Writing at Centrum

The Proust Questionaire: Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Where or when were you the happiest?
I’m happiest when I’m writing. Or when I’m painting. Though I’m also very happy when I’m sleeping and not having a bad dream. These past few years, I have come to the realization that I am happy at least once a day—if even for a fleeting moment.  

What are your pet peeves?
Guys who have to be the smartest person in the room. People with a great sense of entitlement.
Religious people who have no sense of humility. Rude poets.  

What is your favorite season?  
Autumn. What a lovely way to die.  

What living person do you most admire?  |
My mother (my two sisters run a close second)  

If you could be a non-human animal for a day, what would you be?
I want to say: “A penguin” but another part of me says, no, no, “a tiger.” Tyger, Tyger, burning bright...  

What is your most marked characteristic?
My sense of humor / my laugh / also though, I cry easily. Am I equivocating?  

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I am constantly beating up on myself. If my life was a novel I would be the protagonist and the antagonist. 

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
I deplore the fact that some people seem to have been born without an empathy gene. I wonder if scientists are working on that kind of gene therapy? I also deplore stinginess in people. Stinginess has nothing do with a lack of resources—it has something to do with a lack of generosity. 

What do your friends say about you behind your back? 
“God, he still wears red Chuck Taylors.”
“That sonofabitch is publishing another book??!!”
“He doesn’t have a television? Really?”  

Who are your favorite heroes or heroines in fiction?
Pip in Great Expectations, Bigger Thomas in Native Son, John Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Fermina Daza & Florentino Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera.

What fictional characters do you most dislike?
Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises, Daisy and Tom in The Great Gatsby, Marlow in Heart of Darkness.

Who are your favorite musicians?
Kurt Elling, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Pink Martini, Jaunes, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkle, The Beatles, The Doors, Billie Holliday  

Who are your heroes in real life?
Ruben García, a man I’ve known all my life and who runs Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, a sanctuary for immigrants and the poor; Dorothy Day who started the Catholic Worker movement; Cesar Chávez whose faith and humility still move me.  

What talent do you wish you had? 
I wish I could sing, play the piano, dance, do stand up.  

What is your present state of mind?
Don’t ask. You might have to buy me several drinks and then I’d have to tell you. And you’d have to listen.     

On what occasions do you lie? 
Mostly to spare people’s feelings. I hate this about myself.   

What historical figure do you most identify with? 
Karl Marx. Like him, I am obsessed with analyzing the material world, and like him, nobody will be reading me in twenty years.   

What is your favorite journey?
The journey I’ve taken to look directly into the face of the difficult world I live in all of its violence and not avert my eyes. My determination to love this world I live in. This is the only journey that matters.  

What living person do you most despise?
Rush Limbaugh. He lacks an empathy gene. I’ll stop there.   

What is your greatest fear?
That I am not grateful enough for the life that has been giving me. That I am too hard on other people, not forgiving enough, not generous enough.  

What is your greatest extravagance?
I like to treat my friends to expensive dinners. I like to give people I love paintings I’ve worked on for months and months.   

What is your greatest hope?
That there will be peace in Juárez and that Mexico will become a great nation.   

What do you most value in your friends?
Their kindness, their generosity, their affection, their impossible loyalty.  

Who are your favorite writers?
William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Gabriel García Márquez, Denise Levertov, John Donne, e.e. cummings, C.D. Wright, Adrienne Rich, Alberto Ríos, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, David Duncan, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, J.G. Ballard, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers. I better stop, I could go on and on here.     

What is your motto? 
You don’t get extra credit for doing what you’re supposed to do.  



Benjamin Alire Sáenz leads a sold-out workshop as part of the 2011 Port Townsend Writers' Conference.

Benjamin was born on August 16, 1954 in his grandmother’s house in Old Picacho, a small farming village on the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He was the fourth of seven children and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico.

He graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972 though he was not a particularly good student. High school was something he survived--though he was later to use those years as the basis for Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood. The culture of the late sixties were very influential in his intellectual and political formation and he numbered among his heroes, Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Daniel Barrigan, Dalton Trumbo, Thomas Merton, Saint Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam war left a permanent mark on him and in 2008, partially out of his outrage for the war in Iraq, he wrote Names on a Map. Using the voices contained in that novel, Saenz explored the way in which a war can destroy a family.

As a writer, as a young man, and as a thinker, he was greatly influenced by Chicano movement and his own people's struggle for civil rights. He had learned first hand--but especially from his father--how racism could damage a man and stifle the dreams of an entire population.

"The Only Way to Reach Inspiration: Write Your Way To It": An Interview with Robert Wrigley

Jeremy Voigt: W. S. Di Piero recently posted on the Best of American Poetry Blog that “[Poets] shy from putting prose out there because it’s a giveaway…You can’t fake it. It reveals quality of mind, for better or worse, in a culture where poems can be faked.” Do you think that poems can be faked in our culture? Your poems are invested in syntax and narrative motion (tools perhaps most often associated with prose) as well as the lyrical, so do you agree that prose elements can be a test of a writer’s abilities?

Robert Wrigley: I think Di Piero’s probably right. So yes, I think poems can be faked. And some kinds of poems are more easily faked. Some kinds of fakery are easier others. But think about that for a minute:  What’s easier to fake, do you think? Abstract Expressionism or Botticelli? I would wager that most people will say the former, but I have stood before Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” at the Uffizi, in Florence, and a painting of Jackson Pollack’s: “One: Number 31,” at MOMA, and guess which one brought me to tears? I believe the only tool the poet possesses that is not also possessed by the writer of prose is the line. I also believe, as Pound put it, that poetry has to be as well-written as prose. If you can’t wield syntax, give it up. Try welding. I don’t shy away from prose, but I’m not moved to write it. And frankly, I dislike writing about poetry, at least writing about it from any sort of academic platform.

Kim Barnes Interview

There's a great new interview with novelist and memoir-writer Kim Barnes up at Brevity magazine.

Barnes’ novel "A Country Called Home" was published by Knopf in 2008. She is also is the author of the novel "Finding Caruso" and two memoirs: "In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country," winner of the PEN-Jerard Award and finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, and "Hungry for the World." She is co-editor, with Mary Clearman Blew, of "Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers", and, with Claire Davis, of "Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty."

Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

Barnes will be in residence during the 2009 Port Townsend Writers Conference, leading a workshop in nonfiction. She will be giving a public reading on July 12, at 7:30 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater.

Matthew and Michael Dickman

There is a great new article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about the poetry-writing twins Matthew and Michael Dickman, both of whom have titles forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. 

We're also celebrating a great Gary Lilley reading that took place at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on January 31. To watch an extended interview not only with Lilley, but also Copper Canyon Press editor Michael Wiegers, please follow this link!

A Place of Dialogue

[Chris Abani in an interview with Pen World Voices]

Poet and novelist Chris Abani will be in residence during the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, 2009. He'll be leading a generative workshop in fiction techniques. Registration for this workshop is nearly full, but there are spaces still available.

Conference registration is available here, or by calling the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Don't Talk to Poets

Poet Carolyn Forché and fiction writer Micheline Aharonian Marcom will be leading writing workshops May 7-10, 2009, about writing in witness. Here, we present part of an interview with Carolyn by Bill Moyers about her book "The Country Between Us." You'll see why we titled this post the way we did when you reach the end of this interview.

Moyers: "The Country Between Us." What is the country?

Forché: It's complicated because that book emerged while I was working as a human rights activist in Central America and in the United States and those poems turned out to be very different from the poems I had previously written. They were still first-person lyric narrative free-verse poems, but I didn't realize how much I'd been changed by my experiences in El Salvador until those poems reflected that change.

An Interview Between Chris Abani and Cristina García

Originally published in Bomb magazine                                                            

CHRIS ABANI: In this new book [A Handbook For Luck], fate (or luck in this case) plays an important role in how the individuals in the narrative live out their lives. And yet this is not fatalistic. There is a fair amount of free will, even the employment of magic. Would you say that the three lives (alternately) play out the ideas of what is probable, possible, and inevitable?

CRISTINA GARCIA: I think there’s a tremendous amount of tension between what’s probable, possible, and inevitable in this book. A density of suspense. Each of the characters, in his or her own way, battle the powerful undertow of what’s expected of them from their families and the larger society: Enrique in terms of his filial duty to his crazy magician father; Marta as a poor, uneducated woman from the slums of San Salvador; and Leila, as the privileged daughter of upper crust, pre-revolutionary Tehran. These expectations mark them, allow them a measure of florid suffering, but they also present myriad, twisted opportunities for change. I guess this just is another way of saying that that I believe their fates, perhaps all our fates, remain somewhat flexible. Yet luck, coincidence, happenstance play a huge role. One wrong move might ruin potential bliss; a right one, invite it in for a spell. But nothing is taken for granted, or lasts very long. The contract is renewed every day.

An Interview with Kim Barnes

Brandon Schrand ("The Enders Hotel") just emailed me the link to a great new interview with Idaho writer Kim Barnes, who will be teaching at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, 2009.

If you're one of the final two people in the literary world unfamiliar with Barnes's work, she is the author of the novel "Finding Caruso" and two memoirs: "In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country," winner of the PEN/Jerard Award and finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize; and a "Hungry for the World." She is the co-editor of several anthologies, and her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

Her newest novel, "A Country Called Home," has just been released by Knopf.

Barnes is also one of the finest teachers of writing in the country. We're ecstatic to have her here in 2009. Registration for all Centrum writers' workshops will open in eight days, including Barnes's workshop in creative nonfiction.

An Interview with Judith Skillman

Over the past three decades Judith Skillman has written and published numerous poems for books, journals, and anthologies. She has collaborative translations from Portuguese, Italian, and French. Skillman's publications include the Iowa Review, the Southern Review, Poetry, the Northwest Review, and Midwest Quarterly, among many others. She has published ten books of poems.

Jeremy Voigt: The natural world seems to play a major role in your writing. Do you see yourself as a nature poet, a regional poet, or a poet of any particular place?

Judith Skillman: I guess I would prefer not to be labeled as any particular kind of poet, other than, perhaps, someone who loves to write about what happens inside and outside the self. Nothing seems too small to be worth writing about, or too big? I do love nature but I am not a "nature girl," since I depend upon white noise in order to sleep and have rituals that, over time, seem more obsessive compulsive than reasonable. Having said that, I am so glad I moved to Washington state from Maryland in 1982. The northwest is my landscape. I've lived here for twenty-six years now, which is longer than I ever lived in upstate New York or Maryland. I love the light here, the terrain, the flora and fauna. I love that there is no poison ivy! And I also feel Washington state is unique for the way we can go over the pass and find ourselves in an entirely different kind of landscape within an hour.

JV: Could you talk a bit about your specific writing process?

JS: I don't follow a schedule, as my life is too hectic, much like everyone these days. But I do try to be receptive to the muse, or "inspiration." If it has been a week and I've not been applying the seat of pants to the seat of the chair--to use a fiction-writing maxim--I do sit down to write. Taking walks is more of a luxury than it used to be, but walking definitely helps generate the kind of thoughts that lead to poem-writing, if not poems. So does any activity outside, like gardening, hiking, or star-gazing. Sometimes a title or a line will come to me, and while I don't carry a notebook, and I don't journal as many writers do, I pay particular attention to words that come out of nowhere. The exception to this rule might be words that occur in a dream (yes, I do speak in my sleep) which often, while seeming profound during "dreamtime" amount to nothing more than "Hand me the handle."

I try to have more than one iron in the fire, and when I am stuck, I go back and revise older work. I also use revision to jump start the writing process when I feel dry or "used up," and try to keep reading and learning from other writers as much as time allows.

Having birthed and brought up three children, I thrive on interruption and have been known to create it if it is absent. Mothering teaches humility, and the interruption factor is perhaps the most lasting lesson. I used to think it was horrible; now I rather crave it. I know taking breaks from a poem often allows clarity to enter the scene, and also takes pressure off the angst of trying too hard.