But how do I know when a piece is completed? That’s hard to say because I so often fuck up a piece that is ringing with harmony and I’m just a little too dull to hear it…It’s like you’re running towards the edge of a cliff and sometimes you manage to stop just in the nick of time and sometimes you run straight off. Sometimes you get scared and you stop far too early, and it works.
Author Archives: Artisanal Writer
Sharon Berg
My first live-in partner was a painter. I was his model. When we first got together, he used egg tempera, then oils. His vision for his development as an artist was to reach back in time, using previous artistic mediums and methods to discover their limitations for himself.
David Bergen
It is difficult to write about a place if I haven’t experienced it personally. The preacher in the market in Santiago, Guatemala; the ferry crossing the river to China Beach in Danang; the smell of a 20-horse two-stroke outboard in the Lake of the Woods; the size and shape of the pillows in a hotel in Phuket Thailand—these small details informed each of my stories.
Marty Gervais
I write in the bathtub. I step into a steaming bath, lay back and lines of a poem begin to spill out of me. It’s more a recitation than anything else. And I hear my voice echoing in the tiled bathroom, and this provides me a sense of the poem’s rhythm.
Al Moritz
Poetry is from and for everyone but that it’s also the prophet who is not accepted in his own town and who can work no works of power there because of the lack of faith. I had to move on to elsewhere, and I’m still having to move on to other elsewheres. But I don’t shake the dust of any of the places off my feet.
Pratap Reddy
Non-success is a common phenomenon in all human endeavours, but for a writer, the disappointment feels even more acute…But I have trained myself to swallow my disappointment in a quick gulp and move on to writing the next query letter.
The Artisanal Writer 