I’ve never been much of a poet. I thought I was, until I took a poetry class in college, taught by a Vietnam Vet who was never any less than 20 minutes late to class and realized, “Nope, I suck at this.” I have since burned/recycled every poem I have ever written. No need to thank me.
But after I finished the first draft of The Big Rewind, I woke up one morning with curious sentences bouncing around in my skull. I had been reading But Our Princess is in Another Castle, by B.J. Best, which restructured the way I was creating narrative as I functioned throughout the day. Even as I processed simple tasks, I was filtering them through winding, vivid poetics. And when I sat down to write, I would come back an hour later and have no recollection of constructing a sentence, a whole paragraph.
(It was fucking AWESOME.)