Pro Tips

In her collection No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body, Asiya Wadud frames history as ephemeral, porous and deadly serious. Rooted in shared histories of oppression, Wadud’s collection places her body and personal experience as a framework.

You can’t allow one rejection to represent your whole life as a writer, nor can you try to tackle all your writing goals on a given day. But when you begin submitting your poetry to literary journals, you know you’ll encounter rejection, delayed gratification, and judgment.

How do you feel about cemeteries? As a young person they scared me to death (heh), but they have become one of my favorite spots to spend my time. I do happen to be someone who enjoys the spooky and the macabre, but I also see them as a place of quiet beauty and mystery.

“Don’t forget! You have your two best editors hanging on either side of your head,” I tell my WRIT 1301 students. I am met with a combination of blank looks and cocked eyebrows. “I’m talking about your ears.”

My students' eyes widen in disbelief.

I wrote the first draft of my novel—sketch really—by hand. I was alone in a hotel room, cooking on a hot plate and taking breaks in a courtyard that smelled of cat pee. It was pure magic. I’d just left my career in politics at the Minnesota State Capitol to pursue my writing.

This past fall I found myself teaching an intense class on revision. I also found myself with about the same amount of time to complete final revisions on a short story collection that would launch in March (Splendid Anatomies, Veliz Books). What a thing!

When you’ve experienced financial hardship, especially when it comes to putting your writing out into the world, it can be difficult to get back in the saddle again and attempt to publish your next book.

One question I hear time and again from students is a simple one: how to begin? When it comes to facing the blank page, writers develop all kinds of strategies to build momentum: set a timer for 15 minutes, use an app to block use of email and Internet, stop writing in the middle of a sentence.

Crafting titles is a particularly difficult part of writing poetry because a title is the poem’s introduction, and first impressions have high stakes. As a poet, I want my titles to spark a reader’s interest when they’re perusing a table of contents.

On a wet, cold winter day during my third year in Venice, I ducked into the Museo Correr off St. Mark’s Square to warm myself. The vast ballroom Napoleon built in 1797 to celebrate his toppling the thousand-year-old Republic of Venice was empty.

Never forget that your audience is part of your art. If you doubt this to be true, take a look at A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a wildly famous 19th-century painting by Georges Seurat. If you look closely at the painting, you’ll notice something strange: there are no brushstrokes.

You know who you are. You know that marketing is part of the writing process, but you loathe it. Maybe you even fear it. You’re much more at home being . . . well . . . at home—just you and your laptop. Connecting with other people can sometimes be dreadful and draining. I’ve been there.