Photo by Scott Huck

Julie L. Moore, the Featured Poet for Issue #1 of The Basilica Review, answers a few questions about her beginnings as a poet, who she's reading, and more.

How did you get started writing poetry?
I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid. I used to fill spiral notebooks with stories and poems; sometimes, I’d share them with my family, but mostly, I’d just keep them in a desk drawer. One Christmas, I typed up a story for each member of my family—my mom, dad, sister Penney, and brother Paul—and gave them as gifts. I can’t remember what the stories were about, though. In eighth grade, I remember my English teacher reading an essay or story of mine out loud to the class as an example of what good writing is. We had a double classroom—it was a middle school—so there I sat, listening to my teacher read my words to fifty of my classmates. At that moment, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I decided, too, that since I needed to pay the bills, I’d teach. 

Little did I know that teaching would become a joy—in response to a calling, really—not merely a means to earn a salary. When I went to college, then graduate school, I wrote many academic essays, of course, but took no creative writing courses because none were offered. Afterwards, as I began my teaching career at Wilberforce University, our nation’s oldest historical black liberal arts college, I experienced what all first-year teachers do: The weight of multiple lesson preps and countless papers to grade. I also had my children. So there was no time to write creatively. In fact, for the most part, I forgot all about it.

After I was hired in 1999 at Cedarville University, a colleague of mine, fairly early on, showed a documentary that she’d helped develop with her graduate advisor. The film was about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. I couldn’t make the showing on campus because one of my kids was sick, so my colleague let me watch it at home. I watched it alone—and it’s a good thing I did: I wept uncontrollably (and at that point in my life, I was not much of a crier!) not only over Kenyon’s death and Hall’s moving tribute to her but also over the loss of my own writing. Truly, I had an epiphany: I had told myself I’d be a writer, and there I was in my mid-thirties, doing no writing whatsoever. I think I had a bit of a mid-life crisis a little early. 

For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me, I didn’t focus on writing stories; I focused immediately on writing poetry. Watching the documentary, I felt like I’d found my calling. And that was a very strong impulse. But I knew I hadn’t had a creative writing course since high school, and I was embarrassed that until that day, I hadn’t even heard of Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon (and yes, I was an English professor!). Yet, going back to school wasn’t possible for me at that time. So I did the only thing I could do: I went to the library. If I couldn’t take classes in poetry, I figured I could read as much as I could get my hands on. I also knew I needed to read contemporary poets to learn what they were doing in their work and what conversations I wanted to join. So of course, I began by reading work by both Hall and Kenyon. I remember, too, that one of the first books I checked out was a collection of poems by Maxine Kumin, Selected Poems, 1960-1990. 

I never looked back. And I never quit. The impulse, the calling, is still there, as clear and strong as ever. And I direct CU’s writing center, another passion with equal joy. I feel very fortunate to have found my life’s work and that it’s so fulfilling.

Who are you reading now, and who remains a perennial favorite with you?
I read a variety of writers and poets, past and present. This past summer, for instance, I read Rilke and Rukeyser alongside poetic and nonfiction work by Jane Hirshfield, Rebecca McClanahan, Kathleen Norris, Wendell Berry, Scott Cairns, Jeff Gundy, Jeanne Murray Walker, Alison Stine, Judith H. Montgomery, Sally Rosen Kindred, and Alicia Ostriker (I was recovering from a major surgery, so I had a lot of time on my hands!). Perennial favorites include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost as well as Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, and yes, Donald Hall, and Jane Kenyon. For me, the poets I started with have stuck with me; they’re the ones I return to over and over again.  

What sort of writing training have you had? Is it important, in your opinion, to have a writing mentor?
As I shared with my first answer, I haven’t had any formal poetry writing training at all. I have attended the Antioch Writers’ Workshop (AWW) three times in the last five years and found both the workshops and the one-on-one critiques by professional poets very beneficial. Though I would love to have a mentor, I have never had one. No one seems to have the time! Every poet I know is incredibly busy with their own teaching and writing (not to mention their families). Sometimes, I feel that I could have progressed further—and faster—if I’d had a mentor. To be honest, I still feel that way at times. So I guess I would say that yes, having a mentor is important, though I can only surmise that’s the case from my lack of one. 

Early on—and for me that’s 2002 or 2003—I remember reading Mary Oliver’s book, A Poetry Handbook. I was at a low point—I was feeling very isolated in my writing life and was doubting my ability to write anything at all of value because I didn’t have an MFA or any formal training and because no one really took my commitment to poetry seriously. And Oliver says in that book, “[T]o write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.” I was so thankful to her for saying that because that was exactly the choice I was faced with, and I had decided to read. And the poems were my mentors. 

That doesn’t mean I haven’t had any help. I have been fortunate enough to have met a few writers along the way who’ve graciously helped me by offering me feedback on my chapbook, Election Day, released by Finishing Line Press in 2006, and my first full-length book, Slipping Out of Bloom, due out in June of 2010 from WordTech Editions. Poets like Jeff Gundy, whom I met at my first AWW, and Eric Paul Shaffer, whom I met when he came to CU in 2005, in addition to my colleagues, Ryan Futrell and Kevin Heath, have all given me insightful feedback at one time or another that has helped me better my work. I’m deeply grateful to them.

How has your writing developed over the years?
It’s hard for the fish to climb out of the bowl and look at her environment from the outside in. That’s how I feel answering this question. I can’t climb outside of myself to look at my work objectively in order to analyze its development, or lack thereof. I suppose readers (what few there may be!) can do that far better than I can. But what I have noticed are things like variations in line length and movement, point of view, and voice. Lineation has become very important to me, as has extended metaphor. I’m also writing prose poems now, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart last year. That’s something I never thought I’d be able to do. But I kept studying the form and various authors’ adaptations of that form, and eventually, something just clicked, and out came this prose, sometimes narrative, sometimes richly lyrical, but all of it definitely poetic. The same thing happened with the use of second person. One day. Click. 

I like that I keep trying new things. I’ve written a lot about my own suffering—and that of my family—because that’s where our lives have been these past five years. And physical pain along with serious illness is so challenging to faith, especially in a country that seems to send the message that prosperity and good health equal happiness. I don’t think so. And I think my experiences allow me to delve into how difficult it is to endure suffering—and doubt—and somehow persevere in faith, even find joy. But I also don’t necessarily want to be known as the pain poet, or the death poet. I’ve just had another very difficult year dealing with yet more health problems, and I wrote one of my friends that I’ve discovered that there are as many genres of pain as there are of literature. She responded that I should write a poem called, “The Genres of Pain.” And I told her, no, I can’t do that; I’m beginning to bore myself! Yet, I guess that I like the fact that I’m exploring new subjects and the same time I’m writing about subjects I keep returning to—joy in the face of sorrow, faith in the grip of pain, life amid the threat of death. “Of Grief and Gift” is really all about this. But “I think of Frost this morning” is a bit of a departure for me, and I like that. My second full-length book will include these poems and more like the Frost one—a whole section of poems where I’m interacting with characters from literature like Emma and Hemingway’s Santiago and even Prufrock. That book’s working title is Scandal of Particularity, and I’m just now putting it together to send out.

What advice do you have to poets who are just starting out?
Read. Read. Read. Since I teach college composition and direct CU’s writing center, one thing that always stuns me is that I interact with students who want to write well, yet they read so little.  To repeat what Oliver says, “[T]o write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply.” T.S. Eliot said something equally important: “Wide reading...is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number.” I think the same lesson applies for would-be poets. Read the old and the new. Read Homer. Read Virgil. Read Ovid. Read Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare. Read the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. Read Dickinson and Whitman and Hopkins and Frost and Eliot and everyone before and after. Read work you think you won’t/don’t like. Intentionally! Read all the genres, too. And of course, read as many contemporary poets as you can because after all, you want them to read you. I liken it to a conversation. None of us likes someone who talks all the time but doesn’t listen to a word anyone else says. If you write but don’t read, you’re that person. If you want to be heard, first you must listen. 

I also think it’s also good to keep in mind that poetry isn’t just expression; it’s art. Donald Hall came to our campus several years ago and told our students that if it’s personal expression they’re after, they should keep a journal. If it’s art they’re after, they have to work at it—and revise a lot. 

So maybe the advice I’d give would be to remember the two Rs—reading and revising. Because after all, I’m also a teacher, and that makes a great mantra for freshmen in composition, too.