Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1987), chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and most recently, Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003). She has translated Flowers from the Volcano (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) and Sorrow (Consortium Books, 1999) by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), published by Ecco Press in 1991, and Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash), published by the University of California Press in 2003. She also compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and in 1998, was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. She teaches creative writing at Skidmore College, and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison, and their son, Sean-Christophe. Carolyn Forché will be teaching Toward a Book of Poems: A Manuscript Workshop at the Split Rock Arts Program from July 29-August 3, 2007.

How and why did you become a writer?
I began writing in early childhood, and found that I couldn't stop.

In which literary forms do you most often work?
Poetry, creative non-fiction and the personal essay.

Who are some of your favorite writers?
My beloved poets are Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, George Oppen, Edmond Jabes, Osip Mandelstam, Saint-John Perse, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Nazim Hikmet, and Yannis Ritsos. Only Szymborska is still alive. My favorite poets among the living are numerous.

Among prose writers, I am drawn to Proust, Musil and Kafka, W.G. Sebald, Jose Saramago, Michael Ondaatje, Evan S. Connell, Alistair MacLeod, Paula Fox, Nadine Gordimer, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, and many others.

How would you define a successful work of literature?
A successful work of literature might restore the language in which it is written. Tangentially, it might transport, confuse, arouse, infuriate, gesture toward and inspire its reader.

What are the most rewarding parts of the writing process for you? What are the most difficult?
All aspects are difficult for me, and growing more so. I think "page fright," the terror of the white, unwritten space might be worst, and this anxiety returns, after long and mysterious hours of revision, in the moment when one must decide that the poem is finished. Most rewarding is to have brought a poem into the world.

In which parts of the world have you lived?
I have lived in the United States, El Salvador, England, Lebanon, South Africa, and France. I have spent brief periods in Spain, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Cyprus, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Which literary forms do you prefer to work on with clients?
I prefer to work with poets.

How much and what kinds of background or experience would you expect your clients to have?
I would like to say "no experience necessary," as I do enjoy working with beginners as well as more experienced writers, but it is important to me that the poets I work with are readers as well as writers of poetry.

Do you have some ground rules that you would expect clients to follow?
Take the work seriously, write with abandon, revise with courage, accept critical responses with grace and be willing to rebel against assignments and suggestions.

What advice would you offer prospective clients as they consider choosing a mentor?
I'm not sure how to answer this. I think it is important that mentor and poet form a bond in service to the work at hand. Choose a mentor whose work inspires you, or who you think might read your work attentively and with a sincere desire to assist in its development.