Transcript of Fawn Neun’s Interview for Battered Suitcase, 2010
In order to help promote your work and The Battered Suitcase, we’d like to feature a brief interview with our contributors on our blog to share with readers.
If you’d like to participate, please answer the following questions as fully and completely as you’d like and we’ll post them to our blog with your author photo (if you provided one). If you’d like to take a more in-depth approach, or would like to have it appear on a particular date to coincide with a book release or gallery show, please let us know.
Interview Questions
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
It may sound like splitting hairs, but I’m not sure I ever wanted to be a writer. I did realize early on that I enjoyed writing. Even before that I knew that enjoyed language and then reading. In what was a pretty bad childhood, language became a means of self-defense, exploration, and creation of alternative “realities,” place where the world made more sense than my own did.
Why do you write?
Writing feels good. Not always in the way chocolate feels good. Sometimes in the way a good cry or a long run or hitting three dozen baseballs at the batting cage feels good. But when I’m writing, whether it’s positive stuff or angry stuff, I feel better, more complete, more competent, more involved with stuff that matters. I also think I have important observations and ideas to share. I think writing can make a difference, and it’s the way that seems most natural for me to make a difference.
Is being a writer/poet anything like you imagined it would be?
I don’t really have any idea what being a writer is supposed to be like. I know that as much as I enjoy doing it, it remains exceedingly frustrating. Writing requires “getting into a zone” that needs to last hours at a time, and the world just doesn’t make that easy to achieve. There is so little compensation for writing what I want to write, that I can’t afford to give my family the lifestyle they deserve and dedicate the time needed to get where I want to get with my writing.
What do you think makes a good story?
Heroic endeavor. It doesn’t matter if the hero wins or loses, only that he or she keeps trying. And relevance. And freshness of imagery, breaking new ground or presenting old ground in such a way that the reader is transported to that place.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Poetry
Who is your favorite author or poet?
Galway Kinnell
What books or stories have most influenced you the most as a writer?
At the risk of sounding like Sarah Palin, all of them, but none perhaps more than Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, the anthologies Contemporary American Poetry and Another Republic, Leaves of Grass, Walden, Selected Works of Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Yannis Ritsos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
What books or stories have most influenced you as a person?
When I was 9 or 10 I found and read a lot of Arthurian Romances, and they saved my life in a sense by showing me that a world built on reason and respect was possible. A bit later Emerson’s essays helped me realize that my philosophical and religious thoughts were not as “unheard of” as I was beginning to think they were
Where/how do you find the most inspiration?
Everywhere. When I manage to not have a million things running through my head at the same time, I notice things everywhere. Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” compares paying attention to prayer, and I think that is where most of it comes from. Certainly being away from home and work helps me pay attention to more things, especially if I’m in the mountains of southwestern NC.
What does your family think of your writing?
They are encouraging, but they find it annoying having to share time with it
What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
Schedule? I wish I could manage such a thing. My primary duty in the world today is taking care of my 5-year-old daughter. That makes any sort of regular schedule impossible. Truthfully, I squeeze in writing whenever and wherever I can. I write a lot when driving to readings or workshops. And I write early in the morning and late at night.
Do you have any writing quirks or rituals?
None I’m aware of
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
If this means in my writing process, then simply finding the uninterrupted time to follow a train of thought all the way through. If this means in the things I write about, then writing straightforwardly about my childhood still escapes me. Many people have told me I could make a fortune writing a memoir, but I remain unable to write about my childhood in prose. If this means in the things I write, I try to be pretty accessible.
What are your current projects?
Something Knows the Moment, a book of poems exploring religious faith and doubt, is due out mid-August 2011. I also have five other manuscripts “completed” and waiting for lightning to strike in one of the major contests or for my publisher to say, “Okay, you’ve waited long enough between books now.”
What are you planning for future projects?
I have one collection in which all of the poems use Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a model; I have another that focuses on the last vestiges of the rural South; a third collection consists of poems about writing; a fourth consists of poems observing the interactions of the human and natural worlds; and the fifth is a long sequence of dream poems. Additionally, Pris Campbell and I have been working on a full-length version of the Sara and Norman poems collected in The Nature of Attraction.
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Persist and read.
Where can we find your work?
You can order them from me (just write to [email protected]) or from my publisher: www.mainstreetrag.com. I am on facebook and post new publications there as well as on my webpage at www.scottowenspoet.com. I post most of my essays and reviews in my blog at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com.
