Art Chowder September | October 2017, Issue 11 | Page 30

P O E T K AT H E R I N E S M I T H
By Karen Mobley
Please describe your process.
My process generally looks something
like this: Wake up. Make coffee. Stare
at things. Write some things down. Stare
some more. Write some more things
down. Eat a snack. Go outside and poke
around in the garden. Pull some weeds.
Watch ants excavating sand from between
the patio bricks. Go inside and type up
what I’ve written. Add some things about
ants. Put a chicken in there. Revise the
line breaks. which just won the Pulitzer, is remark-
able); Jamaal May, who recently came
to Spokane as part of Get Lit!; and Kath-
ryn Nuernberger’s new book, The End of
Pink, which is amazing. And then there
are some local poets who are also friends,
but I’m sure I’d love their work even if I
didn’t know them: Nance Van Winckel,
Maya Jewell Zeller, Ellen Welcker, Laura
Read (our current city poet laureate), and
Christopher Howell.
That said, I don’t have one set way of
making a poem. Sometimes it happens
the way I described. Sometimes I spend
several days (or weeks) thinking about
a particular idea, maybe an article I’ve
read, a conversation I had or something I
saw, and over the course of days or weeks
I’ll jot down my thoughts until finally
something comes together that feels like
a poem. I’ve had a great time with writing work-
shops at Spark Central, where poets
of different levels of experience work
together and write poems on a simi-
lar theme. Nance did one to correspond
with Kay O’Rourke’s “The River Re-
members” paintings that are on display
at Spark; Laura did the “I am a Town”
project; and then just recently I helped
Laura and Brooke Matson with a project
called “Unloved: An Encyclopedia of Os-
tracized Animals,” based on sketches by
local artist Jessica Wade. These projects
speak to the spirit of collaboration and
mutual encouragement that exists in Spo-
kane’s writing scene, and it’s wonderful
to be part of it.
I’m part of an online writing group that
contributes significantly to my process.
There are eight of us, all women, and we
take turns sharing writing prompts each
week. Those prompts sometimes gen-
erate poems. The poems the other poets
write sometimes generate poems of my
own. Everyone has a different style so
the prompts we come up with are all very
different, which is helpful for generat-
ing new material. My work is stronger
and has more variety to it than it would
without that support network. And it’s so
helpful to have people cheering you on,
as it were, since it’s often discouraging
and frustrating to try to gain recognition
as a poet.
Who are your favorite poets,
publications or events?
My favorite poets tend to change with
who I’m reading. Right now, these in-
clude: Tyehimba Jess (his book Olio,
30 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
Do you have any new publications
or recognition?
I received a SAGA grant from Spokane
Arts in March for a poetry project that
I started for Lilac City Fairy Tales. My
first full-length poetry collection will be
published this fall by Scablands Books. I
have poems in the current issues of Bell-
ingham Review and Carve Magazine, and
forthcoming in the Laurel Review, Duen-
de, The Collagist, and The Cresset.
The book that will be out this fall, Book
of Exodus, is based on a Russian fami-
ly that fled religious persecution in the
1930s and lived in the Siberian wilder-
ness without contact with the outside
world for more than 40 years. The proj-
ect for which I received the SAGA grant
is based on the Fox sisters, who were
Spiritualist mediums in the late 1800s. I
think I’m drawn to these stories because
they’re the stories of outliers and outsid-
ers, people who do things that aren’t quite
believable, who are driven by a particular
faith in something—or maybe it’s some-
one else’s faith, and they’re just carried
along—and I’m interested in what com-
pels them.
What other activities inform your work?
I make collage art that combines words
and images. In poetry, I create images
with my words, and I started wondering
what would happen if I could add lay-
ers of imagery without using words. The
words add meaning to the images, and
the images add meaning to the words, but
rather than having one illustrate the other,
the relationship between the two depends
on the fact that they coexist in the same
space.
I raise a garden and backyard chickens,
and those things show up in my work,
either overtly or as a sort of background
noise. Working in the garden and making
poems are similar to me—figuring out
where each thing goes, noticing how each
word or plant plays off the one beside it,
finding the weeds or the things that aren’t
working and pulling them out, rearrang-
ing. There is a continual practice for
both—watering, feeding, pruning—then
spending time in the space and observ-
ing. I let the plant or poem grow on its
own, working with the shape it wants to
take rather than what I want, or thought
I wanted.