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The Chapter One Series from Marsh Hawk Press, acclaimed by Publishers Weekly, supplements classroom instruction with real-world experiences and features the memoirs of outstanding poets from diverse backgrounds, recalling the ways by which they found their start as writers. While creative writing programs seek to develop the talents of maturing writers, essential information about the development of the writing craft will be discovered in the early memoirs—the Chapter One’s—of established poets published in this series. Each month we’ll post a new Chapter.
For more on the Chapter One Series read our Original Project Proposal
Series 2025
May: R.L. Stine: “Say yes to things you meet. You don’t know where they will lead.”
April: Amber Flora Thomas: “A Journey Between Poetry & Art”
March: David St. John: “You Can’t Judge a Book”
February: Danusha Laméris: “How I Came to Poetry”
January: Rusty Morrison: “Writing into risk”
Series 2024
December: Xiaoqiu Qiu: “The Little Dying”
November: Ilya Kaminsky: “Reading Dante in Ukraine”
October: Forrest Gander: “The Questions We Ask Ourselves: An Interview by Jim Natal”
September: Jane Hirshfield: “Borges’s Generosity & Some Thoughts on Doubt”
August: Charles A. Matz: “A Poetry Before Oblivion: Five Rules”
July: Barbara Novack: “Why Poetry?”
June: W.C. Williams to D. Ignatow: “I wrote you an indifferent letter today.”
May: Liane Strauss: “How to Help Your Non-Poet Friends Enjoy Poetry More (Maybe)”
April: Susan Terris: “It’s All About the Duchess”
March: Sandy McIntosh: “Never Walk Away”
February: Tony Trigilio: “Is Daily Writing Possible?”
January: Spencer Rumsey: “No Spontaneous Bop Prosody! A Professional Editor’s Advice to Poets Writing Prose”
Series 2023
December: Eileen R. Tabios: “The ‘Monobon’: Transforming Intense Emotion into a New Poetry Form”
November: Laurel Blossom: “I think you’re going to write a lot.”
October: Annalise Nassani: “Beginning with Erasure: Writing That Fills a Void”
September: Elaine Equi: “Square One”
August: Denise Low: “Gary Snyder and a Lesson in Consistency”
July: Karin Randolph: “Too Many Titles”
June: Al Filreis: “Notes toward a pedagogy of ModPo”
May: Mary Mackey: “My Own Private Jaguars: Craft and Inspiration”
April: Eileen R. Tabios: “(see title below)”
March: Stephen Paul Miller: “The Poetry Mailing List: Poetry Beyond Borders”
February: Denise Duhamel: “In Praise of Colette Inez’s ‘Pay Yourself First'”
January: Sandy McIntosh: “Coaxing the Hangman”
Series 2022
December: Patricia Carlin: “At Home”
November: David Lehman: “The Birth of The Best”
October: Tony Trigilio: “The Importance of Being Obstinate”
September: Mary Mackey: “The World Before Words”
August: Steve Fellner: “On Murderers, Anorexia, and the Concept of the Soul”
July: Sandy McIntosh: “A Poet Learns to Drive the Author-Driven Book”
June: Denise Low: “The Fourth Dimension of Writing”
May: Basil King: “My Aunt Ethel’s husband Dicky Graveny was a sculptor”
April: Stephanie Strickland: “Do I contradict myself?”
March: Rafael Jesús González: “The Gasp”
February: Arthur Sze: (Interview) Revealing and Reveling in Complexity
January: Barbara Novack: “Thanking Mr. Cohn”
25 Essays and Interviews from previous years are available in On Becoming a Poet, an anthology