PtoP Ep. 31 Rahija edit 1 === Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Robin LaMer Rajia. Robin is originally from Kansas City, Missouri, and has lived in Kentucky for over a decade. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is currently the Department Manager Associate in the Department of English. In 2010, she co founded and edited Rabbit Catastrophe Press, a hand bound feminist book arts micropress. In 2015, she co founded Workhorse Writers Collective, a publishing and education platform for poets outside of academia. Her poems have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Fence, Guernica, [00:01:00] and elsewhere. Inside Out Egg is her first full length book published by Variant Lit in April 2024. Welcome Robin and thanks for joining us. Robin: Thanks for having me. Carrie: So congratulations on publishing your first full length book. Robin: Thank you. Yeah, very exciting. Carrie: I'm just curious, you know, having been a publisher yourself, with Rabbit Catastrophe Press, did that, has that prepared you in any way for? Robin: No, not at all. No, it, it feels like a whole different thing. I think I, I feel more acutely how much of a privilege being an editor was in that none of it was, uh, mine. I was just sort of ushering it through and kind of like a midwife, and I wasn't, you know, Mm-Hmm. wasn't making the art myself. And this, this feels completely different. Much, very much [00:02:00] more vulnerable, but also really exciting. Carrie: Yeah. Robin: To have a thing that you can hold that you made. Carrie: Absolutely. And you are, like most poets, I would say, a working writer. And you've, you know, I know you're not affiliated with, Workhorse Writers anymore, but I think it's still going on. Robin: It's still kicking. Yeah. It's still going. Yeah. Carrie: But, I'm just curious, you know, how you balance your work life and your writing life, and if you have any, suggestions for those of us, like me, who, who do that. Robin: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right in that most writers are working writers, meaning they, they do the work of writing, but they also have other jobs. And only if you're very, very lucky, do you have a job that's even sort of connected to writing. My job is, I work in an English [00:03:00] department now, but I don't teach and I don't, I'm not a professor, but I do get to be around writers all day, which is very lucky and sometimes I even, you know, can get paid to go to a, to a literary reading and it's great and that, that was very lucky. But before that, I had all sorts of crap jobs that had nothing to do with, with writing or reading or art, but um, you know, I kind of started out not ever thinking of myself as a writer or a poet. And just, just doing the work of living life and trying to get by. And, and then I would find writing just sneaking in kind of in any spare moment. And that's, I, I just really slowly built the habit of writing around other things already. That's kind of how I started. So I'm kind of used to sneaking it in here and there, [00:04:00] but, I did eventually go get my MFA. Which is a, another great privilege that not everyone gets. And that's a really intense period of writing a ton all the time, maybe too much, not all of it's very good. It's fast and it's intense and it's emotional. And then you get out of the MFA and then you have to like motivate yourself, which is really hard. A lot of people have the write every day you know, mentality, I, I can't do that really. I, but I do try to work. I've, I'm lucky in that I have a kind of a set schedule. So I have the weekends off and I try to write from eight to noon every Saturday and every Sunday. And I don't always do it, but sometimes I do it and it feels good. And then I [00:05:00] would, I would say like my biggest suggestion is, I think ideas and thoughts and little tiny chunks of motivation come to all of us throughout the day. And to just not ignore those, even if you're busy or even if you're at work, which I do sometimes, just stop and write them down and save them for later and get in the habit of not ignoring that impulse, Robin: Toward like a creative act. Carrie: Yeah. That's, that's really good advice. I, I think we're very much conditioned to compartmentalize, but Robin: For sure. Carrie: If we are short on time, it's more helpful to like you said, always kind of keep, keep the door open. Robin: Yeah. And I, I used to be like a person who was like, Oh, I only have 30 minutes. I don't have time to write. But I found that that would be like any amount of time. It's like, Oh, I got to go to work in four hours. I don't have time to write. And, and that [00:06:00] I would find myself stretching it. And it's like, if I had to do one thing today, I felt like I was too busy to write. And I. You have to really let that go. Carrie: Yeah, especially, especially when you're short on time. Yeah. So, have prompts played a role in your writing process? And if you could tell us a little bit about that. Robin: Yeah, I think, I think so. I kind of got started writing just hanging out with other writers in, in Lexington. I'm, I met a lot of writers in town, when I moved here and I just kind of started getting into it and we would motivate each other to try new things. And sometimes somebody would, you know, have a, do something interesting, do an interesting form or write about an interesting topic. And we would all use that as a prompt to, to try our own thing. And, yeah, there's actually during the pandemic when like, I don't think anyone [00:07:00] felt like writing very much or felt very creative or motivated. Um, me and a friend of mine, we started reading this sort of like beginner's poetry book. Which was, you know, we both had our MFAs. We'd been writing for years and years, but going back to this sort of beginner's book was like so, motivating and refreshing and it really, every chapter had prompts at the end and it really, I think a lot of those prompts helped me finish this book. So it's prompts are so important when the world is crazy and life is crazy. Yeah. You sort of need a starting point. Carrie: Yeah, that's, that's great to hear that they were, instrumental in finishing your book. So, would you like to share a prompt or prompts? Robin: Sure, yeah, well I want to do a call out to that book. That I was just talking about. It's called In the Palm of Your Hand by [00:08:00] Steve Kowit. And it's, you know, from the nineties, but it's still super good. And, it just really got me through the hard times and it has a ton of prompts, , in it. But the one I'm gonna give you is, one that I kind of made up myself. With a friend of mine, Mikey Swanberg, who's also a poet. We started writing. We kind of made up a form and we called it the century because it had a hundred lines. A hundred lines in it, which is kind of a long poem. And we would sort of kind of dare each other to write these. And it did feel like a dare because it's, this is definitely not a prompt for when you have complete writer's block. This is a prompt for when you want to do something new and crazy. And, you want a challenge. And the good [00:09:00] thing about writing a century Is that it's not easy, and it takes a really long time, and when you're done with it, you really feel accomplished, even if it's terrible, and you feel like you've done something amazing, which you have. And it's not all going to be good, obviously, because it's, it's too big to be good, but I've written some, and I've pulled two or three good lines out of one that have become their own poems, which is very helpful when you're, you know, trying to, you almost write so much that something good almost accidentally slips out and, then you can pick up on that and run with it later. I, what I found was the most interesting thing when I did this was. You know, it kind of starts off really, not really about anything. It pulls in like a lot of different [00:10:00] things, a lot of different topics, ideas. And then the writing itself, the act of writing itself, sort of, you can follow the path of where, and you can almost see where you start to figure out what you want to write about. So not only does it get words and ideas on the page, but it, it also sort of tricks you into showing you what is important to you. Carrie: Mm-Hmm. . So you're not going in with necessarily any subject in mind, you're just, the goal is to get that 100 lines. Robin: Yeah. And, I found, you know, the first ones I would write had like, you know, 50 topics in it. I would just write like a couplet about one thing and a couplet about another thing. But then eventually you start really digging into something and exploring it in more depth than you thought possible, because well, you have to, because you have to get to a hundred lines. And if you have a [00:11:00] really difficult subject that you do want to write about, that is complicated or maybe you don't know how to enter it quite yet, uh, how to begin talking about a topic, then I think this is a useful, form because it sort of forces you to write. Just write about anything and everything until you get it right. Carrie: It almost sounds like, you know, I guess prose writers will often have word counts, you know, that they want to do by the end of the day. So it kind of sounds like a poetry version of that. Although I don't know that you're doing it over one day necessarily. It probably takes a while to get that hundred lines built up. Robin: Yeah, that, that does have a similar feel, and, and of course, yeah, word count, this could be like, you know, your lines could be two words long if you wanted to, and you needed to, if you're trying to just like really knock it out, or they could be [00:12:00] really long lines, and that's sort of up to you. But yeah, it's good to have, yeah, I would never was able to do one of these in a day. I think probably like a month for me, more like it. But it is kind of nice to, once you have, you know, once you have like 25 lines now on the page, you start to feel like when you go back to work on it, you're, it's not a blank page. You kind of have a foundation to start building ideas on. Carrie: Yeah. And I think that is one thing that really helps, you know, with that thing we were talking about earlier about trying to work within that small amount of time that you might have, is that having something that's already there that you can go back to and think about? Robin: Yeah, totally. Carrie: The hardest part is often like you, you know, said it mentions facing that blank page and you know, how do you do that in 15 minutes? Robin: Right. [00:13:00] Carrie: Yeah. Well, that's great. Do you have any other writing tips that you'd like to share with our listeners? Robin: I, just went to a went to a talk, it was, Crystal Wilkinson and Nikki Finney in conversation with each other last Wednesday, and they were talking about the writing group they had when they were young, and I thought they said something really good, because there was a lot of students in the audience, and they said they were talking about how they weren't trying to get published, they were trying to become better writers. And that I think is really important, especially when you're starting out and you, you know, it's easy to confuse the two, like, Oh, this is published because it's good. So I should, if I get published, then I'll know I'm good, but doing the opposite way, which is just focusing inward on your craft and on your [00:14:00] words and trying to get better at writing stuff that feels true to you. and to your people in your writing community. That I think is really important. I also think that it's good to like become obsessed with things. That have nothing to do with poetry. A couple months ago, I just got obsessed with like black holes and I just read a bunch of articles about black holes and now I have 15 poems about black holes and, coming at, not at like sitting down and saying, okay, now I need to write, but sitting down and saying what fascinates me and what do I need to write about to understand better just for myself, I think is a good way to go about it. Carrie: Mm hmm. Yeah, I sometimes wonder if it's, like, a uniquely poet thing to be obsessed about different topics like that, you know, and, and do a lot of research. It seems, I [00:15:00] don't know, it does seem like a poet thing to me in some way. I don't, I'm not sure why, of course, if people. Prose writers are writing non fiction, or writing about a character with a different job than they have, I mean, they could, that can happen to them too, but, there's something about digging into the library research, or, you know, Google, or whatever. Robin: Yeah, fiction writers, yeah, they have to do a lot of research, and, and they, they will probably get to be really knowledgeable about a topic or a subject. And, poets, I think are lucky that we don't have to get good at something we can just, we're good at finding the one interesting thing about something, Carrie: Right, Robin: and that, Carrie: yeah, Robin: we get permission to ignore the rest. Carrie: Yes, absolutely. So if you'd never, if you've never thought about writing poetry for any other reason, this might be the one reason [00:16:00] that you want to try writing poetry. Well, thanks so much, Robin. , That was a great prompt and lots of great advice, and we really appreciate you being here. Robin: Thanks so much, Carrie. Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex. org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental, musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors. Find out more about Archipelago, Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website.