?

Writing—and reading—allows me to experience my life more intensely and to be more fully present in it. It has also forced me to structure my life in order to make time to be at my desk.

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

Style of Desiderio da Settignano, Saint John the Baptist, 1400/1899, terracotta, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1943.4.83

Jane Kenyon was an early poetry love. I picked up her books as a college student in the poetry section of my local bookstore because one was blurbed by Annie Dillard, my favorite writer at the time. Living near Washington, D.C., I’m fortunate to have free access to many art exhibitions. Shows by Desiderio da Settignano and Bill Viola were touchstones that I returned to many times, as well as the work of local artist, Charles Ritchie who captures the mystery present in my domestic, suburban landscape. 

Charles Ritchie, Winter Night, 1999-2012

I’ve also sought out contemporary poetry about the experience of motherhood. Books by Rachel Zucker, Carrie Fountain, and Sarah Vap are some of my favorites, although I’m happy to say there are many, many more. 

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

My kids are getting a little older, and after a decade dominated by bearing, nursing, and mothering very young children, I’ve entered a new period of change and uncertainty and I’m looking ahead to what’s next. The manuscript I’m working on now reflects this shift and is full of poems of exploration and wandering.

Follow Emily on Twitter here.