The final week of October was the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s eighteenth annual Writers Week. After a busy yet rewarding week of craft talks, readings, and panels with visiting authors and publishing professionals, a group of MFA and BFA students had a discussion with the poet Ross Gay about his writing process and his advice for writers and writing teachers alike. Ross Gay is the editor at Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and a professor at Indiana University. At the previous night’s packed Buckner reading, Gay read some of his upcoming work as well as poems from his book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
During the Q&A, Gay talked in more detail about his upcoming book and his writing process for the poems included in it. His forthcoming book is a collection of poems he called “delights,” which he wrote over the course of a year. Each day, he set a timer for thirty minutes and used that time to write a poem by hand about something that delighted him, whether that was two people carrying grocery bags or a laundry bag together or neighbors gathering around a fig tree in Pennsylvania to pick and share the fruit. After writing about ten or so poems, he would transcribe them, taking care not to revise too much while transcribing, as he felt that the more he revised, the more he was messing up the poems. He told us that writing these delights was not without its challenges. Around day four of the project, he got stuck. He felt like the work he had produced on day three was not as strong as he wanted it to be, which made him call into question the entire thing. Would the work he created be worth the time? Would he be able to maintain the project for the whole year, as he intended? But he decided to do his best and not get in his head about how the poems might be received or if he missed a day here or there. In the end, he wrote about two hundred ninety poems. Now he is working on revising, picking the strongest of the poems for the new book. As a group of less experienced writers, it was reassuring to hear that a poet many of us look up to has moments of doubt just like we do, and that we can push through those doubts by focusing less on what the end product will be and more on the writing process itself.
One question people had for Gay at both his reading and the Q&A session was one regarding the positive nature of his poems. Many of the writers felt that modern poems were usually focused on the negative aspects of life and were intrigued by Gay’s ability to focus on unabashed gratitude and delights. Gay said he worried that people saw the baseline of life as despair and that moments of joy were simply thought of as breaks from the norm. Gay believes the actual baseline of life is connection and care. He talked about how so often in a day we experience small moments of kindness—people holding the door or checking to make sure that someone who tripped is all right. Although he is heartbroken all the time that does not negate the joy he experiences.
Gay also talked about the connection he felt between writing and gardening, his other passion. He said writing poetry reminded him of his time participating in an orchard planting project, where he knew he was creating and cultivating something that would likely outlive him, just like his poetry hopefully will. His overall goal is to take great care of his plants, his poetry, and his reader.
–Sarah Wall
Photo Credit: Melissa Crowe 2017