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Carolyn Martin

 

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, Oregon where she gardens, writes and plays with creative friends. Her poems have appeared in a number of publications including Stirring, Persimmon Tree, Antiphon and Becoming: What Makes a Woman. Her second poetry collection, The Way a Woman Knows, was released in February 2015 by The Poetry Box, Portland, Oregon. To order copies and learn about upcoming events, please visit TheWayaWomanKnows.com.

What is your writing process?
I’m a morning person. I love how the birds welcome the sun, how the neighborhood is quiet (mostly), and how the feral cats, robins, stellar jays and squirrels play around our yard.

After years of writing alone, I’m now in a five-woman writing group that meets monthly.

I am a fanatical revisionist. It’s not unheard of to put a poem through 15 different versions — even if that means a tweak of a word or two — before it tells me it’s complete. Even then I don’t believe it and often return to find a better form, lineation or punctuation strategy.

What are you currently reading?
Just finishing The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and have Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric on my night stand. That sounds like somewhat intelligent reading, but in reality I read a lot of escapist fiction from writers like David Balducci, Patricia Cornwall, James Patterson, Steve Berry and their ilk.

What are your favorite books of all time?
I have a hard time deciding on favorites since they change as I move through life. As a former English teacher, I’ve read so many books that I couldn’t count them, much less remember them. Recent “likes,” however, include Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto and Dan Brown’s Inferno. Pretty eclectic, no?