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 Ellie Snyder.
What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
This piece is inspired by true events and an epic family egg toss, although my cousin wasn’t actually annoyed that I lost it for us. He was a good sport and probably more impressed than anything that I stayed in the game as long as I did.
Who or what inspires your work generally?
Family, friends, lovers, memory, my media diet, angst
Who are some of your favorite writers, and what do you like about them?
This year Louise Erdrich has continuously blown me away with the depth of her characters, the beauty in her prose, the rewards that come with her stories. I’ve rarely felt safer in a novelist’s hands. Then, the work of Irish poets Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland has lately inspired my own, McGuckian with her rich and intricate almost dreamlike poetry, Boland with her gentle rendering of the domestic and mundane into that which is profound and universal.
What do you do in the rest of your life and how does that connect and/or conflict with your creative life?
The other way in which I’m most creative is in my personal style, the assembly of an outfit being in many ways similar to the assembly of a poem. Both the larger structure and the intricate details contribute to the look’s or poem’s overall success, though the former is taken in all at once, then can be studied more closely in its separate components while the reverse is true of the latter. If anything, I’m far more confident in the assembly of an outfit than the writing of a poem. I know when my outfit is good—I rarely stay confident for long that my poetry is good.
What is your "white whale"?
The perfect (or even halfway decent) ED poem. I find it difficult to write with originality about disordered relationships with food and the body avoiding cliché, self-indulgence and self-pity.