The Writer’s Desk features the desks and writing practices of Gemini Ink faculty, visiting authors, teaching artists, volunteers, students, interns, staff, partners and more. Receive new posts in your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter at bit.ly/geminiinknewsletter.
Join Sheila Black on Saturday, Nov 9, 2024, 10am-1pm CST, via Zoom, for her workshop: To Praise the Ruined World. Sheila will share insights into how poetry can provide solace during tough times. In this one-day workshop, we will read poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Adam Zagajewski, Frank O’Hara, Roger Reeves, January Gil O’Neil, and others that demonstrate how praise can be a tool for understanding and transcending even the hardest truths. We will explore how these poets craft praise songs that acknowledge life’s sorrows and losses. We will then write our poems of recovery and resilience.
Hi Sheila! It’s great to have you here with us!
Let’s dive right into your writing habits.
- Describe your first writing desk. How is it different (or not) from your current writing desk? My first writing desk was a school desk – third grade – in São Paulo, Brazil – one of those old wooden desks that children have scratched their names into and opens to reveal a drawer another child has filled with Elmer’s glue in love with how it hardens into the shape of whatever it is poured around. I wrote my first story there and the first thing I ever wrote that one might call a poem. I remember the world went still, and I knew this was something I wanted to keep doing forever.My current writing desk is divided between two places. In San Antonio, I write early in the morning on my – very messy – kitchen table. It just works for me. I like being around the normal objects of my everyday life and looking out my (again kind of unkempt) backyard. I’ve gotten so many poems from those surroundings. For a few months last year, the two cardinals that live in the mountain laurel seemed to make an appearance in almost every poem I wrote – it was seeing that flash of red, one scooting after the other along the branch that taps against the window. My desk in Tempe is much more orderly. I like to think perhaps – it resembles an altar slightly – I might tackle something more serious here, but this desk is still new, so the question is still open.
- Has your preferred place to write changed over the years?
I think a lot of my writing practice was shaped by the fact that I was always a working mother – in other words, multi-tasking, and taking care of three children. Out of necessity, my preferred place to write became places like the kitchen table – in the middle of everything – but a place where I could stop, sit down, and seize a few minutes for my writing, no matter what else was happening. For the same reason, I became a very early riser and still, to this day, do most of my writing in the pre-dawn hours. I love that early-morning sense of being in a world that feels like yours alone – a world that hasn’t quite woken up yet.
Do you follow any habits or routines before writing?
In a word, coffee. I am a total coffee addict. I drink coffee before I write – always, and during, and often after as well! My only requirement is that the coffee be hot! - How important is it to you to have stability in your writing routine?
I find stability is important. I’m not one of those people who feels you must write every day – there are periods when laying fallow can be good for your writing, but when I’m writing or working on a writing project, I tend to start falling into a routine pretty quickly. If I’m lucky, an hour or two or three every morning. Devoting that kind of regular time – even if it is only a couple of hours out of the day – makes a big difference in developing and building a body of work. I also sort have come to feel that writing is a bit like good housekeeping – you’re always refiguring, repurposing, using your scraps. I often find I will get multiple poems or essays out of a subject I’ve scribbled a line here or a line there about over a period of many months or years. Being able to create compost, I think, is so helpful to any writer – to build from your journals, your notes to yourself – it is all useful and worthy. - What is your secret talent? Does it ever pop up in your writing?
I am actually a good swimmer (only notable because I am so unbelievably terrible at every other sports-type activity). I can swim long distances and be pretty tireless about it. I know how to scuba dive, and I did it a lot as a child. I think what pops into my writing a lot – even though I live far from the ocean, is a sense of the ocean as a secret country/body of knowledge; the ocean is an image or metaphor or series of metaphors I return to often. - What is the one piece of writing advice that you value most?
Don’t be afraid. I think we all write with some fear – Is it good enough? What am I revealing? From my experience, I can say that when you feel most afraid or when what you are writing seems very out there (even hopeless), you are often making the biggest leaps. Another piece of advice I treasure is to remember always that writing really is a pleasure. We get so afraid of it but, truly, when I am in the middle of making a poem – that is a great feeling for me, a happy place in a way that doesn’t necessarily have much to do with whether the poem I end up writing is good or not. I do think to be a writer over the long haul you have to love the process – at least a little, which is not to say that writing can’t often be painful or frustrating. - What’s a book or movie that you can watch over and over again and not get tired of?
For years and years, I read Anna Karenina once every couple of years. I never get tired of that book, though it seems sadder to me as I get older. I used to just love the romance of Anna and Moscow and the train through the snow from Saint Petersburg. I failed to see all the other things that the novel does, but I think that is kind of the point – a great book like that can truly be read again and again. In poetry, there are so many poems I wouldn’t know where to start – some poets whose work I return to – Jericho Brown, Diane Suess, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Joy Harjo, John Murillo, Emmy Perez, Camille Dungy, Sasha West – those are a few of the people I’ve been reading lately. - Does good writing result from best practices, magic, or a bit of both?
I think it results mostly from being a passionate reader. There is something about the kind of reading you do when you are just starting out – that process of sinking into someone else’s words or invented world that is a powerful magic. Almost all the writers I know became writers because they loved doing that – they were readers first. I think craft matters – but I think – to go back to what I said about not being afraid when you are writing – there will come a time when you have to let go of all the rules you’ve learned, the craft you’ve internalized, and just trust in the magic of it. We can know everything and at the same time we sort of have to know nothing to move forward. - What is your next project?
I’m working on an essay collection that sort of teeters between disability subjects and nature-related subjects. It’s still in its early stages, so I’m curious where it will go. - If people want to learn more about your work, where should they go?
I am the rare writer that does not have a website. This is partly because I am a total Luddite. But people can learn about my work by looking up my books on bookshop.org – the online bookshop that supports independent bookstores!
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).
