Ask the Author: Valentin Per Lind
Answered Questions (10)
Valentin Per Lind
Probably Narnia. I always think of Narnia at Christmas. I'd take the wardrobe: it's cheaper than the train! The world created by imagination is always more powerful than reality, and the juxtapositions of good and evil less ambiguous.
Valentin Per Lind
My mother's fluid filled sack burst and I found myself regurgitated like a slippery, partially digested morsel of food, or worse, some wrinkled parasitic creature. The bright lights of the theatre blinded me and I gasped as my lungs and airway struggled to open... was I too die at the very moment of my birth?
Valentin Per Lind
Jesmyn Ward's Sing Unburied Sing, which takes the form of one black American family's road trip across the Jim Crow American South. Beautiful and harrowing at the same time, but the American South always had that dual nature.
Valentin Per Lind
It would be my adoption. My blood family forced my mother to put me up for adoption in the 1950s as I was born out of wedlock. My mother was in a highly conflicted state after I was taken away. As a precaution against me being followed and snatched, the adoption agency arranged for the taxis to be switched an route. Quite close and dagger stuff!
Valentin Per Lind
I don't worry about it. One cannot force inspiration. If I wrote for a big publishing house with a deadline on my next book, I might worry about it, but I don't have that problem.
Valentin Per Lind
While one be a full-time novelist, it is difficult to be a full-time poet. Unfortunately, I have to pay my way through life and that means doing a job that isn't mentally rewarding. Writing for me is a way of correcting that imbalance, affirming that I do have an inner life.
Valentin Per Lind
Read as many poems by classic writers as you can. We unconsciously absorb other writers' styles and eventually out of that we develop our own style. Secondly, develop as rich a vocabulary as you can. Thirdly, write about what you know, and fourthly, don't be a slave to meter: how the poem flows is more important than adherence to the laws of meter.
Valentin Per Lind
The second edition of Corvix. This will be an expanded addition containing several new poems. I don't know how many more I will write, so it was a choice between updating my existing book and waiting several years to write enough poems for a second volume.
Valentin Per Lind
Inspiration is something that comes unexpectedly, and usually when I am doing something totally different like going for a walk or making breakfast or in the bath. I will frequently wake up at two in the morning with lines of text going through my head. At that time, the doors to the Unconscious are wide open and that is when inspiration happens. I never sit at a desk with the intention of composing.
Valentin Per Lind
It wasn't an idea, it was the culmination of years of writing poems that expressed my feelings toward life. Eventually I decided that, as I was getting on in years, I needed to gather them together and publish before they were lost. But I am still writing.
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