Brent Fisk Member Member since 2006

Where do you prefer to do your creative work?

Anywhere I can get ten or fifteen minutes to bang out a draft. I find I often move through the day with a few lines percolating. I try to keep a pad of paper near the bed for those fragments that come at the edge of sleep. I've lost too many to sunshine to think they'll still be there when I am fully awake.

Do you read literary journals and magazines regularly? If so, which are your favorites?

Rattle, Southeast Review, Gulfcoast. I also read a lot of poems online through the Poetry Foundation, and I love to listen to Tim Green's Critique of the Week through Rattle. The poems workshopped can be wildly uneven, but even then I am pulling ideas for editing and generating my own work. I would love to participate more, but I am always at work when they go live with their workshop.

Who are your literary (or artistic) heroes?

John Berryman and CD Wright for their banged-up strangeness. Robert Hayden and Charles Wright. Dorianne Laux, Charles Simic, WH Auden, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich and Wallace Stevens. Ross Gay for his conversational tone and joy in the moment, even the difficult ones.

For short stories I love "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "the Kind of Light that Shines on Texas" by Reginald McKnight-- Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Sherwood Anderson, George Saunders and Flannery O'Connor.

Novels-- Faulkner, Harper Lee, James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Russo, William Kennedy, Lewis Nordan. And dozens of others I've temporarily forgotten.

How much of a typical day (or week) are you able to dedicate to your creative work?

Maybe an hour or two for the actual writing and revision that has to be done at a desk. But I am collecting imagery, dialogue, and threads, filaments, and fragments all the time. I never worry about "writers' block" because I find those periods of dormancy invaluable for recharging the water table of creative thought.

What makes you procrastinate when you could be doing your creative work? What are your strategies for finding focus?

Good television, movies and the churn of news are constant distractions.

How much time do you spend reading for pleasure or edification?

I am a lazy reader except for poetry. I will sometimes read dozens of poems a day. I read at least one short story or creative essay a week, and I will read a novel when it grabs me. I give it about fifty pages and if I'm still struggling, I move on. Sometimes, it's not the novel, it's the reader. Some of my favorite books are ones I struggled to get into before loving them eventually. The slim Wide Sargasso Sea is an excellent example. I started that three times before completing it one night and then immediately rereading it. So good, but I wasn't in the right headspace the first few times I opened the cover.

Do you have a personal creative style? How would you describe it?

I use a lot of simile and metaphor, and I love the setting and physical world to further everything about the poetry or prose I'm working on. I love to use the specific names of things-- birds, butterflies, tree, weeds, knots, hats. We always jump to the generic, and we're losing touch with the texture of the world because of it.

Where do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration in relationships, loss, grief, nature, childhood, and all things liminal.

What single creative achievement are you most proud of?

That I have published widely in magazines though I have never published a book, and that I have kept writing and publishing over decades when so many talented peers have given it up. The whole process is strange-- both a grind and a joy.

What fictional character would you most like to be?

Jim Finch.

If you could choose to be born in any era, which one would you choose and why?

As fraught as the world is right now, I will still choose now. I have people in my life that I love and who love me, and I would not risk those connections to live in some imagined richness or simplicity. I am a child of jukeboxes, joysticks, punch bugs and Western Sizzlers. That's good enough for me.

What advice would you give to a young, budding writer (or artist) with less experience than yourself?

Never trust the confidence you have in your early drafts, read great writers voraciously, and pay attention to the world that surrounds you. Find trusted readers who give good feedback, and realize good feedback may come from writers who are not particularly good at it themselves. The opposite is also true. Also, revision is not the same thing as copyediting.

For your first draft (or sketch), do you prefer analog or digital tools, or a mix?

Either. With typing, the drafting can keep up with the pace of my thoughts better, but there is something about the physical touch of pen to paper that has its own magic. Slowing the drafting process may be what the poem needs.

Do you incorporate generative AI/LLMs into your creative process? If so, how?

No. I saw the Terminator and 2001. I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave...

What is your favorite word and why?

That would be like picking a favorite song or singer. I couldn't do it. I love words with nuance, multiple meanings because of the texture they offer in their use. I also love verbs that are precise-- nibbled, pranced, flicked, rumbled.

What would you like your epitaph to say?

Well, I'm going to try and live forever.

Are you an unreliable narrator?

When I have to be.