Thinking is 50 percent of writing. Researching is another 30 percent. Fingers to keyboard makes up only 20 percent of the work at times. Then revision begins a new type of cycle. I remember these figures when the itch to be ungenerous with myself emerges, the whole you-should-be-writing thing—should being an unrealistic normative behavior that I always seek to resist. I also remember: It’s never the last poem, never the last book. Thinking of the longevity of the work—collapsing linearity into the strange and false construct that it is—takes a large amount of pressure off writing. Turning to researching and thinking makes the possibilities of my writing become boundless. Reading and imbibing the outside world fall under thinking for me too. When I’m feeling siloed in my writing (I almost wrote soiled…and that, too, feels valid in this thought) I turn to the books that continue to wreck me—drawing inspiration from innovators such as Dionne Brand, Cecilia Vicuña, Han Kang, Cristina Rivera Garza, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julietta Singh, and Marie NDiaye. These authors trouble genre, the sociopolitical, and literature. They give me permission to do the same. This communion of thoughts and words continues to shape my writing.
—Felicia Zamora, author of Interstitial Archaeology
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2025)
Photo credit: Louise Erdeljohn Photography