1. Please tell us about what drew you to the written word and to verse.
I grew up in a house full of books & music. My daddy loved poetry and sometimes read aloud from One Hundred and One Famous Poems, a small leather-bound book. The poems weren’t chosen for children, but I loved the magic of sound, rhythm, and feeling they held. I wanted more! I still do.
2. In addition to your poetry collections, please tell us about what inspires you to create picture books.
As writer Nancy Willard says, the closest genre to picture books is poetry. As soon as I had children in my life—my older son and my nephew—I began making little books for them. I didn’t imagine going beyond this audience of two, but then children’s book editor Richard Jackson saw a letter I’d written to another poet and wrote to ask if I wrote for children. That was in May 1984.
Having sent out poetry collections for eleven years before getting one published, I knew this was a miracle. I wrote right back and said No, but hold on. I’ll try. And here, I am almost forty years and thirty-four picture books later. It would never have happened without Dick’s guidance and belief in my work.
3. Your poem, "Where I'm From," has become a cornerstone text for many classrooms. What message do you have for young people who encounter this poem?
You can write!! Don’t be afraid of the blank page. Your life is full of stories and of moments that could become poems. If you practice letting this happen, you will know yourself better and have a lot of fun too.
What might the blank page say to encourage you? Here’s a poem I wrote about that:
FROM THE PAGE
I am blank
because your heart
is scrawled over with stories.
I am empty
because your life is full.
I am perfectly flat
so you can pitch a tent
a fit
a high sweet song.
I am light
so you can make your mark.
I am open
so you can walk in.
Lean close.
Let me feel your breath.
Ah!
Tell me everything.
Poem Credit: She Let Herself Go: Poems (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2012)
4. What does poetry allow you to process in the human experience (thinking especially in the context of all that is going on in our world)?
No matter how difficult its subject, the process of making the poem gives me hope. I almost always write with pen and paper to begin with, and the touch & motion, the ink, the loop & letterblade ground me. To create in the face of destruction all around can keep us on the side of life.
5. What do you believe the world needs to know about Appalachian voices and literature?
Appalachian literature is as diverse, and as rich, as literature from anywhere else. Set aside your attitudes and assumptions. Read! But don’t read literature as if it were a sociological study; read it as a view through one person’s imaginative lens. No one writer—or ten writers, or twenty, etc.—defines Appalachia. There are layers, contradictions, expansions, and dimensions waiting to be explored. Appalachian writers are writing today, as I am writing this to you.
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