Visiting with E. Kristin Anderson

by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor

Editor’s Note – Anderson is an amateur photographer who dabbles in Lomography. The photos of the train, bridge, and lighthouse are samples of her work.      

Train Trouble

Talk about your inspiration for these poems.

In New York I used to write a lot on the train and here in Austin I love writing at quirky cafes—places where there’s always something going on, even if it all appears routine. And it’s always the little things that find their way into my poems. “Grief at Lake Travis” came from realizing the irony of a lighthouse at a man-made lake. How strange it is to see something like a faux lighthouse as a Mainer, who grew up seeing real lighthouses around every corner! I think there’s something special in these quotidian nuances, the things we think about but might not normally put to paper. Things like an overgrown lawn or a fight at a seedy laundromat are a catalyst for me, and I see it as my job to spark this reaction in my readers.        

Lake Travis

Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of any or all of these particular poems. 

El Chupacabra

My process is a lot like a romance, really. I’ll get really excited about something I see on TV or on the bus and just become fascinated. I love watching Sci Fi shows or cryptozoological documentaries on cable and I’ll end up buying old books and reading everything I can about el chupacabra and I’ll finally crank out three or four poems and feel so exhausted that I just need to step back and take a break and evaluate my relationship with poetry. Where do these poems come from, and why am I the writer they chose? And then we talk it out and realize that poetry and I have something special and I’ll write a jillion poems in my spiral bound notebook (nothing fancy here) and it’s the honeymoon phase all over again. Which, of course, is all rather silly and a very snotty poet thing to say. But in all honesty, I do feel like I have a relationship with the written word, like it pokes and prods at me when I need it most, and when I write an exciting first draft it’s like the first kiss my fifteen-year-old self fantasized about every night when she closed her eyes.   

Ram Island Ledge Light

Name your favorite living writer and tell us why.

This is such a hard question, since I read so, so much and every time I read a good book I am in love with it and I tell all my friends about it (especially) if they don’t read that genre and it becomes my bosom buddy and sometimes travels in my purse until I can find someone willing to give it a chance. That said, my favorite living poet is probably Louise Gluck, because when I read from her book The Wild Iris as a junior in high school I finally understood what a poem was. I’m forever indebted to my English teacher, Cynthia Graves, for giving us a contemporary poet to read when so often high school curricula focus exclusively on the old stuff, which, while valuable, is not always what high school kids relate to. I must give a nod to Ms. Laurie Halse Anderson, who challenges me to be a better YA writer whenever I read her books, and to Nick Hornby, whose novel High Fidelity spoke to me in a way that made me want to be a novelist. 

Through the Manhattan Bridge

What’s the hardest thing to get right in a poem?  

I think the line breaks are hard to get right. That’s usually where I do the most editing after I finish a first draft. Sometimes I write a first draft with no line breaks at all, then go back and enjamb the crap out of it just to see what happens. Recently I wrote a piece in traditional stanzas, but went in and pulled out all the line breaks and realized it was a prose poem at heart. Right now, I feel like a lot of post-modern poetry just doesn’t get the line break. Or maybe I don’t get post-modern poetry. But if I read a poem aloud, and I can’t hear the line break, well, it just doesn’t work for me.

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