Each month, we ask our authors one question about their writing, events, interests, and more. Our question for January, 2015 is:
How do you react when readers discover something in your work that you didn’t originally intend or were not aware of?
I react with humble gratitude to have readers at all. —J. Kates, The Briar Patch
It used to bother me when that happened—either because I didn't like them seeing something that wasn't "there," or because I didn't want to have missed fully seeing what I'd done. Now, it feels totally fine, amusing, interesting, or...whatever. I've learned to let my poems go, and I'm glad if anyone connects at all to something that I wrote. —Alice B. Fogel, Strange Terrain
I had a professor in college who told me that once the story is finished, it's no longer yours. It belongs to your readers. I love that idea. And I'm thrilled when readers can connect on a level that's so personal to their own experience or life that I could never see that coming when I'm writing the book. The best thing about a "finished" book is that readers build on it, deconstruct it and recreate it. The book BECOMES an entirely different animal and in so doing is far more powerful and interesting than anything I've created. So readers discovering something new; that, to me, is not just a good thing, but something as an author I strive to attain. —Dan Szczesny, The Nepal Chronicles
When someone discovers or interprets something in my work that I had not originally intended or was aware of, I am usually very excited. This means that the poem has "spoken" to that reader, rather than me doing the "speaking." The difference is subtle, but I believe it is the mystery at the heart of writing poetry: once it comes through me and my sensibilities and is released into the world, it then belongs to whomever it reaches and touches. Thus, as long as it arrives and lands in someone else's hand, I am gratified. —Becky Sakellariou, Earth Listening
Generally it’s a real delight because as a poet I often think I am writing a poem about X and only much later with time or the distance of a more objective reader, do I realize the poem is really about Y. One never knows what furry creature is sniffing about eaves and crannies just below the surface of the brain. And of course, once the poem has left the house, one also never knows what kind of late-night company the poem might be keeping. —Rodger Martin, The Battlefield Guide
I’ve had cases where people have stopped me after a reading and said how a poem hit them hard because it meant ***, and I hadn’t seen that in the poem. I thank them. Rodger Martin once told me, he thinks the poet may be the last person to understand their poem. I agree. I don’t write my poems with an idea in mind. I write from image or images. In my process, the meaning of the poem comes out in the rewrites, and often I don’t see what the poem means, it just hits me emotionally. —James Fowler, Falling Ashes
I am thrilled when someone sees something in my work that I didn't. It sends me back to it to discover the "new thing" for myself. And I usually end up agreeing with them. When I release a poem into the world (whether individually or as part of a book) the poem becomes the reader's and those readers relate it to their own experiences and lives. It's rather magic, isn't it, this poem that lives between the poet and the reader with a life of its own. —Pat Fargnoli, Winter
The autograph line for my first novel The Island Queen: Celia Thaxter of The Isles of Shoals dwindled. With wonder I had listened to recitations of Celia’s popular Sandpiper poem, entertained Smuttynose murder theories, and defended Celia’s intimacy with Whitter. I was packing up when a well-heeled matron removed my book from her handbag.
“I liked it very much.”
Pleased, I took the book and smiled.
“I only wish. . .”
Apprehensive, I looked up.
Her lips puckered with disapproval. “Why did you put in that F word?”
F word? My mind raced through the chapters. “Sorry, where exactly?”
“You know, before Celia marries Levi.” She paged through and pointed her gloved finger at a paragraph.
As reluctant to look at the infamous word as she was to say it, I waited until she was gone and stopped, bewildered, at the only F word on the page: Fornication. —Julia Older, Tales of the François Vase
