Marie Gauthier

January posted this meme on her blog, and it’s been eons since I last participated in one. If you have a blog & feel up to it, consider yourself tagged, and let me know in the comments so I can stop by & read your answers.

1. What’s the last thing you wrote?
I finished a new poem earlier this week.

2. Is it any good?
Yes. But then I always think so. Until I don’t.

3. What’s the first thing you ever wrote that you still have?
I’m not a big saver — have to keep the archives pristine for posterity’s sake, you know. But I do keep all my contributor’s copies, even the early ones, which include poems I began writing at around 19.

4. Favorite genre of writing?
Poetry, natch. I also love poetry essays, poetry criticism, biographies of poets. And novels, too.

5. How often do you get writer’s block?
Writer’s block is a luxury I cannot afford.

6. How do you fix it?
If I sit down without an idea already in place, then I begin by reading. Reading other poems always stirs the pot.

7. Do you save everything you write?
Holy moses, no.

8. How do you feel about revision?
Essential.  Without revision, I’d never complete a first draft, which, the way I write, is actually more like the twentieth.
9. What’s your favorite thing that you’ve written?
Because I tend to write so little about my husband (I write such poor love poems!), my poem, “Conservationist,” first published in Cave Wall and included in my chapbook, Hunger All Inside, is especially meaningful to me.

10. What’s everyone else’s favorite thing that you’ve written?
The poems about my sons are always popular.
11. What writing projects are you working on right now?
My first full-length MS is circulating, and, dare I say it, the poem I wrote earlier this week feels like the start of a new manuscript.
12. What’s one genre you have never written, and probably never will?
Playwriting is a completely different skill, the envisioning of scene, set, & character. I lack that vision.

I wrote a short story in my early twenties, but it was crap.

13. Do you write for a living?
No.

14. Quote something you’ve written, the first thing to pop into your mind.
“Your wings are swelled / to honeycomb, afflicted / sacs of marauding cells — ” beginning lines of my new poem, “Diagnosis: Stage IV.”