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In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
“I keep this quote by Vaclav Havel taped next to my desk: ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’ I’ve had it explained to me in a dozen or so ways, most of them contradictory.
“The only working antidote I have found for spells where I struggle to write—the weeks and months where every poem seems to me some small, opaque machine,
“Writing looks much the same for me as others: a cup of coffee, music, a bare desktop, and so on. Eventually the tank runs dry, the wheels come off, or I’m simply at the end of my workday. What’s left are inevitably the problems that stymied me while I wrote, or the ones I see on the horizon.
“One practice I’ve found useful for generating new ideas is entering into conversation with other poets, other poems. Though in general the more
“I think the greatest thing we have at our disposal to write are our eyes and ears. Vanessa Hua has written in this series about writing against the clock
“I think of visual artifacts as prompts and as talismans. My book, House A, is a hybrid book—the third section consists of image-text poems
“For Kristen Dykstra and Marcelo Morales Cintero.
“Two things have transformed my productivity. The first: I made a writer friend! Specifically, one who actually wanted to meet up with me
“’Yes, every man is Noah, but on closer inspection, he is Noah in a strange way, and his mission consists less in saving everything from the flood than,
“I’ve always had a difficult time talking about writing. I’ve never really been able to say the phrase ‘my writing’ without feeling not only self-conscious
