Ask the Author: Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Answered Questions (6)
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
I remind myself that even 20 minutes of writing counts as writing. I don't set wild expectations for sitting eight hours in a chair. Also I set myself plans for a day's work on a project, so I don't spend all my time wondering what to write. I don't get writer's block as often as I used to, in part because I know my rhythms (when I have energy to write and when I don't). But if I simply do not want to write, I don't. I'll get up and do something 3D.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
I think writing is the best way to love the world full-time.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Write! Read! Take classes! (They don't have to be MFAs -- just classes online or in your community). Be around people who also love to write, who match and raise your excitement about writing. Email professional writers and ask them questions about their work. Ask them to read your work.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
I'm working now on a biography about my 100-year-old grandfather, a coal miner who became an international energy expert. His life is an American fairy tale -- he grew up witnessing far too many of his community members die in coal accidents, and through education and hard work he went onto make a great difference in how America thinks about energy.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
The ideas for my first and third book actually came from the same night.
The idea for The Fairy Tales Mammals Tell (2013) started when three other writers and I set up a Writing Booth in a hotel room. People came in and gave a word, and we writers wrote (on the fly!) a short piece or poem using that word. Then we’d give the people their poem and send them on their way. Out of the corner of my eye from where I was sitting writing on the hotel bed, I saw two of my neighbors, a couple, come in. At the time I didn’t know them very well. They gave me two words: “life hiatus.” I put my head down and wrote fast while they watched, and what came out was a poem about going to sea and why people both love and fear water. This couple gasped when they read it because it turned out they shared a dream to one day live in a boat and sail around the world, and this poem – which they framed and gave me a copy of – spoke to that dream.
It was the only poem from that Writing Booth that I ever saw again, and I revised it until it became the title poem of my first book: I called it “Fairy Tales Mammals Tell Before Getting on a Boat.” And I liked the title so much that I went back to my other poems and picked my Top 20 (which were nearly all my most recent). Most of them, I noticed, dealt with the sense of being an animal that comes with becoming a parent. And so from there the poems collected.
My most recent book, Poetry for Strangers (2015), also was inspired by the Writing Booth. First the book was a blog, poetryforstrangers.com. It was such a wildly intimate and euphoric thing to write a poem for a complete stranger, based only on a word. So I decided to do it every week for a year, and that year has stretched into three years and a book. I think I’ll keep going because I enjoy it so much. Because it’s a blog still, there’s a whole community of writers sharing their own weekly poems for strangers. It's all so generous and interactive. It feels like the best thing that could happen for poetry today.
The idea for The Fairy Tales Mammals Tell (2013) started when three other writers and I set up a Writing Booth in a hotel room. People came in and gave a word, and we writers wrote (on the fly!) a short piece or poem using that word. Then we’d give the people their poem and send them on their way. Out of the corner of my eye from where I was sitting writing on the hotel bed, I saw two of my neighbors, a couple, come in. At the time I didn’t know them very well. They gave me two words: “life hiatus.” I put my head down and wrote fast while they watched, and what came out was a poem about going to sea and why people both love and fear water. This couple gasped when they read it because it turned out they shared a dream to one day live in a boat and sail around the world, and this poem – which they framed and gave me a copy of – spoke to that dream.
It was the only poem from that Writing Booth that I ever saw again, and I revised it until it became the title poem of my first book: I called it “Fairy Tales Mammals Tell Before Getting on a Boat.” And I liked the title so much that I went back to my other poems and picked my Top 20 (which were nearly all my most recent). Most of them, I noticed, dealt with the sense of being an animal that comes with becoming a parent. And so from there the poems collected.
My most recent book, Poetry for Strangers (2015), also was inspired by the Writing Booth. First the book was a blog, poetryforstrangers.com. It was such a wildly intimate and euphoric thing to write a poem for a complete stranger, based only on a word. So I decided to do it every week for a year, and that year has stretched into three years and a book. I think I’ll keep going because I enjoy it so much. Because it’s a blog still, there’s a whole community of writers sharing their own weekly poems for strangers. It's all so generous and interactive. It feels like the best thing that could happen for poetry today.
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
I am nearly always inspired to write, because there are so many interesting things in the world to think and imagine about! Walks in cities, visits to museums, seeing performances, eavesdropping on my children, all of these produce great ideas. But the limit is always time. I keep to 1-2 big projects a year, but I am always brainstorming new ones.
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