Greetings! The charming and talented Anne Champion tagged me for the Next Big Thing Series, in which writers give brief interviews about their forthcoming books. Here's a link to Anne's post about her forthcoming poetry collection Reluctant Mistress. Check it out:
I've chosen to answer questions about How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents, my poetry collaboration with Daniela Olszewska, forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press. But I'm giving a quick shout out here to two more forthcoming books: X Marks The Dress: A Registry, my hybrid poetry collection with Kristina Marie Darling, forthcoming from Gold Wake Press; and F IN, an erasure of my own murder mystery novella, forthcoming from Noctuary Press. Too, I'll mention a new project I've just started, a collaboration with fiction writer Kelly Magee. Let's just say there's fur involved. Fur, scales, and fire. Stay tuned!
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| Old Bermuda Inn, Staten Island, New York by Corinne May Botz |
What is the working title of the book?
How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents
Where did the idea come from for the book?
How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents is a collaboration with poet Daniela Olszewska; we brainstormed everything together, including the concept. Each of the poems takes its title from an article on the website wikiHow; each poem asks the question, "How do you do X?" We used lots of different styles and narrative voices; it's absolutely not a confessional or lyric collection. We wrote the poems together, sending daily half-poems on email and finishing each other's work.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry/hybrid forms.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
We've included a series of humorous poems focused on office culture -- working from home, sharing food with co-workers, etc. These poems feel visually comic to me, and I can imagine a movie version. Maybe the cast of 30 Rock or Arrested Development could take it on as a project! Or Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert -- there you go.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
In these miniature mock instruction manuals, lyric poetry meets wiki, generating wickedly funny prose poems based on the website wikiHow.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Two months.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I admire Daniela's aesthetic and wanted to challenge myself to write with more humor, playfulness, and joy. I wanted to get away from the serious themes I'd worked with for years, and to avoid personal narrative of any kind. Writing this book was great fun; it let me try on new voices.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
wikiHow is a fascinating website. It's full of weird emotions -- longing, jealousy, fear, rage, passion. It's totally epic, like an opera for our time. We tried to pull out some of the stranger articles to highlight the fantastic optimism of the website itself.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The book will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2014. I'm not represented by an agent.
My tagged writer for next Wednesday is:
Daniel M. Shapiro
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