Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

Jack Gilbert addresses this experience directly in “A Brief for the Defense”: “If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,” he writes, “we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.”

Great art reaches through the fog, toward this secret heart—and it shows it to you, holds it before you.

if I had to narrow down the greatest gratitude of my university years, it would be reading Toni Morrison—specifically, reading Beloved. Perhaps more than any other text, Beloved made me the person I am. It’s the book that altered my personal and creative DNA.

I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character—and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel—is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, together, make sense of character.

Healing is relational. We like to think that one can heal oneself just by force of will, but my experience certainly aligns with the argument the passage makes: We need other people.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life, which begins with this incredible first sentence: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”

Once that first line succeeds in selling me on the worthiness of some totality that in no way, at that point, actually exists, I can continue.

Writing free verse, it’s hard to know exactly when a line has the feel or rhythm that you want. It’s hard to describe, though you know it when you feel it. For me, it’s often about gracefulness. I want graceful lines and graceful sentences. I try to write very simply. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences tend to be quite conventional—subject, ve

So we would go scrumping—do you know the term “to scrump”? It’s an English word that basically means to steal apples, but also has come to mean to steal any type of fruit.