Creative ID

During Amy Holman's publishing lecture last spring at Spalding, she suggested a new answer to the inevitable question, "So what kind of writing do you do?" Instead of answering with a genre, Amy urged us to fire back with a "Creative ID," an elevator-ride-length description of our artistic fingerprint. Since then, I've been struggling to compose one for myself. You'll find Matt's neatly tucked into his introduction below. Mind promises to be a little messier, but that's part of my identity, so why fight it?

Here goes: For me, the seed of a piece usually comes from a real life incident or a dream that haunts me until I decide to write it down. From there I write until I find something (usually quite unexpected) to which I can link the seed to help me, and hopefully the reader, make some sense of it. Formally, I like to experiment, using everything from sonnets and tankas to open form and prose poems. Next venture: graphic poetry!

So that's my first attempt at getting something down "on paper." We'd love to hear your Creative IDs, so feel free to post them below, or email them to us, and we'll post them here. Thanks for reading.