Cheryl Latuner
Cheryl Anne Latuner has published a poetry chapbook, Soon They Will Fly—A Meditation at Fitzgerald Lake, and a memoir, Baby at My Breast—Reflections of a Nursing Mother. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Comstock Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Tar River Poetry. Her current project is entitled The Phenology Club, based on a year-long series of outings with the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lives in Northampton, Mass, and teaches literature at a Waldorf High School.
What is your creative process? Are you a night owl or an early bird?
I’m an early bird. I try to commit to writing first thing in the morning, before the world enters in. I’m a full-time teacher, and I’ve found that organizing myself to arrive at a cafe an hour before school to write keeps my writing going throughout the year. I may jot in a journal during the day as ideas or images come up, or make notes in the evening. But my writing always happens best first thing in the day. At the Wildbranch nature writing workshop through Orion magazine a couple of years ago in northern Vermont, I met two people, a man and a woman, who live right in my town. They have become my writing buddies. They are smart, warm, enthusiastic about my interests and eager to help me do my best work. Though I’ve been in many writing groups of all shapes and sizes over the years, this one works the best for me, by far, on my present course.
What are you reading right now?
Presently I’m simmering a long-term project, a memoir of my childhood on Long Island interwoven with elements of natural history. So what I’m reading around in at the moment is H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, A Romantic Education by Patricia Hampl, and This Fine Piece of Water–An Environmental History of Long Island Sound by Tom Andersen.
What are some of your favorite books of all time?
E. B. White’s Points of My Compass, One Man’s Meat, and his letters. Poetry by Seamus Heaney, William Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson. Barbara Kingsolver. Also, books I teach: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Moby Dick, Walden and Emerson’s essays.