Ask the Author: Renée K. Nicholson
Answered Questions (6)
Renée K. Nicholson
I don't often feel blocked as a writer; my struggle is with time. Balancing my day job and my writing can feel fraught. I can't always pivot to write in the hours between meetings. Or, sometimes I just feel wiped out. So having sustained writing time is always my struggle to contend with. However, I often plan writing-only trips by myself or with other writers. The literary journal Barrelhouse has a writer camp where you go with other writers and write for a long weekend, with a few community activities in the evening and meals together, but nice, prolonged time to write. I've been a couple of times and hope to go again.
Renée K. Nicholson
When the writing is clicking, when I feel that I putting down words in an artful way that say something close to what I hoped in my heart and in my imagination, that's the best part of being a writer.
Renée K. Nicholson
Read! I know every writer says it, but reading really is the lifeblood of our work. Let yourself be inspired by others. find people whose work pushes you. Write for yourself first and foremost. Fall in love with the process of writing.
Renée K. Nicholson
I'm currently writing a series of essays inspired by cover songs. This happened as most things for me do--by happy accident. I wrote one short essay about a cover, which I read at my friend Keegan Lester's poetry collection release event at 1-2-3 Pleasant Street, a local bar that usually hosts bands and occasional literary events. He'd invited me to read with him, and so I chose it because it was short and basically the only piece I could see myself reading in a bar. Funny thing...people liked it. Then I tried another, and then I found out a certain version of a song was a cover, and then it became something I was working on.
Renée K. Nicholson
I don't know that I call it "inspiration" per se. I get an itch to write about something, and idea or fragment that just occupies a part of my mind and won't move on until I investigate it on the page. I often write longhand in a notebook, which I know might strike some as terribly old-fashioned. but I like the tactile sense of pen to paper.
Renée K. Nicholson
It started with the essay, "Five Positions," which is in the book. I wrote it in graduate workshop, where it had a very uneasy beginning. I pursued fiction for a while after, but kept returning to write essays, and especially essays about dance. In 2009, I ended up having knee-replacement surgery on my right knee, a casualty of the rheumatoid arthritis that ended my dancing days. I started writing about that, too, but didn't understand these would be linked for some time. I ended up doing the National Training Curriculum workshops at American Ballet Theatre, and things started to come together--past and present, dancer and writer.
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