My Writing Process Blog Tour: Chris Mink What a pleasure it is to be bio’d and linked with so fine a pack of artists. A hearty thanks to Danilo John Thomas for my inclusion, but even more so for the bone saw comparison. Next week I’ll hand it over to Keith Kopka and Chris Hayes, a couple of fearless troubadours who write the streetlights by which we see the roads. Keith Kopka is a native of Rhode Island, but he currently lives and writes in Florida where he is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Normal School, The Greensboro Review, The New Orleans Review, South Dakota Review, Quarter After Eight, Barnstorm and others. He is also the poetry editor of The Southeast Review and has been a recipient of a Chautauqua Arts fellowship and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship for poetry. Chris Hayes has published poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Zone 3, and several others. He has also been the recipient of Smartish Paces Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Currently a Ph.D candidate at Florida State University, Chris lives in Tallahassee with his wife and two children. Have some poems: hobartpulp/web_features/three-poems--4 anti-poetry/anti/minkch/ Q’s & A’s: 1. On what am I currently working? I’m trying to finish my first collection of poems, All the Devils. It’s a book in three parts, though I don’t delineate them with Roman numerals or Proust quotes or squiggly lines. I probably should. People like that kind of jam. My primary signals for transition are the different folks who populate the poems, both real and imagined from my home region, the South. They tell the past, present, and future. The flawed specter of that place is an inherited thing, and the characters in the poems, and the primary speaker (me), are culpable in the perpetuation of its evils. The work in this book was born there, I think, in this idea that nothing and no one comes out clean. Hopefully, it’s a real hoot! 2. How does your work differ from others’ works in the same genre? Insofar as my genre is probably Southern poetry, there’s an unavoidable lineage, and a sort of guilt by association, applied to all Southern writing. I can dig it. In fact, much of it is absolutely fair: I don’t go very long without plugging back into Stanford or McCarthy. I love catfish and football. Our writing can feel a little syrupy and overwrought with its good ol’s and dirty boots. I want to avoid these clichéd representations of the Southern setting, though. The older I get, the deeper and more complicated my understanding is of the voices and stories and politics and habits that patch me together. Existing representations of the South and its people are tired, and I want them to be seen as the living, breathing, three-dimensional humans that I know. 3. Why do you write what you do? For what I’m currently working on, I write it this way because it’s vital to interrogate the established narrative of a place and to update it. Much of the South remains in a social and economic depression, and largely in a cycle of poverty, and until that changes some of the concrete images in the writing down here may feel familiar. But these passing gestures toward racial implication or the mere fetishization of that poverty, which seems to be the current function of the Southern setting in so much contemporary art, is no longer enough. It operates as a kind of cultural tourism. It makes teeth pop out of my elbows. I love trying to tell stories within the tightening hallways of a poem, determining which rooms a reader needs to see, and which photos on the wall need explaining. I’m fascinated by the sonic and emotional musicality of colloquial speech, regional traditions, how being privy to a localized meaning can redefine social currency and reconfigure authority. There’s also this idea of the eternal within poetry, within all art really, like if you can rig the dynamite correctly, and it explodes, then the markings will be there forever. A lot of my poems are homages to their subjects, the good and the bad, the heroes and the villains. See, the rednecks that bumbled through my neighborhood in a pick-up screaming racist shit at my mother were just as influential as my amazing mother, albeit in vastly different ways. 4. How does your writing process work? I like to wear pajama pants and a tank top. Sometimes I’ll drink a Yoo-hoo; sometimes I’ll wear cutoffs. A lot depends on weather and time of day. I start by scraping every part of an idea into a big sloppy chunk of text first, without any concern for line or eloquence or shape. I want to establish the where, when, and who straight away. Voice and perspective are part of this early conversation. Then I’ll start to play with lines, stanzas, images that work or don’t. I’ll think about arc—fragmented or linear, turning on an image or event. That gives me an early blueprint. That’s when I can start thinking about the why. Why do I want to tell this, why this way, and perhaps most importantly, why should a reader care? Because just like people, the poems you care about are the ones you want to spend time with. So I think “why” is pretty paramount. After that, everything is on the micro-level, which can be either an absolute joy or completely horrifying. Thanks for reading! Bios: Rae Bryant: Rae Bryant is the author of the short story collection The Infinite State of Imaginary Morals (Patasola Press 2011). Her stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in print and online at The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s, Huffington Post, New World Writing, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Her intermedia has exhibited in NYC, D.C., Baltimore, and Florence Italy. She has won prizes and fellowships from Johns Hopkins, Aspen Writers Foundation, VCCA, and Whidbey Writers and has been nominated for the PEN/HEMINGWAY, Pen Emerging Writers, the &Now Award, and multiple times for the Pushcart Award. Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists’ Collective, 2013) and a CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bayou, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, The Feminist Wire, Dialogist, B O D Y, Lana Turner Journal, Slice Magazine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and elsewhere. In 2010, her story “ A Way out of the Colonia” won the Editor’s Prize in Camera Obscura. Please read more about Rosebud at rosebudbenoni She does good things at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Tessa Fontaine graduated from the University of Alabama’s MFA program and joined a traveling circus sideshow. Excerpts from her book in progress can be found at The Rumpus. As an instructor for Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project, she taught creative writing and performance in prisons across Alabama. More of her work can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, Pank, and more. Shes currently in the University of Utahs PhD program in Creative Writing. Annie DeWitt’s writing has appeared in NOON, Guernica, BOMBlog, Esquire’s Napkin Fiction Project, The Believer Logger, art+culture, Everyday Genius, The Faster Times, elimae, and Dossier Magazine, amongst others, and is forthcoming in Tin House and the American Reader edited by Ben Marcus. Her work was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, edited by Alan Ziegler. Ann holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia School of the Arts. She was a Founding Editor of Gigantic: A Magazine of Short Prose and Art in 2008. She currently teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. For more of her work, please follow her column at The Believer: logger.believermag/tagged/various-paradigms Luke B. Goebel is the author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours (FC2 2014). He won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for innovative fiction for the above-mentioned novel. He is a fiction writer and an Assistant Professor. His fictions are forthcoming or have appeared in The American Reader, PANK, The New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Elimae, The Collagist, Greenmountains Review, Gigantic, and elsewhere. He won the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award in 2012. Jessica Richardson earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama last year. Her short story collection, “It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides,” won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and will be published by Fc2 next fall. Her work also won awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters and the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlas Revew, Caketrain, Corium, Hobart, Joyland, The Indiana Review, PANK, Western Humanities, and other places. Danilo Thomas received his MFA in fiction at the University of Alabama where he was the Fiction Editor for Black Warrior Review, issues 38.1 and 38.2. He has taught in Alabama’s maximum security prisons through the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. Raised in southwestern Montana, he currently resides in Florida. His work was a finalist for the 2012 Italo Calvino Prize in fiction, and can be found in Bull, Parcel, Whitefish Review, Juked, Mason’s Road, Midwestern Gothic, Fiction Southeast, 751magazine, The Offending Adam, Newfound, and other publications. Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of one novel, Our Prayers After the Fire, forthcoming from Blue Square Press, and 4 chapbooks, most recently Baby-Doll Under Ice (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014). She is the Associate Editor of Denver Quarterly and co-Assistant Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM. Jenny Gropp’s poetry and prose can be found in Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Seattle Review, Unsaid Magazine, DIAGRAM, PANK, Best New Poets 2012, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, and currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is the managing editor of The Georgia Review. Her first book, The Hominine Egg—a collection of poetry and prose—is forthcoming from Kore Press in 2015. Annie Agnone is a writer, photographer, and educator living in Brattleboro, VT. She holds bachelors degrees in visual communication and psychology from Ohio University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from The University of Alabama. She currently works as a program director for Putney Student Travel and National Geographic Student Expeditions, where she designs and leads international and domestic experiential travel programs for high school students. Annie has taught photography and writing as a means of cultural exploration to high schoolers in Italy, Ireland, and The Czech Republic for National Geographic Student Expeditions and Putney Student Travel; creative writing to inmates at a medium-security Alabama prison for the Alabama Prison Arts + Education project; written and visual storytelling to high schoolers from Alabamas Black Belt region for the Black Belt 100 Lenses summer camp; and English composition and creative writing to undergraduate students at The University of Alabama. At UA, Annie also served as the web and design editor for the award-winning literary journal Black Warrior Review. Annies photographs have appeared in National Geographics Intelligent Travel, National Geographic Kids magazine, Brevity, and elsewhere. Her writing has been published at The Rumpus and National Geographics Intelligent Travel. In 2013, Annie was awarded a National Geographic Young Explorer’s Grant to drive over 20,000 miles through 36 states to explore, photograph, and write about nocturnal culture for her project America by Night. Chris Mink is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University. His work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Harpur Palate, and Hobart, among others, and his poems are forthcoming in Barely South Review, and the anthology It Was Written: Poems Inspired by Hip-Hop. He has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Keith Kopka is a native of Rhode Island, but he currently lives and writes in Florida where he is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Normal School, The Greensboro Review, The New Orleans Review, South Dakota Review, Quarter After Eight, Barnstorm and others. He is also the poetry editor of The Southeast Review and has been a recipient of a Chautauqua Arts fellowship and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship for poetry. Chris Hayes has published poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Zone 3, and several others. He has also been the recipient of Smartish Paces Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Currently a Ph.D candidate at Florida State University, Chris lives in Tallahassee with his wife and two children.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:09:00 +0000