Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we’ve been able to start a series of interviews with authors appearing in current issues of The Kenyon Review. Here is the newest: Meghan O’Rourke speaking with our poetry editor, David Baker (her poems appearing in our Fall 2006 issue are available here). My personal favorite part is O’Rourke’s method of finding time for poetry:
As for my own writing, my father once gave me some good advice. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation while holding two jobs and raising three kids with my mom, who worked full-time too. Every night he came home from his day job and wrote for thirty minutes before he made our dinner, etc. It took him many years to complete the dissertation, but the day finally came when it was done. One day I was complaining to him about time, and he just said, if you want to, write for thirty minutes a day; it’s not a lot, but you can write a book that way. That’s one lucky thing about being a poet: you can write a book in small installments, if you are greedy enough to seize them.