1. What or who gives you inspiration and perspiration?

2. Have you always wanted to write, or did you have a secret desire for something else, like spelunking?

I never thought that I would write, though I was an English major in school. My interests were always in teaching, but that dream never came to fruition. I worked as a buyer for a raw materials company for many years and later as an executive assistant to the CEO of a Silicon Valley tech company. I do have a secret desire to be a handyman. I love repairing things. I’m fascinated with all things broken. I have this fetish about making something new again, I suppose. This works well with writing poetry, too. I might begin with an idea and work it through until it feels completed. But I have a file of broken poems that are just waiting for repair.

3. Do awards and accolades make you swoon? Have there been any that you're particularly swoon-y about that you've gotten?

It’s only recently that I’ve had the good fortune to have any kind of awards or accolades. Being nominated twice last year for the Pushcart Prize was an absolute thrill. It was completely unexpected, so I suppose I was a tad bit swoon-y for a few days over it. Okay, maybe a few weeks. There have also been occasions when I’ve been asked to write a poem for a memorial service or an event paying tribute to someone very special. Those are the times that I’m very grateful that I’m able to write and do something for someone I love. Once I wrote a poem for my mother when I was around 15 and my brother found it the night she died. She’d saved it all those years in her nightstand drawer. Even though I had written poems throughout my life, I began writing seriously after that night. That was three years ago this last January.

4. When you're not leaving your poetic footprint, what else in the world  makes you warm and fuzzy?

I adore my birds. I have three parrots who love to talk. They’re hilarious and full of personality. Especially my bare-eyed cockatoo, Sugar Pie. When my older kids went off to college the house became too quiet, so I brought one bird home. As each child left I found a reason to adopt just one more bird. Now I have three birds and one 12 year old at home. I suppose when she’s off at school, it will be time to bring in the fourth parrot. I’m also a pretty decent cook. I spend hours with recipes trying this and that, hoping to make the best Aveeno Lemono Soup (Egg Lemon Soup) you’ve ever tasted. My husband is Greek, I can’t quite beat his mother’s concoction yet, but I’m still trying. I’m thinking when I’m in my late eighties I might come close. It will take me that long, I’m certain of it.

5. Give me names. Who are the best new poets, in your opinion?

I adore Jeannine Hall Gailey and her book, Becoming the Villainess. She has this incredible ability to write persona poems that take my breath away. I can get lost in another world when I read her work, and I love that. I’m also a huge fan of Paul Hostovsky, Lana Ayers, Kim Addonizio and Brigit Peegan Kelly, whose writing is full of beautiful imagery and penetrates the soul.

6. Best of the Net or Pushcart? Which matters more and why?

I think they are both a wonderful way to honor a poet’s work. Best of the Net focuses on the internet and has the ability to reach a very large audience, while Pushcart incorporates both magazines in print and online. Either one is an amazing way to have your work acknowledged. I can’t imagine a greater

compliment than being chosen for one or both of these prestigious awards.

It’s both gratifying and humbling knowing that someone thinks enough of your work to nominate you. Writing is something that requires quite a bit of time alone. It’s a solitary experience. There are days when I sit in my daughter’s old room, which we now call ‘the writing room’, for hours at a time. The sunlight streams through the old windows, and I’m typing frantically away on the keyboard writing this poem that’s coming fast into my head. The last thing on my mind is an award, but when a poem is noticed and loved by someone, it spurs me on to write more. I doubt I could ever stop writing, even if one day, it’s just my parrots who listen to my poems.

7. Then and now. What poem made you start writing and what poem do you absolutely love right this very moment?

The poem, Because I Could not Stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson I read then and now.  That poem seemed magnificent to me the very first time I read it and it still seems that way today. These days I write mostly in free verse, but I have written sonnets and metered poetry as well. When I first started writing I read mostly formal verse and I couldn’t get enough. Daffodils, by William Wordsworth, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Browning, If, by Rudyard Kipling, and then there’s TS Elliot, Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman. They are all magnificent. But the poem I absolutely love this very moment would have to be, somewhere I have never traveled, by ee cummings. I can barely speak after I read that poem. The last line is spectacular. It does something to me that I can’t explain. I guess that’s poetry.

8. Are online poetry 'zines a crushing blow to traditional print 'zines, or are they the meat and potatoes of the poetry world now? Also, which do you prefer?

Oh, I think online ‘zines are the wave of the future. I can sit for hours at the computer and google a poet and read hundreds of poems right there in my office. It’s such a luxury to be able to do that. I mean where else can you go in your slippers and old robe and drink a cup of coffee, sneak a few chocolate kisses and then read poems all day long? I will say that there is something very satisfying about holding the printed copy of something you’ve written and it makes it very real to have a magazine in your hand as a souvenir. I have a drawer for this. A special place where I save the printed copies of my work. But honestly my kids would rather read my work online. So I suppose there’s room for both. 

9. Where do you see yourself and your poems in five years?

I hope to have a manuscript accepted for publication in five years time. I’ve been fortunate to have had two chapbooks published. Object of Desire from Finishing Line Press, and Litany of Finger Prayers, from Pudding House Press.

I’m working on two books of poems now called, A Thousand Tiny Sorrows  and Note on a Windowsill. I hope at least one of them is published at some point in the near future.

10. What are the ingredients for a tasty poem?

Well, my poems have to pass what I call the ‘cry test.' This is a test I give each poem after it’s written. I make my husband sit down in his easy chair and listen to me read the poem. The poem has to have several elements to keep his attention. It must have an interesting idea somewhere in the poem or he gets bored quickly. There must be a good flow and some music in it or I notice he gets kind of fidgety. And finally, if he doesn’t cry at some point in the poem, I feel that I have failed. When he cries I know I have struck a chord with him emotionally and that is always the goal of my writing. It gives me purpose and  incentive to write more.