We love learning more about our contributors, and an interview seemed like a fun way to hear more about the writers and artists we publish, so we gave them a choice of questions to answer. We hope you also enjoy hearing more about the artists and their works. Read on and check out issue 28 for work from Dara Laine.
What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
Even in the Woodpile was inspired by the literal pile of wood behind my brother’s house in New Jersey. He lives there with his wife, their two daughters, and, for a time, his sibling-in-law (they/them), in the house my sister-in-law and her sibling grew up in. Our families go way back; my parents went to high school with her father, and even our grandparents went to the same school. The poem started when I was thinking about our families and how we got to that moment, sitting in their yard, missing our parents. I was also reflecting on “rewilding” and looking at the cut logs by their firepit—how the landscape still carries grief even as it grows new life. I initially drafted a version of it for the Tupelo 30/30 Project.
What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
A little of both. Sometimes I’ll respond to a prompt or plan a piece around a specific topic to challenge myself or get out of a slump. But most of the time I’m just collecting bits and bobs from daily life, pausing to jot something down when it comes and returning to it later. If I’m in a good writing place, I’ll start with something close to stream of consciousness, write until it feels like I’ve said what needs to be said, and then go back and shape it into something more intentional.
Who are some of your favorite artists, and what do you like about them?
Liza Katz Duncan, Natasha Rao, Marie Howe, and Jane Kenyon. I love Duncan and Rao for the way their images feel both lush and precise at the same time—intimate, surprising, but never showy. Howe and Kenyon taught me that you can write very simply about ordinary life and still create something big and heartbreaking. All four of them make room for tenderness without sentimentality, which is something I’m always chasing in my own work.
What is your #1 advice for other artists?
For fellow emerging artists (which is the group I put myself in): submit, submit, submit. Someone is going to get picked and published—why not you? Rejection is baked into the process of sharing our poetry with a wider audience, so inherently, it’s not personal. So why let it hold you back? Submit enough that rejections arrive so frequently they no longer faze you. Just keep sending the work out and so it can find its people.
We think of “after happy hour” as the time you can really let loose and be yourself. What is your after happy hour?
For me, it’s “floor time.” It’s that time of night when only your closest friends are still over, someone is on the floor, others are on the couch, and I’m completely comfortable. We can say whatever we’re thinking and all be the full versions of ourselves.