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Do you struggle to make time for your creative self? In this episode, creativity experts and writers Tresha Faye Haefner and Jon Pearson discuss their different approaches to making time and finding motivation for their writing. As Jon notes, the difficulty is not writing but "starting" to write. Get some great tips to use in your creative process, from starting to celebrating, to just making the time! Listen now. 

-"We thought we knew a lot about our history. We were wrong." - Heather Bourbeau How do you write poetry about historical people and events? In this interview, Heather Bourbeau discusses the way she tackles the personal and historical in her new book, Monarch. Broken into four parts, the collection illuminate aspects of history that schools often leave out of their curriculum, like the Miss Atomic Blast beauty pageant held in Nevada to celebrate the creation of the bomb, or the list of items left after Mt. St. Helens exploded. Heather gives tips how to connect with historical events, how to write about sometimes difficult subject matter, and how to do good self-care along the way.

How do we know what other people know? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner talk with Jessica Cuello about her third collection, Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her book explores issues of childhood trauma that children are taught to lie about or to hide from adults. Jessica discusses her own ambiguous, uncertain relationship with the lyric "I" when writing, and asks the question, "How do we know what others know?" As James Baldwin says, all art is a form of confession. Listen for references to James Baldwin, Dorianne Laux, and Mary Oliver. 

In this interview, host Douglas Manuel gets his chance to interview Lois P. Jones, who interviewed him on Poet's Café. Lois discusses how winter stirs her imagination for poetry (as Wallace Stevens put it, "One must have a mind of winter") because of its mystery. Doug, Tresha and Lois discuss how poems confront readers, challenging them to use their own imaginations, and "complete" the poems as they read. She also references Lorca, Rilke, Neruda, Galway Kinnel and Joseph Fasano. Enjoy.

Get inside the mind of poet-activist, writer, and publisher Edward Vidaurre as Tresha and Douglas ask about his book Cry, Howl from PricklyPear Press and his work running FlowerSong Press. He talks about riding the bus to school and seeing others reading; how that inspired him to seek out authors like Miguel Hernandez, Wanda Coleman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Wright, Claude Brown and others. Now he uses his writing to speak up about issues as a contrary political force in Texas and to use his position as an editor to elevate writers who might not get heard. 

In this interview Kelly Cressio-Moeller discusses how music, art and cinema play into her writing. As a student of art history and a drummer, Kelly describes how she created flow in and between poems to make her first collection, Shade of Blue Trees! When Pulitzer Prize winner Dianne Seuss gave her advice to "build a section" of her book, she had to make hard choices to cut out her darlings. Quoting Yusef Kommunyakkaa, she reminds us, "The ear is the greatest editor," and as a poetry editor who reads hundreds of manuscripts, the hard work that makes things flow can make all the difference. Kelly also relates the story of her "easy poem" dictated to her from the largest moon she ever witnessed.

Does a poem start with an image or with sound? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner ask Ellen Bass about her writing process. She tells us about ways she uses an image to start a poem and her use of tools like sound to distract her "overly logical mind" while her more intuitive mind goes to work. When things don't go right the first time, though, she keeps trying, reorganizing syntax, talking with friends, etc. She tells the story of writing the title poem of her latest book, Indigo by writing many "failed" poems first, and only being "successful" after seeing the right image one day while out walking. There are good reasons why poets need to get out, she says, even if they are hermit introverts.

How can you cope with anxiety? Try writing a book about it. In this interview Kelli Russell Agdon discusses her latest book. Originally she tells us that the book began with two separate manuscripts melding into one. One book was a collection of poems about the broken world, and another about the broken self. Together they become her manuscript, Dialogues with a Rising Tide, out from Copper Canyon Press. Hear Kelli discuss the way she channels anxiety into writing, how she uses constraint to help her choose titles for her poems, and why she has more fun and ease when writing with friends. 

Were there certain topics that were off limits to talk about when you were growing up? Any words you weren’t allowed to say? In this interview Diannely Antigua discusses her book Ugly Music, a book where the speaker explores her complicated relationship to sexuality against a strict religious background. Antigua tells us about her transformation from being a girl who didn’t want to fall asleep having impure thoughts to becoming a poet who can use the word p***y and d**k. If you have taboos to break in your writing, you’ll be able to relate.  

In this interview Tanaya Winder discusses the way she has combined poetry and performance with social advocacy to help others feel seen in real life and on the page. Once a student at Stanford driven to pursue a degree in law, Tanaya eventually turned to poetry seeing it as a way to help marginalized communities and survivors of trauma find their voices. Coming from a life rooted in music and ceremony she also tells us about the way she uses song and sound to help her access her poems and honor her own heritage. Find out more by listening to this podcast or watching Tanaya's TED talk here. 

In this interview Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books, 2022), passionately discusses the complexities of love and how profound that experience is as a mother of a four-year-old girl. She says love is, “An enormous braid of hope, fear, longing, joy, exhaustion, disappointment, exhilaration and feeling like a fraud.” People limit themselves because loving is so frightening. “In the veins of love runs the iron of fear,” but for her, writing poetry keeps her honest. Even in seemingly “mundane” events, there is a voice that says, “This means more than what you see on the surface.” If you give it space, the poem tells you what it means – that the tree is cut down, that your jeans don’t fit. The poems are under the surface of your skin. 

In this wide-ranging interview, Kai Coggin tells her story of meeting Sandra Cisneros along with her middle school English class and how the famous author encouraged her to make time for her own writing as well as bringing writing to others. Now Kai Coggin on her fourth book Mining for Stardust, uses poetry to "freeze time", recording the darkness and tempering it with the power of the light. She introduces young people to the kinds of poems that help them find and define their own identity and shows them that poetry is meant for everybody. This interview is packed with wisdom and insight to inspire any writer.

Big Announcement for the podcast:  Kelly Grace Thomas is stepping aside as co-host with Tresha Faye Haefner. Kelly has a new baby! With an infant in the house she's focusing on being a new mother, and stepping into her prodigious shoes is creative powerhouse and high-spirit extraordinaire Doug Manuel, author of Testify.  Join us as Tresha catches up with what Doug has been doing since our interview with him a few years ago, and then the two of them preview the Saloncast interviews ahead! Welcome Doug!

“What does it mean to call every stranger friend?” That’s a question poet and innovator Brian Sonia-Wallace asks as he discusses his unusual journey writing spontaneous poetry at events. In his twenties Brian Sonia-Wallace put out a typewriter on the street to write poetry for strangers and has been doing it ever since. He is the founder of “Rent Poet” and travels the world to write for others, including at a residency at The Mall of America. You can read about his adventures in his new book from Harper Collins, The Poetry of Strangers. In this interview, he discusses the ways that he, and others who write poetry for strangers find commonalities with their clients, how they write poems that reflect their feelings and the feelings of their clients. This is a rich interview with intriguing insights from the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, and one of the more original, poet-entrepreneurs writing today. Recommended readings and Poets Referenced Danez Smith Sam Sax

What does it mean to carry a landscape with you when that landscape belongs to someone else? In this interview, Gustavo Hernandez discusses the way poetry has helped him deal with living as an immigrant, and what it means to have two places always with him - California and Jalisco, Mexico. He talks about using poetry to help mourn his father. He also discusses the way short-fiction helped him create not just individual poems, but a full book with a "coming of age arc". That collection Flower Grand First ends in a vision of the hereafter, in which he notes, "The hereafter is like everything around me, built by my father," and how he set out "not for an ascent, but for a return."

Many poets are beguiled by the fundamental where did I come from question. Much of Lynne Thompson’s work traces the threads that influenced her sense of identity and how it interacts with politics and race. At the same time, the job of a poet is to find a new angle on how to address issues that may be “universal” or at the forefront of the zeitgeist. So, Thompson advises, “You need to get outside the frame and try on all the shoes in the story.” This is how you find your way through to something more unique.  In this interview Lynne Thompson walks us through several poems around her adoption, what is known and what is not known, and what the imagination does with each. She talks about how to embrace the not knowing, and how poetry is really everywhere if you’re listening for it.

How do you find your voice? What about the voice of a poem or piece? In this interview Kim talks about her influences, and how they have helped her find her own voice. She also talks about getting past her own voice to find the voice of the poem itself, and how she helps support her students in doing the same. You'll also get bonus anecdotes about rhyming in the high desert, writing about a scorpion in an Italian Castle, having her poem printed in the New York City subway, and the really surprising journey she had to go on to get her book, Poet's Companion, published. (If you've never read this book, you can get it through Norton today : )

What can we learn from reading the Confessions of St. Augustin? In this interview Tresha asks Cameron Morse to discuss his latest book, Far Other, titled after a line from St. Augustin. Cameron discusses his interest in the Confessional Tradition, how it began around 300's BC, and what it can still teach us today about the value of an "ordinary" individual telling their personal story. We discuss our evolving understanding of what it means to be born a human being, to search after something greater, to reflect on and tell our own stories. We also discuss the role that "play" has in poetry, and Cameron tells us how using words and finding the pleasure in words themselves helps him find a sense of freedom in writing his poetry. He'll share some samples of his writing, as well as his re-writing strategies that will help you find the play in your poetry too. 

How do you find the place in your poetry for your complete self - the sorrow and the joy, the eventful and the mundane, the gratitude and the grief? Is the balance found in a single poem or across multiple poems? In this interview award-winning poet Sonia Greenfield talks to us about her journey towards finding her voice, and how several teachers helped her along the way. Sonia also discusses her mission to help provide a platform for a diversity of  other voices in Rise Up Review, the political protest journal she started the day Trump was inaugurated. Finally, Sonia and our hosts make recommendations for new poets to read, including Torrin A. Greathouse, Etheridge Knight, and David Hernandez, Fatimah Asghar, Hanif Abdurraqib, and publications such as Best New Poets, Boat Journal, Muzzle, Adroit, The Rumpus, and Button Poetry. 

Do writers have a duty to share their work? In this interview Nancy Lynee Woo discusses what it’s like to come out of an Emerging Writers Fellowship, to wrestle with the pressure to become a “literary celebrity,” and the difference between trying to get published by a journal, vs. sharing art more freely on social media and personal platforms. She tells us how writing a mission statement for her life helped her get clear about her goals – what was important and what she could let go of, and when. Nancy also discusses her challenges writing a poem about a family member she never knew, and tells us how she approached the prospect of writing about the mystery of personal history, and the unknowable unknowns. Join us for a very full, enriching conversation.