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.
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