Where do you get your ideas? Observing and journaling. My critique partner—author and illustrator Michael Austin—showed me the value of walking and reflecting with a small-size journal in hand. It’s the notion of stopping to apprehend largeness through the infinitesimal; as William Blake famously said, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”
What is your process for creating a poem? I don’t have a process per se. When journaling, I often work with images, something from memory or a photo. For example, in the Musée de Cluny (France’s national museum of medieval art), I fixated on a Palmesel, a sculpture of Christ astride a donkey on a rolling platform. Humble and rude, statues like this were pulled along in medieval parades during Holy Week—a Christ crowds could relate to. The image stuck in my mind as I drafted the poem “When You Need a Chat with Jesus.” I pictured Jesus as the kind of guy willing to sit down with you, share an heirloom tomato sandwich slathered with Duke’s mayo, and just listen. I guess that happens when you grow up in the Deep South and study French from an early age.
Are your poems religious? If you mean dogmatic, no. Spiritual? I’d say yes—seeing the blessing in small things, like the humble sovereignty of dwarf irises in early spring.
How long does it take you to draft a poem? Days. Weeks. Maybe months to finesse it. I revise relentlessly. It’s the editor side of my nature. Gustave Flaubert coined the term le mot juste, meaning the exact word or phrase. That’s what I strive for.
What poets inspire you? Got a favorite poem? For a sampling, I’d say Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, Walt Whitman, John O’Donohue, and Seamus Heaney. My first writing teacher introduced me to James Wright and the poem “A Blessing.” That was it for me. Breakthrough poets like Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire mesmerized me as an undergraduate, as did Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck. The accessibility of verse by Billy Collins and Ellen Bass has great appeal. Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley Jones is a powerhouse. Jesse Graves’ poetry is an ongoing lesson on how connections crisscross region, landscape, family, and community.
What was your favorite book growing up? There’s not just one. I loved books that could whisk me out of the everyday—the Oz books, The Little Prince, ancient myths, Arthurian legends, fairy tales, history, Charlotte writing in her web, Stuart Little ona road trip, Tom Sawyer on a raft, and biographies of barrier-breaking women like Amelia Earheart, Marie Curie, and Eleanor Roosevelt. When I was in middle school, Shelley’s poetry took me on flights of fancy, but Keats’ aesthetic grounded me. I read Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks” for an assignment and requested his complete works for Christmas. In high school, my brother introduced me to Andrew Glaze, former Alabama poet laureate. Who can resist a poet who titles a collection Damned Ugly Children?
How did you get started as a poet? I did not dabble in poetry until 2005 (briefly) and more consistently after 2020 when I started submitting to journals. However, as an undergraduate, I studied creative writing with a professor who exacted discipline by taking students through a poetic form each week. The comments were crisp and direct. We started with couplets and quatrains and worked toward more demanding verse like sonnets and terza rima. I fell in love with syllabic. I remember laboring through a syllabic poem about an ant on a sidewalk—soldiering on, getting around obstacles, carrying a burden 10–50 times its own weight. Otherwise, I’m self-taught, with occasional feedback from a former professor who knows 20th-century poetry inside out and keeps me honest. Charles Harper’s A Million MFAs Are Not Enough gave perspective. I learn as I go.
What draws readers? I can’t speak for them, but I can reflect back what a few have told me: the healing power of nature; the search to learn from and make peace with disappointment; the desire to work through depression and grief—to let go and reach a place without regrets; gratitude (and joy!) for the intricate details of creation.
Why the title The Tears of Things? Virgil’s The Aeneid delivers some of literature’s most memorable lines. Aeneas, defeated at Troy and far from his destroyed home, stops at a temple and weeps on seeing murals with scenes from the Trojan War, including images of dead friends and fellow citizens. Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of Aeneas’ explanation to a comrade—sunt lacrimae rerum (“there are tears at the heart of things”)—speaks to the human capacity to know distress and sorrow while arriving at a condition of safety.
What influenced you to focus on nature? Connecting to nature is restorative. In childhood, nature was up close and personal. The first poetry I heard was my mother reading from A Child’s Garden of Verses. She majored in psychology and botany and loved plant life. Unlike her, I never got the hang of remembering plant names, including the Latin terms. In the early years, our yard didn’t have much of a lawn, just the feel of a forest floor and canopy.
My dad tended an organic garden on the easement and “put up” tomatoes, beans, corn, squash, and peppers. Going on vacation was a back-to-basics adventure: camping, renting a weather-beaten cottage on the Gulf of Mexico, spending weekends at the lake house, a cabin with a wraparound porch and hammocks but no phone or television—just night sounds of fish jumping, tree frogs calling, and the scrape and clank of a hand-cranked ice cream churn.
Your book goes through four seasons. Why did you add a fifth season? Actually, the book spans about two decades, so the seasons are symbolic. The fifth season speaks to transcendence and acceptance. It ends with a loving-kindness meditation.
Creating the collection was a way to slow down—to exist in present tense and explore nature through the senses. When you pause in the outside world, it’s easier to take the journey through your interior landscape.
Why is this genre important to you? It started out as a challenge. Several years ago, I ventured into poetry just to experiment with a compact art form—which makes sense, as I’ve worked as a copywriter for a bit of my career. Then it became a way to examine and work through life events (e.g., breakups, anxiety, depressive episodes, grief)—poetry therapy if you will. As I took a deeper dive, I discovered the National Association for Poetry Therapy, a nonprofit that promotes “growth and healing through written language, symbol, and story.”
How long have you been writing? It seems like forever. I’ve worked in magazine and book publishing as well as marketing and communications. I also taught writing and communication arts at several universities and colleges. The industry changed, so I moved from print to digital about 10 years ago.
When you aren’t writing, what do you like to do? I’m an early riser and focus on yoga, meditation, and journaling before I head into work. I’m experimenting with painting again—I discovered it informs my writing and is another way to “get into the zone.”
When do you find time to write? I do my best to carve out time for writing, but that’s always a challenge since editing and pumping out content on deadline are the focus of my day job. Michael, my critique partner, reminds me, “Hey, if you wrote one sentence this week, you did something.” I’m neither fast nor prolific as a poet, but that’s okay. I’m not in a race—poetry is a way to self-discovery and self-awareness. I’m thankful for the editors and publishers dedicated to producing journals and books in the name of art and human expression. Truly labors of love.
Why does poetry matter? Devices can distract and take us down rabbit holes, but poetry, indeed any kind of creative writing, is a way to return to the fundamentals of breaths and beats, to glimpse the infinite and our connectedness to nature and each other.
D.H. Lawrence talked about how people are not free just doing what they like. They’re “only free when they’re doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving.” Poetry is a way to do that, as is any activity that engages all that you are.
Sometimes I see an image on a website with the caption “Better Than a Thousand Words.” I get that. But words matter. Poetry can be a way to paint an image—for an audience that has the patience to apprehend, think about, maybe return to it.
Any thoughts on AI?
AI offers powerful, useful, efficient tools across industries—and if ethically and appropriately used, that should be lauded. Will AI replace writers? Interesting territory. I attended a marketing conference where a presenter noted AI would assume the primary role of producing content—and even said that writers should relabel themselves “content updaters” as this phenom unfolds.
AI therapy tools are now available. That gives me pause—pouring out concerns to something that has not experienced existential reality. There’s something to be said for arriving at self-awareness by processing disappointment, heartbreak, grief, joy, and pain through painting, singing, writing, standup comedy, theatre, and other forms of expression.
For now, most literary journals exist in an AI-free zone (unless there’s a special call to use it in a themed issue). Works for me.