Interview with Karen Williams
This is the rest of the interview I did with Karen Williams (Some parts of this interview have been cut for space!) Karen Williams is an instructor at Chatham University and Seton Hill University. She has lived in Haiti and Africa. Karen writes children’s books, non-fiction and poetry. She is the author of over a dozen books. Her latest book, My Name is Sangoel, is a children’s picture book co-authored with Khadra Mohammed and illustrated by Catherine Stock. My Name is Sangoel is the story of a refugee boy from Sudan who is resettled in the United States. THE BOOK COMES OUT TODAY! You can purchase it through Barnes and Noble’s website. GO HERE
How did you start writing poetry?
I always said I could not write poetry. I had never formally studied the genre beyond what I learned in high school. I didn’t think I had the skill or the patience to learn the craft. Then several things came together in my life. Five or six years ago I reconnected with my friend, Sharon McDermott who is a talented poet and teacher. I reconnected with her at or around the same time that our family started poetry night. Everyone was required to bring a poem to dinner on Sunday evening. This became a popular event with family and friends. I also saw the documentary about Bob Dylan and everything he said about language and lyrics suddenly made so much sense. I had all this material I felt I wasn’t using to the best of my ability in my other writing for children, fiction and creative non-fiction. It just wasn’t working. Sharon and I began work shopping each other’s work. I commented on her creative non-fiction and she helped me with my poetry. All of a sudden this whole new genre just opened up for me. I couldn’t get enough poetry. I began studying and writing it. It was very freeing for me.
Would you consider yourself a narrative poet?
My poems are often written in the narrative voice because I believe poems written with a narrative approach connect with the reader. When I went back to Haiti, recently to visit for three weeks, the poems just flowed and they were very much narrative poems. The poems I wrote tended to be narrative because I have this close connection to Haiti because I lived there for three years. I had lived there for a long time and I had already written some fiction based on the experience, but this work was more about my inside world, my memories combined with what I was experiencing in the new moments of this visit. The material wouldn’t work in longer prose and poetry served to capture my emotions and the images that I found most affecting. Poetry gave me a new voice, to express my connection with that complex country.
Would you say you relied on memory for these sets of poems or did it all come from current observations?
Both, I think, of course. Haiti is a difficult place to live, to be. I have always had trouble trying to figure out how or why I could live with the poverty and degradation all around me, the terrible diseases and starvation and still love being there. Poetry helped me to explore this and express how deeply I feel about the place. I could play with the images and the language and make some sense out of my experiences on a more raw, gut level without having to make them work in prose.
How do you decide when a work should be prose or poetry?
I recently had an idea for a picture book. About two years ago I caught the tail end of an interview on NRP. A scientist was asking did you ever notice the mounds and mounds of leaves in the park in fall. Then you come back in the spring and they’re gone. Where did they go? I thought that’s a great idea picture book. How would I treat this? I had some success with a similar picture book that used a concept in science, the phases of the moon. I could make a great picture book mystery with this concept about leaves disappearing too. I tried to write the story and I couldn’t work it out. I also tried several other story lines. And, then I realized, “Oh wait, this is a poem!” I knew it was going to be really celebratory, following the child in the leaves; it was going to be a long poem, which I made it into a picture book. So, it connected my original main genre, children’s books to my newfound interest in poetry. This is really when it all came together for me. I started to feel comfortable enough to allow poetry into my primary writing genre.
I reconnected to something I used to tell my students, “Writing a picture book is a lot like writing poetry, every word counts.” My skills with the picture book helped my poetry with my ability and interest in writing poetry. Now, I am finding the new things I am learning about language through poetry has strengthened all of my other writing.
How did you start writing poetry?
I always said I could not write poetry. I had never formally studied the genre beyond what I learned in high school. I didn’t think I had the skill or the patience to learn the craft. Then several things came together in my life. Five or six years ago I reconnected with my friend, Sharon McDermott who is a talented poet and teacher. I reconnected with her at or around the same time that our family started poetry night. Everyone was required to bring a poem to dinner on Sunday evening. This became a popular event with family and friends. I also saw the documentary about Bob Dylan and everything he said about language and lyrics suddenly made so much sense. I had all this material I felt I wasn’t using to the best of my ability in my other writing for children, fiction and creative non-fiction. It just wasn’t working. Sharon and I began work shopping each other’s work. I commented on her creative non-fiction and she helped me with my poetry. All of a sudden this whole new genre just opened up for me. I couldn’t get enough poetry. I began studying and writing it. It was very freeing for me.
Would you consider yourself a narrative poet?
My poems are often written in the narrative voice because I believe poems written with a narrative approach connect with the reader. When I went back to Haiti, recently to visit for three weeks, the poems just flowed and they were very much narrative poems. The poems I wrote tended to be narrative because I have this close connection to Haiti because I lived there for three years. I had lived there for a long time and I had already written some fiction based on the experience, but this work was more about my inside world, my memories combined with what I was experiencing in the new moments of this visit. The material wouldn’t work in longer prose and poetry served to capture my emotions and the images that I found most affecting. Poetry gave me a new voice, to express my connection with that complex country.
Would you say you relied on memory for these sets of poems or did it all come from current observations?
Both, I think, of course. Haiti is a difficult place to live, to be. I have always had trouble trying to figure out how or why I could live with the poverty and degradation all around me, the terrible diseases and starvation and still love being there. Poetry helped me to explore this and express how deeply I feel about the place. I could play with the images and the language and make some sense out of my experiences on a more raw, gut level without having to make them work in prose.
How do you decide when a work should be prose or poetry?
I recently had an idea for a picture book. About two years ago I caught the tail end of an interview on NRP. A scientist was asking did you ever notice the mounds and mounds of leaves in the park in fall. Then you come back in the spring and they’re gone. Where did they go? I thought that’s a great idea picture book. How would I treat this? I had some success with a similar picture book that used a concept in science, the phases of the moon. I could make a great picture book mystery with this concept about leaves disappearing too. I tried to write the story and I couldn’t work it out. I also tried several other story lines. And, then I realized, “Oh wait, this is a poem!” I knew it was going to be really celebratory, following the child in the leaves; it was going to be a long poem, which I made it into a picture book. So, it connected my original main genre, children’s books to my newfound interest in poetry. This is really when it all came together for me. I started to feel comfortable enough to allow poetry into my primary writing genre.
I reconnected to something I used to tell my students, “Writing a picture book is a lot like writing poetry, every word counts.” My skills with the picture book helped my poetry with my ability and interest in writing poetry. Now, I am finding the new things I am learning about language through poetry has strengthened all of my other writing.
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