{"id":277,"date":"2011-06-03T15:59:59","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T15:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=277"},"modified":"2020-12-09T16:12:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T16:12:12","slug":"what-makes-writers-tick-tamar-yoseloff-answers-ists-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/what-makes-writers-tick-tamar-yoseloff-answers-ists-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"What makes writers tick – Tamar Yoseloff answers IS&T's questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seven Questions<\/span><\/p>\n

In this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process.<\/p>\n


1. Where do you write? <\/span>(do you have an office, room, bus journey that you find yourself and your writing?)<\/p>\n

I have two writing places in my house \u2013 one is a desk in the study, and one is a shed in the back garden. The garden shed is too cold to use all winter, but I like the sound of the squirrels running over the roof. All my poetry books are in the study, so I\u2019m most often in there. But I do like writing on trains.

2. How do you write?<\/span> (into a notebook or straight onto a computer?)<\/p>\n

I am very attached to my computer, and most drafts start there. I like being able to see the structure, to move things around while I\u2019m redrafting. I print out all my drafts and staple them together, so that I can chart the process of each poem. I also have a little notebook that I carry around in my handbag in case I have an idea, but it\u2019s really just for note-taking. The only time I will write a draft in my notebook is on the train, and then I tend to write sonnets, because the notebook is sonnet-sized.

3. Roughly how much time do you spend each week on creative writing related activities?<\/span> (writing, editing, correspondence & submissions)<\/p>\n

If you count teaching prep and reading students\u2019 poems, then I would say it\u2019s 9 to 5, five days a week (with some time given over to the usual distractions). I tend to read the newspapers at the weekend and watch bad television. <\/p>\n

4. What time of day do you usually write?<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a regular writing time, nor do I stick to a certain number of hours a day, but I do like writing in the morning. Not too early \u2013 I\u2019m not one of those crack-of-dawn writers. But I\u2019m fresher then, and perhaps less distracted by the trivialities of the day. <\/p>\n

5. What does it feel like to write? <\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that it feels any different to anything else; it\u2019s so much a part of me and how I think. Writing has always been my way of finding order the world. <\/p>\n

6. Are there any stimuli that will usually trigger you into writing?<\/span><\/p>\n

I am a very visual person, so it will often be something I\u2019ve seen. And more recently, paintings have been an enormous inspiration. I\u2019m really a frustrated artist, so writing poems about art is the next best thing. <\/p>\n

7. What are you working on now?<\/span><\/p>\n

I usually have a bit of a hiatus between books, simply because I find each collection is a way of working through a particular theme, and once I\u2019ve finished, I\u2019m looking for the next thing I want to write about. I\u2019ve written a small handful of poems since The City with Horns, but already a theme is emerging to do with boundaries and borderlines, so I would like to see where that leads me. I\u2019m also writing a series of \u2018informal\u2019 sonnets to go with photographs taken by my friend Vici MacDonald (http:\/\/artanorak.tumblr.com\/<\/a>). She likes the same unloved bits of London that I do, places that Iain Sinclair calls \u2018the dirty folds in the map\u2019, so it\u2019s a very exciting project. <\/p>\n

*Tamar Yoseloff<\/span><\/a> is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The City with Horns<\/span><\/a>, published by Salt last month. She is also the author of Marks<\/span>, a collaborative book with the artist Linda Karshan, published by Pratt Contemporary Art, and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology<\/span>. She is a freelance tutor in creative writing and has run a number of site-specific poetry workshops in venues such as the Fitzwilliam Museum and Tate St Ives. Her blog, Invective Against Swans <\/a> explores the intersection between poetry and art.
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Seven Questions In this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process. 1. Where do you write? (do you have an office, room, bus journey that you find yourself and your writing?) I have two writing places in my house \u2013 one is a desk in the study, and one is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23856,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/23856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}