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Terry Ehret |
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Terry’s 18Q |
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The Eighteen Questions |
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18Q |
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Terry Ehret is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, an innovative poetry publishing collective representing the voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. http://www.sixteenrivers.com Terry is also the editor of the Sonoma County Literary Update, a monthly newsletter/blog http://www.literaryfolk.wordpress.com |
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1. Did you choose the writing profession or did it choose you? Initially I wanted to be a folk-rock lyricist--that was when I was 12 or so. After a high school project researching C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, I decided I wanted to be a philologist like them, a decision which alarmed my mother, who was encouraging me to explore dental hygienist is a more stable career. I settled on a combination of poetry and teaching when I was in college, just after returning from a study-abroad in Florence.
2. What is your background? (education, work, etc.) I have a BA in Psychology from Stanford University and an MA in English (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University. I taught high school English and Art History for 13 years (1973-1990), then switched to college/university-level teaching. 1990 was also when I began publishing. I have since then taught at Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, and with the California Poets in the School Program. I currently teach private writing workshops in Sonoma County.
3. When did you ‘know’ you were a writer? I think I knew I wanted to write when I was a kid, but didn't actually know any living writers. It's tough without living role models to know what to do with one's urge to write, besides keeping a journal. By the time I was 17, I knew that I felt more alive, more graceful, more complete in the act of writing than in any other endeavor. I guess that's when I knew I was a writer. When I returned from studying abroad in Florence, I knew I wanted to be a poet. Now how to support oneself as a poet--that took me many years to work out.
4. How would you describe your style of writing? I write poetry, mostly lyric free-verse and prose-poetry (poems without line-breaks). I also write tiny stories or fables which might be described as "plot-imparied."
5. What is your writing process? I write very improvisationally, using whatever prompt is at hand, and often incorporating distractions as prompts as well. Sometimes that results is an unexplainably meditative kind of poem. Sometimes it results in a more experimental, fragmented, post-modern kind of poem. I consider the prose poem to be my native language. I like to write in a way that straddles the conscious and the unconscious, and which has as little conscious control or intention as I can manage.
6. What was your path to publication? I began publishing prose poems in a little magazine called Paragraph, as well as local journals, when I was in graduate school. After graduation, I collaborated with two fellow SFSU creative writing students on a self-published collection called Suspensions. Some poems in that book were nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of the judges that year, Carolyn Kizer, liked my work, though she wasn't able to persuade the other judges. The next year when she was judging the National Poetry Series, she recognized some of the pieces in my manuscript, and picked it for the National Poetry Series. The prize was publication with Copper Canyon Press. Thus my second collection, Lost Body, came to be. After many submissions to contests and publishers, trying to get a new collection published, I met one of the founders of Alice James Books, a publishing collective out of Boston, who encouraged me to start something like this on the West Coast. Eventually I co-founded Sixteen Rivers Press. Like AJB, Sixteen Rivers is a regional, all-volunteer. non-proft organization run by the poets we publish. Sixteen Rivers has published my next third and fourth books, Translations from the Human Language and Lucky Break.
7. What is your favorite self-marketing idea? Dana Gioia, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, once said to me, "Bookstores don't sell books. Readings sells books." I've always taken that to heart. If you want to sell your book, give readings and workshops as often as you can stand it. Having a personal website, linked to a blog site I can easily update and manage, also works well to reach people through the Internet.
8. What are the biggest surprises you’ve encountered as a writer? At first I was surprised how much marketing, promotion, and PR work a writer has to do. I thought publishers would take care of that and wouldn't want the author interfering in his or her amateur way. Quite the opposite. Publishers expect authors to do most of the promotion, including setting up one's own readings. Of course, the more professionally a writer approaches this, the better the results.
9. How do you inspire yourself? What are your sources of creativity? I let myself be inspired by "whatever's at hand." Since I'm a teacher, that's often whatever I'm reading. When I was raising my children, it was whatever distraction or interruption they presented. I find travel to be very inspiring. Dreams are a source of inspiration, too.
10. What is your proudest writer moment? Being selected Sonoma County's Poet Laureate.
11. What’s the best advice you were given about writing? This is a paraphrase of William Stafford's advice: When you find yourself struggling with writer's block, lower your standards.
12. What is your most embarrassing writer moment? I spent a few years working with a therapist (haven't we all?), and one time I brought up having a "fraud complex," by which I meant that I often worry people are going to find out I'm not a writer, I'm not as good as they were led to believe--in short, that I'm "faking it." Finally, towards the end of the 50-minute hour, the therapist opened her eyes wide and said, "Oh, you've been talking about a fraud complex. All this time I thought you were saying "frog complex!"
Ribbet.
13. What business challenges have you faced as a writer? Starting and running a poetry publishing collective has certainly been an ongoing challenge. But we brainstorm our way through these, and having many minds and hands at work certainly makes it easier to overcome business setbacks.
As an individual writer, the greatest business challenge is how to keep the boundaries around my creative/writing life protected. When one works free-lance, it's hard to ever say no to a potential client or audience. But without time to write, who will I be? Saying "no" is what I struggle most with.
14. What is your writer life philosophy? This, too, I take from another writer--Katherine Mansfield. Her quote has been tacked above my writing spot for 25 years: "Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
15. When you’re not writing what do you do for fun? I like to travel, hike, read, watch movies, spend time with my daughters (when they let me).
16. Who do you like to read? I'm dyslexic, so I tend not to read really long books, and I have to take every book I read very slowly, which may be why I was drawn to poetry in the first place. That said, I have always enjoyed the works of Ursula LeGuin, Grace Paley, Tomas Transtromer, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Pablo Neruda, Wislava Szymborska. I also like to read mythology, history, archeology, astrophysics, and philosophy.
17. What’s your advice for new writers? Read. Learn as much as you can about the tradition you want to write in, whether that's poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, or all of the above. Be curious and open-minded about your own aesthetics and the aesthetics of others. Find a supportive writing or critique group to keep you writing and to help steer you through the revision and editing process. Remember, we're all ignorant, just about different things.
18. What are you currently working on? I've got a long-languishing novel, which is a kind of historical-fantasy-mythological-anthropological novel about the Trojan War. It re-magines the premise of the war, based in part on the research of anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, who wrote The Language of the Goddess and The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. You can read more about this on my website: www.terryehret.com. Click on Sleep Under Stone (a novel in progress): http://www.terryehret.com/gallery5.htm. |
