1. What is the working title of the book?
(Daughters), which is a companion to another manuscript currently circulating in the world called Daughters of your century.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
My daughters Sonia and Alma. How being a parent has changed my orientation as a poet, reversed my process. For many years I wrote big outward systems first, then clawed back toward (or sometimes still away from) my individual experience. Since Sonia’s birth and a little before even, I’ve been drawn to chart the ghosts of those systems in the daily experiences of parenting. Working from inner and quotidian experiences first. Poems have gotten smaller, sometimes too small I worry.
3. What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry
4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
I’m bad with movies. I would be played by Spiderman I guess. Kate would be played by the colors in City of God—full of a love that holds all that strife and hope together. Sonia would be played by the sparkles coming off a fairy godmother’s wand or a unicorn’s horn. Magic, basically. Alma would be played by something elfin, sylvan, animist.
5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Sipping coffee in PJs the morning magic’d up: Baby Unicorn stuffed into the attic legs akimbo in the dollhouse where things arrive & stay or don’t—Sonia tells me this is the right place for Baby Unicorn, as opposed to such effluvia as yellow plastic helicopters, or tiny creatures she refers to as chinchillas (but who really knows their provenance)—Baby Unicorn who is the totem animal of these months, how will we remember it if we don’t write it, here or in the baby book we have tried to keep but can never invent time to open.
6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Going on five years. The draft isn’t done though.
7. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
See #2.
8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
My children are amazing.
9. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Stealing Thom’s answer: Neither, I hope.
