Prompt to Page Episode 54: Kevin Nance === 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 Kevin Nance. Kevin is a photographer, arts journalist, and poet in Lexington. He has published widely in newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Poets and Writers, and has work in literary journals, including the North American Review, Poet Lore, Willowa, and Still: The Journal. His four books include Smoke, published last year by Accents Publishing. Kevin was recently announced as the new editor of Yearling, the poetry journal of Workhorse [00:01:00] Writers. Welcome Kevin, and thanks so much for joining us. Kevin: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Carrie: So I've heard in some other interviews that you've done that you didn't write poetry for about 15 years, and you said in part that was because you didn't have a poetry community. Can you explain, I guess, a little bit, why you think that is? Why having a community was so important to your writing life? Kevin: Well, I think most, for most people, not everybody, there are exceptions, but for most people, poetry is both a sort of, writing poetry is, is sort of both a lonely activity. You write, you do it while you're alone. And I think it is an activity which generally speaking does not produce a lot of outside validation, especially in your earlier, you know, in your career. You have to have your [00:02:00] own inner motive for doing it because you don't get really a lot of praise or a lot of feedback even. I mean, you know, you feel like you're writing in a sort of vacuum. And when I lived in Lexington in the eighties and nineties, and then when I moved to Nashville, I went from Lexington to Nashville. And in both of those places I had poetry friends, poet friends, I should say, and we would sit around and talk about poetry. And they were not only my friends and people who, you know, gave me feedback and sort of supported, we supported each other. I think they were also my audience, you know? Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: And, that was in the days really before online poetry journals and poetry communities came into existence. I mean, there was some, but basically, if [00:03:00] you wrote poetry, you may remember the days when you printed it out on paper and the submission process was on paper and would take six months to a year to hear back from your poem. So, I think I really craved a give and take. And I found that in Lexington. And then in Nashville. Then I moved to Chicago in 2004 to take a job and, for whatever reason, I never kind of connected with a group of poets there. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: I think in retrospect, I wonder why that was. I didn't really seek it out, and I think without that group around me, without the support and feedback, and maybe most crucially, the audience, I am embarrassed to say today in hindsight, that I didn't quite have the oomph to keep doing it. And [00:04:00] I, you know, I did have, I had certain other things that came into play at the time. At some point I fairly seriously took up photography as a creative art form, and I think photography sort of, you know, scratched the itch to create things. And it became a sort of substitute for writing poems. And I think in some ways they kind of come out of the same impulses, at least the kind of photography that I did, I tried to, you know, was in effect writing visual poems in my photos, and I still do that to some extent. I think it's really important for me. I maybe for some people it doesn't matter that much, but for me it means a lot to have a poetry posse and, and currently, you know, when I moved back to Lexington in 2019. I, it seems like I sort of picked up where I left off. I mean, I reconnected with old [00:05:00] friends that I used to talk about poetry with and made a bunch of new ones, and it just jump started my poetry writing impulse again. And in the years since then, I've written probably 3 or 4,000 haiku and published three books including, a book of, you know, longer poems, not haiku. Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's something to be embarrassed about. I think, you know, maybe it was an important thing for you to realize, you know? Kevin: Yeah. Carrie: How important that was for your work. Kevin: It's also true that certain things have changed since the old days. You know, the submission process is much quicker now, and you know, because of email and things like Submittable and whatever, so you have a greater sense of an audience being not that far away. And indeed, you know, occasionally I've had poems get accepted [00:06:00] within days or even hours after I submitted them. And so I had that immediate gratification of knowing well this poem is gonna be out there in the world and people can read it. And there was something very gratifying about that. But even so. I still need my friends, my poet friends around me, and I think I, you know, another big change since I was in Lexington last is that the literary community of Lexington has gotten much, much less underground and more above ground. I mean, there's two or three, maybe half a dozen poetry reading series. There's a lot of people reading and writing poetry in central Kentucky. And I feel like I know a lot of those people. Lexington Poetry Month, which is every June, is a way of understanding this sheer [00:07:00] size of the community. I mean, I think that last year they had almost 400 people participating in Lexington Poetry Month, people writing a poem a day for 30 days. And you know, I think places like Poetry at the Table, which I think you have read there, and I'm gonna be reading there next month. Carrie: Great. Kevin: All of those things make it a much more exciting and sort of active experience and communal experience, not just me scribbling away in my living room. Carrie: Yeah, I mean, you talked about the benefits of being able to submit online and have online magazines and things like that, but at the same time we do still need that in-person atmosphere to see what other people are doing and have, you know, hear other people's words and all of that stuff. Kevin: Absolutely. Carrie: It's really a two-way street. [00:08:00] Kevin: And, you know, I participate in two or three different kind of groups or, you know, ongoing workshops. For example, Poezia, which is a poetry workshop group that I think Katerina Stoykova, started more than 20 years ago. And, it did go on a hiatus during COVID, but it's back and functioning. And, in fact there's a meeting of it tonight that I plan to go. And, so that's a great way to hear other people's work and kind of get a feel for what people are going through as poets. And I think we are living in a time where a lot of people are struggling to kind of come out of themselves as subjects for their poetry and try to address what's happening in the world. I mean, you know, and there are many things going on in the world. And I myself am in, I would say, in that category of trying to stop navel gazing so much and look out at the world [00:09:00] and write some poems that address those things in some way, of course, without becoming polemical or whatever. Carrie: Right. Yeah. So what role do prompts play in your own writing process? I know that you are a big fan of haiku. Kevin: Yeah. Carrie: So that must be one of the prompts you turn to a lot. Kevin: Well, I tell you, one of the things that I have been doing now for years, I think almost six years, and it's been on, it hasn't been constant, but it's been on and off, I do an online, actually, initially it was in person, but in recent years it's been mostly online, a writing practice session. It's an hour and a half in, currently it's on Sundays, and it's with, Laverne Zabelski, who is a good, very dear friend of mine and has for many, many years led groups doing what she calls writing practice. And what those are, are timed writing sessions [00:10:00] typically 15 minutes. Typically, we do two 15 minutes sessions in the course of a meeting, and then it, we start with a prompt, and the prompt is usually something that is just so random. It could be something that came up in conversation. We usually, you know, start out by chatting, how are you? What did you do this week? How are things going? And you know, there's usually something that is part of that conversation that becomes a prompt. And then sometimes it will be something that is within view. Sometimes, you know, she'll say, Kevin, what have you got? And I'll be looking around my desk or something and I will just see something. So for example, today I have, I'm drinking tea out of a cup that has elephants on it. These are beautiful elephants created by Yolanda Harrison Pace, who's a [00:11:00] wonderful writer and artist in Danville. And, I might look at this and maybe that becomes the prompt, the word elephants. That is, that has never come up until this moment, by the way. But I'll tell you that I love elephants. I think elephants are wonderful. And actually I'll just briefly tell you, when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, just getting into high school, toward high school, I went to a carnival, you know, like a county fair. And my younger brother, who's five years younger than me, and we rode an elephant together, you know, and you could just climb up on the elephant's back and you get to ride around. And, that memory has just now come to me and I Carrie: Well, there you go. [Laughter] Kevin: I would probably, you know, if this were Laverne, writing with Laverne, I would suggest elephant, and then I would, that [00:12:00] memory of writing the elephant with my younger brother would probably become the topic of a poem, or, and Carrie: yeah. Kevin: You know, these writing practice sessions that we do, sometimes they come, what I, you know, the remit is to write the first thing that comes to your mind based on the prompt. And then just keep your hand moving for 15 minutes. And so what it, what happens is that you, you don't know where it's going to take you and you, it becomes a process of free association. And you start with elephants, but you might end up someplace completely unrelated to elephants, but, or maybe you, you would. So I have written, there are a number of poems in my book, Smoke, for example, that started out as pieces that were written as using writing prompts in Laverne's writing workshop. It has become, you know, [00:13:00] it's become one of several different ways that I generate new poems. It's become a generative thing for me because very often I will write something during those writing practices that has, that I end up going back to later and recrafting and taking bits of it and it becomes a poem. Carrie: And it almost sounds like just having something to start with is what's important there. Kevin: That's right. And the funny thing is it's less, the subject is less important in some cases. It's mostly important to get you started because where you end up, it's always gonna be about stuff that is your stuff, your material, your life, whatever. And that certainly would've been the case if I'd written about the elephant, and so you end up writing your own stuff no matter what the prompt is[00:14:00] to some extent. It takes you to places that you couldn't get to however. I would never have gotten to me and my brother riding an elephant had I not just in the course of this moment, looked at my mug and seen an elephant. So, you know, Carrie: Right. Kevin: prompts are very useful because they can take you places that you never could have gone any other way. Carrie: Yeah, and I think one of the things that I like so much about poetry or try to do is to surprise myself. And so if the prompt is able, you know, if through the prompt you're able to surprise yourself, I think that's a bonus too. Kevin: You know, there's one other aspect of that writing practice which I think I've realized is very important, and that is that you're writing in a journal in longhand. Typically, mostly when I write poems, I write them on a, you know, using word processing. [00:15:00] I'm either on a computer Carrie: Oh, do you? Kevin: Or sometimes on my phone. Right? Carrie: Uhhuh. Kevin: I write most of my haiku on my phone. In part because, you know, they often come to me in the middle of the night and it's just easy to kind of grab my phone and, you know, Carrie: sure. Kevin: look up my Pages app and I write something out. But when you write in long hand, there is. Well, I'll just briefly tell you, years and years ago, I was on the masthead of Poets and Writers Magazine, and they would send me to all over the country to interview famous writers who had new books come out. And one of those was the novelist, Marilynne Robinson whose work you probably know. Carrie: Oh, absolutely. I love her. Kevin: She's wonderful. And we had this discussion, she had the idea of, you have a front mind and a back mind. And your front [00:16:00] mind is the mind that you use to accomplish very practical things. Like I used my front mind to, you know, put the water on to boil for this tea and to put the tea bag in the mug and all of that. She said she didn't trust her front mind to bring her into the realm of truly true creativity in a literary sense because she felt like if you are consciously sitting down and trying to just come up with something that you're fixating on, you will tend to, what will come out will be conventional. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: It will be left brain stuff. That's another way to look at it. Front and back. It's left, right, and it will be logical and it will be linear and it will not be what you want. Carrie: Right. Kevin: And I said, okay, so [00:17:00] that, you know, she said, I have to access my back brain for that. And I said, well, how do you do that? And she said, by writing in longhand. She felt like, you know, all of the first drafts of her novels are written in longhand. And that's because when she, I don't know what it is. It's the physical activity of touching paper with a pen or pencil and the flowing, the cursive aspect of that. And it allows for you to write slower for one thing. But in her mind, she falls into a sort of different state of mind when she writes in longhand. And you know, it took me years to connect that to my writing practice. But I do the writing practice in longhand. And, I think that probably there's something related to writing in longhand that really [00:18:00] lends itself to generating fresh material and material that's surprising, as you say, and is not, it's not the usual kind of obvious, you know, she said conventional. I would say obvious. You write sort of the obvious thing if you're really just composing on a computer. But you, Carrie: yeah. Kevin: if you're writing in long hand, you slip into maybe something of a, I won't say, you know, hypnotic state or, but you can access your subconscious that way or at least begin to access it. And I have found that to be true too. Carrie: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I rarely compose first drafts on the computer, and I've talked about this with other writers as well, and I think I have read that there is something neurologic, there are neurological differences between writing in longhand and composing on a computer that do [00:19:00] affect I guess where in the brain your material is coming from. Kevin: There's one other aspect of it, which I think is that when you have your rule, keep your hand moving, keep writing, let it flow, you know, make associative leaps and just write whatever comes to mind. Then what you've done is that you've turned off your self-editing mechanism. You're required to not edit or not stop and think, just keep, keep producing something and that, you know, that, philosophy probably originates from the seventies, you know, Carrie: yeah. Kevin: Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, I think that was partly, was it Natalie Goldberg who said that? Carrie: Yes. Kevin: Write down the bones and just get something on paper. And then you've given yourself something to go back to [00:20:00] later and edit and work on. And if you are trying to write perfect sentences as one does, and there's something, if you think about it, there's something about word processing, the ease with which you can backtrack and you know, delete things and add things. It is a kind of writing tool that lends itself to over editing and, you know, it keeps you from getting stuff out in a, in a sort of flowing way, and my impulse is to, you know, worry a sentence to death before I let it go and move on to the next one. So that's another reason why writing longhand as a writing exercise really works. Carrie: Yeah. Well, did you have a specific writing prompt that you wanted to share today? Kevin: Well, I teach at the Carnegie Center. I've taught there for a number of years now, [00:21:00] and when I do my classes on haiku, you know, I have taught several classes on writing haiku, and one of the things that I find is that, you know, for one thing, I call them haiku, but they're really senryu, most of them in that they're not, they're not the traditional observation of nature. They're more inward looking. But I also think that, you know, the word senryu just confuses people. And I don't wanna do that, so I just call it a haiku. Kevin: But one of the things that I have found that people really enjoy. I would give them a choice. I would say, I want you to, when we would have a timed exercise, and I would say just in the next five to seven minutes, I want you to write a haiku about either something that is troubling you or something you want more than anything else. And a lot of people [00:22:00] really take to that like, you know, a duck to water. And I found that it produces the opportunity for people to tap into their, their inner angst. And, you know, we all have it. We're all walking, you know, we're walking crucibles of angst, you know, every waking minute and every sleeping minute too, probably to some extent. What I found is that people can write a haiku slash senryu about either one of those topics almost easier than anything else. And I think it's a good, not just for haiku, it's a good, those are good prompts for poems that might be longer, could take any number of forms. They could, they could be sonnets. Or vilanelles or whatever. But those are the prompts that I think I probably feel like more of my students have responded well to and productively to than any other. Carrie: Mm-hmm. So [00:23:00] how, I mean, haiku is generally, you know, very imagistic. How would you suggest someone go from these kind of abstract concepts of something that is worrying you or something that you want, to making it specific? Kevin: Well, you know, and I think senryu often are less imagistic than traditional haiku, but I think that, you know, I have here my book, Midnight, which is a book of all haiku that I did a few years ago, and all of these had, these were all written to visual prompts, which happened to be my photographs. You know, this was a hybrid sort of book. And there's a, here's, you can see a photograph of a group of starlings, sort of swarming over some trees. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: I saw this while driving on a [00:24:00] country road near Nicholasville a few years ago. And this is more of a traditional haiku in the sense that it's, it is imagistic. "At dusk, the starlings dive and circle in the sky, becoming the night." And I think that is, that is clearly, oh, and now here's a, this is more of a senryu. And it was prompted by this visual image, which is some shadows. And I don't know. I think this photograph must have struck me as having sort of a contemplative quality and it, the haiku, or really senryu goes, "Sometimes I wonder how it's come to this. And then I remember how." So that's kind of, that is [00:25:00] sort of the spectrum of how my, you know, they can either be just pretty much outward looking or inward looking. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: Yeah. Carrie: Oh, well thank you for sharing those examples. Do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? Kevin: Well, I think in keeping sort of with the general tenor of this conversation, I would say that, you know. Whether it's writing practice or working with prompts or doing ekphrastic poetry, which my book Midnight sort of was, or writing from encounters with nature, you know, Basho, who sort of created what we now know as the, the modern haiku by separating it from something else. His poetry was almost entirely composed in response to what he saw walking around Japan on foot. Carrie: Mm-hmm. [00:26:00] Kevin: And I think that's why in his case, you know, the haiku really came about and took the form that it, that it currently has, which is you see something that is in front of you and you respond to it and then it takes you, in the course of the haiku, there's usually some kind of a turn, into some new insight. Some new observation that you make, and that sort of spins the poem in a new direction. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Kevin: And I think that, you know, that is true, and can be true and probably should be true in almost any poem. Almost any poem is a, I feel like a good poem has some aspect of a journey. And at some point that journey takes a bit of a left turn or a right turn. There is a turn where the, there is a question kind of being asked early on, and then there's a either an answer or the beginning of an [00:27:00] answer near the end, and I think that's important. But overall, what I'm trying to say very, in a very highly out roundabout way is that it's important to, to get things down in an unfiltered sort of way, access your back brain, as Marilynne Robinson would say, however you do it. Mm-hmm. Writing, writing in long hand, maybe that helps. And don't worry about what it, what the words are actually, what order the words are in. Just get it down and then work on, and then come back to it and work on it. Mm-hmm. 'cause if you try to bash out a poem that is perfect with, with every line that you write and you, you're, you won't move on to the next line until you perfect the one you're on. You're not gonna write very many poems. Because that, that process does not lend itself to, producing many poems. I mean, you might be, you might be one of those. I guess there are some poets who are, who are [00:28:00] remarkably non prolific. I mean, some really, you know, great ones didn't write that much. But I think most, most poets, you know, have an expectation of themselves that they're gonna produce, you know, at minimum a few hundred pretty good poems in a life of a writing poet, right? You know, it's not enough just to write maybe 10 or a dozen. Carrie: Right. [Laughter] Kevin: You wanna write a few more than that and so generate your poems in any of these ways that we've discussed. Then go back and buff them up, polish them. You can use the front brain to do the editing process. I think that's probably the best and biggest lesson that I could pass on today. Carrie: And I think that applies no matter what genre of writing Kevin: Yes, that's true. Carrie: you're in. Yeah. Kevin: And it can be true for an essay or a novel even, you know. Fiction. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Kevin: Yeah. Carrie: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Kevin. We really appreciate it. Kevin: Thank you, Carrie. It's been a [00:29:00] pleasure. 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 One and Two, at the links on our podcast website.