blackbirdonline journalSpring 2019  Vol. 18 No. 1
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TRACKING THE MUSE

Since 2007 we have invited contributors featured in our annual Introductions Loop to comment on their creative process. This year, Alli Cruz, Katarzyna Jakubiak, Andrew Koch, Romie Hernández Morgan, Stephen O’Donnell, and Jessica Tanck step up to the task.

Alli Cruz Alli Cruz
   Everyone’s a Poet

Like many poets, I am fascinated by memory and how it moves through language. Writing poems, to me, feels like the practice of housing . . .

     
     
Katarzyna Jakubiak   Katarzyna Jakubiak
   Translation and Transgression

My writing is often born from images that capture my attention one moment and provoke me to wrestle with them for months or even years. . . .

     
     
Andrew Koch   Andrew Koch
   What’s Essential About All This Stuff

An essay, for me, usually begins by picking up on a particular resonance between things, between images or ideas or places or people or . . .

     
     
Romie Hernández Morgan   Romie Hernández Morgan
   Traveling Light: From Photography to Poetry

The first art form I really threw myself into was darkroom photography. I was in high school and my sister was my reluctant model, and I would . . .

     
     
Stephen O’Donnell   Stephen O’Donnell
    Reasons to Write

For the same reason our forebears sat nights by firelight and told tales and cut stories into the stone, I do it. And to do it is to cry out in the brief break . . .

     
     
Jessica Tanck   Jessica Tanck
    Awake in Discomfort

Questions have always come much more readily to me than answers. Given this fact, it probably makes sense that most of my writing starts with a problem . . .



Tracking the Muse texts appear in different sections of Blackbird but are organized in this alternative menu, a featured reading loop allowing easy navigation of related material.

A link to this “Tracking the Muse” menu appears at the bottom of every related page. You may also return to this menu at any time by visiting Features.

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