Ask the Author: Neil Aitken
Answered Questions (2)
Neil Aitken
1) I read. I read a lot of different things, not just poetry. Most of the time when I'm trying to figure out what to write next, I read a mixture of history, essays, Wikipedia articles, random books with strange titles in used bookstores, books on religion, science, technology, or architecture. Sometimes I read field-specific glossaries and dictionaries from the 1950s (I highly recommend geology dictionaries from this period - beautifully written descriptions of land and water).
2) I don't read. I go outside and spend time with other people. I travel. I listen to strangers. I take long walks, preferably where there are glimpses of nature (fields, rivers, forests, etc). I try to organize my notes from other discontinued projects. I take pictures. I try to remember how to paint.
3) I immerse myself in another world -- whether that's through film or tv (and usually it's foreign film through subtitles), or through computer games (current favorite is The Long Dark, a near future solo wilderness survival game without zombies, just bitter cold, starvation, thirst, infection, and wolves to contend with). Sometimes it's just good to separate yourself from overthinking and instead experience a different life which might awaken something within you.
2) I don't read. I go outside and spend time with other people. I travel. I listen to strangers. I take long walks, preferably where there are glimpses of nature (fields, rivers, forests, etc). I try to organize my notes from other discontinued projects. I take pictures. I try to remember how to paint.
3) I immerse myself in another world -- whether that's through film or tv (and usually it's foreign film through subtitles), or through computer games (current favorite is The Long Dark, a near future solo wilderness survival game without zombies, just bitter cold, starvation, thirst, infection, and wolves to contend with). Sometimes it's just good to separate yourself from overthinking and instead experience a different life which might awaken something within you.
Neil Aitken
I'm working on a number of creative projects, some more defined than others. In terms of poetry, I've been researching and have started to write poems toward a third book revolves around the themes of the historical erasure (mainly of mixed race figures like Sadakichi Hartmann), hybridity, and border-crossing. I also have a fiction project which I've started, but is currently on the back burner -- it's a novel set in an alternative Victorian timeline where Charles Babbage succeeds in building the first computer and uses it to solve serial crimes in 1850s London. Some paranormal elements and a tendency to twist and bend actual history in interesting ways.
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