Shelf Talks with local poet Megan Snyder-Camp

We recently interviewed Megan Snyder-Camp, local Seattle poet and author of The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press, 2010), about her craft and literary inspiration.

One piece of advice many writers hear is “write what you know.” Do you take that advice? What advice have you found useful?

I think we need invention to approach a truth wholeheartedly, to swallow it as our own rather than apprising it from a distance, as someone else’s story. As a reader, I am less curious about what an author has seen, and more curious about how they see, and how their vision might engage my own. I love the plainness and optimism of invention, the room it leaves for me as a reader to enter and claim my own corner of the work. As a writer, what I know certainly informs what I write, but when the poem begins to stake out its territory, “what I know” becomes a part of the foundation rather than the skin.

The advice I’ve found most useful is in an essay in Louise Gluck’s Proofs and Theories, where she defends periods of silence, periods of not writing, as important to a writer’s development. She argues that silences are spaces in which important, unspeakable work is often done, and that if you can dwell deeply in that silence, when it finally lifts, your work will often begin again from a new place it couldn’t have gotten to if you’d kept bleeding the tap. I love that, and have found it true in the periods when I couldn’t write, like when my children were first born. Now, when a silence comes, I try to let it do its work without fussing at it, and I am almost always grateful for what I find in its wake.

What were you reading as you wrote The Forest of Sure Things? 

I started writing The Forest of Sure Things because I loved Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Then I came across Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story, and was thrilled by her use of plot as a sort of chisel. When I got stuck I often turned to reference books, especially A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, You Are Here, Hints from Heloise, and parenting books. I love how those books are sure there are answers.  

What are you reading now?

Wylie M. Blanchard’s The Curve of Time, a 1950s memoir of a single mother of five who spent summers on a small boat with her children retracing parts of the Northwest Passage. I’m also reading nonprofit fundraising books like Paradigm Found by Anne Firth Murray, because we’re establishing a local chapter of the national literacy nonprofit First Book here in Seattle this fall, and I have a lot to learn. 

Megan Snyder-Camp will be reading with Marjorie Manwaring and Payam Fotouhiyeh at the Ballard Branch of The Seattle Public Library on Thursday, August 11, from 6 to 7:45 p.m. as part of the It’s About Time Writers Reading Series.

             ~ Kristin E., University Branch