Thank you very, very much, Paul.
Thank you.
Does anyone have a question?
I would love to go where everybody says, no!
OK, OK.
Paul you talked a little bit about monsters and horror
events and monster poems.
I was curious about a related genre of science fiction, how
you might or might not use that to inform
the ideas in your poems, and just
in general with monsters or science fiction or both,
how do you make it work?
I don't I'm not I'm not sure I've ever
been someone who believes in the tropes of high art and low art.
And so I've always thought like if you could get Godzilla
in a poem, awesome.
And it doesn't-- there's no-- there's nothing like less
artful about it.
If anything I feel like I enjoy the challenge of getting
that and pulling it off.
And so as a kid, I'm 38 years old now,
and I was born in 1974.
And so I came of age right about the time
where cable TV came into the household,
and you were left supervised, unsupervised
for massive amount of times where
you could be watching cable TV with all these bad B
movies, and Kung Fu movies, and Godzilla films and whatnot.
And so my misspent youth was a lot of watching that.
And so it's part of who I am.
Some people grew up reading Hemingway,
and I grew up watching Godzilla.
And I think that's OK, because poetry can come
from the same place even so.
And so things like science fiction and fantasy,
I love Star Wars.
That was like the generational movie as I was growing up.
And I haven't written about Luke Skywalker yet,
but maybe I will.
Well, I have the most basic of questions.
In [INAUDIBLE]
All right.
Well, someone who grew up with all these monsters, what
drew you to writing?
It's a good question.
I don't really know.
I think sometimes I think it's genetic.
Like I think you're made to be a certain thing sometimes.
Like you're-- sometimes you're going to be a baker,
or sometimes you're going to be this or that.
And I think I always knew even when
I was a kid that I wanted to be a writer, even though I didn't
know exactly what that meant.
I loved to read and I had this idea
that I would like to make books, too.
But I had no idea what that meant.
And so the other thing that I wanted to be was a jet pilot.
So it was kind of a toss up.
And then when I broke my neck, jet pilot
wasn't going to work out so well.
And so when I was 17 I wrote my first poem,
and I wasn't-- it wasn't out of emulation.
I didn't write it because I'd read a poem
or heard a poem that I thought was really great.
It just happened.
It came to my mind one day, and I'm
about to reveal my age again, I ran in--
I was in high school, junior high school.
I ran into the library and I was looking for a typewriter.
And now like the youngsters here are like typewriter,
what's a typewriter?
But now you would have word processors,
but I went and found the typewriter,
and sort of banged this keyboard.
I mean this poem out on the keyboard,
and rather than the light bulb going off over my head,
I thought like a mushroom cloud going over my head.
It felt like this is what I'm meant to do.
And I never looked back.
And I know a lot of my friends spent their 20s
searching for what they were supposed to do in their lives.
And I always felt like lucky and grateful
that I'd found it at 17.
So.
Now what poets have influenced you most?
That's always the question that makes sure-- that
guarantees you can't answer it.
Like you would ask me on the street or something, oh,
but now you ask me, I like, I don't know, poet?
What's a poet?
No.
Poets like-- weirdly I love John Donne.
I love Walt Whitman.
Richard Hugo, Bob Hicok, Anne Sexton.
I'll have to think about more, but there's too many to--
John Ashbery, William Matthews.
On and on.
I'll think about it some more.
And a similar question, were there
memoirs that you used as models or that inspired your own?
I guess maybe in terms of craft or arc?
Yes or no.
In the sense that I never wanted to write a memoir,
I was really kind of against the idea.
Because I didn't want to take time away from writing poems.
And I knew if I ever decided to do it
that it was going to be a large, long project.
And I didn't want to do it because I
knew in the back of my mind, I was
like, I could be writing poems.
Poems a lot more fun than this.
And sure enough that's how it felt at first.
It was really hard to switch over.
But because I was really resistant to the idea,
I think I was also resistant to the genre.
And so I hadn't read a lot of memoirs.
Mark Dodi's Heaven's Coast was one.
Lucy Greely's Autobiography of a Face was another.
But in terms of story arc, I couldn't say that.
Mostly I was reading more about focus in the use of vignettes,
and sort of things like that.
I have a related question.
When you wrote your memoir, did you have--
what was the audience that you had in mind?
Even if it was--
My hard drive.
My second book got accepted for publications.
It was summer break, and I thought, I have some time.
Because I've been resisting the idea for a long, long time.
I didn't want to do it.
But I guess my second book was accepted
for publication, which felt good, because I'd
been sending it out.
My first book was accepted fairly quickly.
And I was really lucky but my second book, I was sending--
I had to send it out 50, 60 times.
And that's the way it always goes, I think,
because with your first book, it's kind of an uneven playing
field.
A lot of people have not--
but with your second book everyone
has published a book by then.
And so suddenly the level-- the playing field is very much--
you're all accomplished poets in a way.
And so it took me a long time to get it.
And but I finally managed to get it done,
and I felt this sense of relief and the semester
was just ending, I sound like, you know what?
I have a summer.
I can spend some time maybe finally
taking a stab at writing a memoir.
And funnily enough, when I was in Tuscaloosa,
same time Andrew was there, I had written a little bit.
I had written the accident scene.
And then put it away for a few years.
And I picked it back up again and revised it,
and I wrote about 20,000 words that summer.
But then had to go back to teaching,
I was teaching for freshman comp at that time.
And so I put it away for a year--
and I didn't look at it again for a year and a half.
And then I was approached by an agent who said,
I loved your first book, but do you have any other kinds
of writing you would--
basically she said, do you have anything that would sell.
Do you have anything that would make money.
I said, well, I have this thing that I
wrote it's been on my hard drive for a year and a half.
And so in terms of audience, I don't know.
I thought about it.
Because I was reluctant to it I decided
that if I wanted to do it, I wanted to commit to it.
And so I wanted to make sure that someone who was not
disabled, for example, or not a writer
could take away something from it and learn about it.
Because when you're disabled, you have to surrender a lot.
A lot of privacy, a lot of independence, and people
have asked me, did that bother you having to write about some
of the things you went through?
And the answer was, no, because I just committed to it.
I decided if I was going to do it,
I didn't want to do a half measure.
Because that seemed worse than anything,
to write this book that I was troubled by.
And then to do it halfway?
That just seems, you might as well
try to do it the best you can.
Andrew, in fact, was someone who encouraged me to write
a memoir while we were in--
you may not remember this, but you encouraged me.
I was like no, no.
So I ignored you for several years.
I think he might have been the first person actually--
do you remember this?
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, you suggested that I really should do it.
I was like, nah.
He's an enabler.
Yeah, he's an enabler.
Yes, sir.
Hi.
You met [INAUDIBLE].
How has your disability affected and influenced your writing?
It's a good question, because how
is it affected-- it's kind of like the chicken and the egg,
you know?
Which came first?
Not that my disability of course came first, but how do you--
it's almost like how do you separate the two?
Like there's no doubt that my disability
has affected my writing because I am my body.
And so because my body is the thing that does the writing,
and I look at creativity as a biological process,
and it's a way of thinking and getting in--
when you talk about basketball players being in the zone,
and making shots?
I think writers get to that same condition
where if you're writing every day, you get into the zone
where you're writing well, and really that's about practice.
But it's also training your mind to go to that place.
And so I look at writing as a physical function in a way.
And so there's no doubt that it's affected my writing.
One way that I can think of is an easy way
to answer your question is, I'm not
able to say if I get an idea in the middle of the night,
and I've already gone to bed, I'm
not able to jump up and go write it down.
And so the one thing I'd sort of trained myself not to do
is like, once I'm in bed, just no thinking about writing.
Because that's the thing, you know.
It's torturous.
Or you try to hold on to it all night all night long.
But eventually you go to sleep, and you forget about it.
And so I just retrained myself not
to think about it while I'm in bed.
While I cannot write, I just don't think about it.
Because I don't have that same freedom to do it.
So.
I think we have time for a few more questions.
I found in your memoir a great generosity towards the people
in your life, an absence of anger.
And I was quite impressed about that.
In particular vignettes about able-bodied people
who tend to lay everything in their life
upon people with disabilities.
I just wanted to say, I found it a very generous writing.
I find that most people--
and I've had all kinds of experiences.
In Tuscaloosa that people would come up to me
and I'd be waiting to cross the street and someone would
be like, can I pray for you?
Yeah.
And I'm like, I guess you can.
But out of the corner of my eye I'd be watching the red light,
like turn green, turn green, turn green.
And so then I just take off.
But they're coming from a sincere place.
And they're coming from good intentions,
and I've just never felt like it was
right to come down on someone for that, for those reasons.
Because I think most people are good
hearted, and when they see me, often they're
not seeing anything.
They're saying like their own son, or their own brother,
or their own mom or dad who might
be dealing with these things.
And that's OK.
I mean, it is what it is.
And anger to me it's just--
partially it's personality, but it's also
seems like just wasted energy.
Wasted energy that I could be using on other things.
Someone this morning in class asked me
if I had anger for the teacher who had let me ride the bike.
And that would be understandable, I think.
But no, I was never angry with her
because one of the things I really
learned from writing the memoir was that I realized
how young everyone was.
My parents were 30 years old when this happened.
I was 12.
The teacher was maybe 27.
We were her first class.
She was 28, we were her-- we were for her first students
that she had ever had.
And so I know that the guilt had to be incredible.
And it was a different time, you know.
Nowadays I think our sense of like safety practices
would not be this--
it's very different.
But I realize how young she was, and I only ever
saw her twice after that.
Once she came to visit me, and then
once when I was in high school I saw her at a great distance.
And she did-- something didn't look right about her,
and she didn't look well.
And what I realized was later on,
I saw her obituary in the newspaper.
She had died of breast cancer.
And that had been--
and I was 18 then.
From 12 to 18 it seems like a long time,
but going back and realizing that was only six years.
Six years isn't long at all.
And I realized that she had gone from this happening,
to her marriage breaking up, to dying.
And her daughter was--
that daughter that I was talking about was now,
she had no mother.
And so no, I was never angry with her.
It just it was something bad happened to her
when this happened too.
It affected everyone.
So I don't want to claim all the badness for me,
because it's not it's all happened to me,
because it happened to everyone.
My family, my friends, my people.
Thank you.
So what do you like about teaching writing?
It's fun.
You get to sit around and talk about words and ideas,
and with smart people.
You get to talk about what you love more than anything.
And you get paid to do it.
And I'm being crass, but it's really an amazing thing.
Who would think that you could possibly
have a chance in your life just to spend your life talking
about words, about ideas, with smart young people?
It's a great life, a great thing.
And I love being able to reach people, too.
Because sometimes you're teaching people,
and I love that moment when the light bulb clicks on
for someone, they get it.
That's a great feeling.
And it's the kind of openness and generosity I
like in my writing, I feel like I can explore that
in teaching too.
And it's all of one.
The more I teach, the more I write, I find.
It's all together.
Thank you very much, Paul.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]