THE NEXT BIG THING - a viral self interview series
(The Next Big Thing)
Self-Interview with Shelly Taylor
I’m
grateful to Arianne Zwartjes for tagging me in The Next Big Thing, a viral self-interview, and to those I tag here who will
follow and who will follow them.
What is the working title of the book?
Lions, Remonstrance is my second full-length collection. I’m also co-editing--with the one & only Abraham Smith--an anthology of contemporary American poets birthed & raised up & somehow belonging to the holler, lovingly titled Hick Poetics.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
(1) Life coming back together after it seems to fall apart; writing inadvertently follows the life trajectory. For three years I wrote my life in this second book & that is simply it. Or, I had a lil heartbreak & I wrote on through it, you know...
(2)
In summer of 2011 I was in Key West & thinking a lot about how I’d like to
see a collection of contemporary voices of poets raised liminal to urbanity,
whose mother was the silence and father a culvert of leaves, as Abe says. And now here we go Hick Poetics, an enormous undertaking of enormous importance, as
nothing of this sort has been attempted & Lost Roads is our press.
What genre does your book fall under?
My second full-length is poetry--much more so than Heifer, my first. // Hick Poetic is an anthology of essays & verse.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Really all I could say is Ben Nichols of Lucero would be just perfect. He's not an actor but who cares? He'd play the man-boy-soldier. He will pull you under. The speaker can be visually anonymous. I would choose anonymity, after all this is a book of verse, hardly cinematic in its whiplash but nice looking men are always nice representationally.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
[[[Psychological exploration of the troubled female consciousness situated in the southern gothic-esque etiquette.]]] That sounds dopey serious, I have always been overwrought. It is [[[a book of broken down love songs.]]] & what is left is marry yourself on a deserted island, something Shakespearean in concept, as in, this is your body-life on fire from the hunted: so won, so lost.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Two years-ish.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Life. I had a novel started & poetry took back
over me as it needed to in 2010.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? Will
your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Lions is out there right now waiting for a home. I watched a lot of Bonanza during the writing of this thing & American mythos are shot through the voicing: what is masculine? What is but a lady drowning, a man?
Lions is out there right now waiting for a home. I watched a lot of Bonanza during the writing of this thing & American mythos are shot through the voicing: what is masculine? What is but a lady drowning, a man?
The poems are
desert, southern, & beach poems:
they roam & are truthful I feel, as I don’t hold much back; they almost
killed me in a way but I’m done now, thank goodness; I can look at life
forwardly, as in what is next? Fresh starts are exciting!!
As for the anthology, did I state yet that
Lost Roads is our Press? I mean, c’mon!
My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:
