My friend Teege Braune tagged me in this writing process conversation that's going around. I teach English to college freshmen, and I put a lot of focus on process in my class, but my own creative writing process is sporadic at best. I'm not sure what I have to contribute to this conversation except a boost to other writers' self esteem when they see how long it's been since I wrote anything on this fucking blog.

How does your writing process work?

My writing process is sporadic. Although I write every day in my job (and in every job I've had since I joined the workforce at 15), I go through long stretches of time in which I produce no poems. When I was younger, this bothered me quite a bit. Anxiety built during those dry spells until I would tell myself that I wasn't really a writer. Then, just when I was about to give up forever--for real this time--I would draft several poems in a few days. This would usually provide enough of a rush to get me through a round of revision and submissions before I hit the doldrums again.

Over the years, particularly during and just after my MFA, I tried repeatedly to write every day. Sometimes I could sustain the routine for several months, but the habit always broke. Eventually I noticed that the daily writing regimen didn't produce any more poems than the slower process that felt more natural to me. In fact, I noticed that the poems I wrote in my writing's "manic phase" didn't really come out in a flood of inspiration. Rather they were made of lines I'd written in my notebooks months or years earlier, images I'd tucked away while riding my bike to work, caring for my daughter, or working on a difficult painting or collage.

I realize now that, although I have no daily word count, I am always writing. When I reach the putting words on the page part of the process, things move quickly because I've done a lot of mental work already. My poems may seem to be born all at once, but they gestate for a long time. To put it another way, I am a slow writer with a constantly boiling back burner.

Are the processes different for poems and essays?

Teege asked me this extra question because I write in multiple genres. The process I've been describing is my process for writing poetry. I also write short, lyrical personal essays, and the process for those is very much the same. In fact, some of those essays could probably be prose poems if you squinted at them just so.

I also write more traditional memoir and editorial-type essays. Although I'm a terrible blogger on my own, I do guest posts for others fairly often. For those pieces, the process is much different, more businesslike and even aggressively unromantic. I start with something I want to say. I make lists. I brainstorm. I draft on the computer, which I never do when I'm writing poems. I edit as I go. I revise. It looks a lot like this.

What are you working on?

Although I embrace my slow writing, I've learned that I reach the words-on-paper stage more consistently if I have a project in mind. Maybe it helps me focus the heat on the back burner. Lately I've been working on complete re-writes of old poems, turning free verse drafts that never quite worked into form. I also have a bigger, slower project in the works. I'm writing a set of long poems that I hope to eventually link into a chapbook or the skeleton of a longer manuscript. Each poem is loosely based on one of the elements--water, fire, earth, air (I think it's going to be better than that sounds). So far I have a solid draft of water and fire, and I'm starting to carry around random lines about earth.

How does your work differ from other of its genre?

It's strange to think of my work as part of a genre, like asking which of the high school cliques I fit in. In high school, I sat at a table in the back of the cafeteria with extra chairs pulled up and people eating their lunches off their laps so we could sit together even when we ran out of room. We were a bunch of smart kids and assorted weirdos who never turned anyone away. I very much like that poetry is the kind of writing that gets all the weird experiments that don't fit in anywhere else, but that's not really the kind of poetry I write.

My poems belong to the tradition of American confessional writing. They're mostly short and personal, narrative lyrics or lyrical narratives. I don't know what sets my poems apart from others like them except that they tell my stories in my voice.

Why do you write what you do?

I joke that I write what I do because I lack imagination. I can't invent anything, so I write what I know. Partly true. I've said that I write what I do because my first poetry mentors valued concrete imagery and observation in poems, so I learned to write that way to please them. Partly true. I know that my style mimics the speech and poetry and storytelling I grew up with in church in the rural, working class south. Partly true. But I think I write confessional poetry mostly because I believe in honesty. A lot of poetry is heavy on artifice. Some of that is fun, some of it is wonderfully playful, and I'm really glad to have all of it at the big, loud cafeteria table of Poetry, but the poetry that speaks to me most strongly strips away artifice. The poet ends up a little exposed because the way she or he sees the world is exposed. It's risky. If you fuck it up, you look like an asshole, but it's the only way I know to write.

At Marsh's Library in Dublin, cages line the back wall. Each cage is just wide enough to hold a small desk and chair and a floor to ceiling bookcase lined and stacked and jammed with massive leatherbound tomes, their Latin titles barely legible on their thick, dust free spines. The librarian who let me in during his lunch hour, "just for a quick peek," said that in the early 1700's, when Marsh's was founded as the first public library in Ireland, scholars were locked in. The books were too expensive, too precious to risk theft or damage. If you wanted to study, you squeezed behind that desk and worked by carefully-regulated candlelight and shouted for the librarian when you wanted to be released.

Gazing through the bars and wire into the scholars' cages, I thought about knowledge and what it must have meant to read and learn when this was what it took. Before the internet and e-readers, before Amazon.com and mass market paperbacks, before modern printing and education systems, Marsh's Library, with its cages and locks and keys, made information comparatively accessible.

Three hundred years later, information is cheap for most of us, but for many, the public library remains one of very few affordable sources of information. In my home state of Florida, the governor says that public libraries are unnecessary these days because everything is available online. The governor must not have visited many libraries, or he would have seen the lines of people waiting to use the internet. Even in a digital age, the library offers access to knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere. (Philip Pullman wrote about this, more eloquently than I can, here.)

Like many people who grew up in low income families, I know this firsthand. I was no scholar, and the public library of my small, depressed home town was no great citadel of learning, but, to me--a gawky kid from a dirt road in Frostproof, Florida--it was my access point, my key. The library was the only place I had ever been where I could have whatever I wanted. It is a cliche to say that the library opened up a world of knowledge and experience to me, that it started my journey in books to places I could never have imagined, but it's true.

There are cages in Marsh's Library in Dublin, but I wonder how many of those scholars heard the lock click behind them and felt, maybe for the first time, totally free.

I asked my Facebook friends two questions: "If you could make one thing socially acceptable that is currently not, what would it be?" and "What is the title of your autobiography?" I learned something about my pals by asking these questions: the people in my life are funny, profound, and profoundly sarcastic. And they want to be naked. Almost everyone who commented said they wished they could be nude more often, and I tend to agree. I don't care to be naked all the time, everywhere, but I do firmly believe that we should always be allowed to sleep and swim naked.

When I was a teenager, I felt self-conscious at the beach. I'm not a good swimmer, and I hated my bare feet, and I felt awkward and flat-chested and like everyone was looking at me. They weren't, of course; they were too busy worrying about everyone looking at them. I don't know if Alex made me love the beach or love my body or if going to the beach with him just happened to coincide with learning to feel more physically confident, but the beach became a place where I truly felt at ease and a little bit in love with myself as a physical being. I feel sexy at the beach, but that's not the point. I feel comfortable and confident there in a way that makes being attractive to someone else totally irrelevant. It also makes clothing seem irrelevant.

I suppose that's part of the reason that the title of my autobiography might mention the sea shore.

The first question for a stranger suggested in Davy Rothbart's book How Did You End Up Here? is simply, "How was your day? What did you do?" I like it because it's an easy question, not much more intimidating to ask or be asked than, "How are you?" but without the rote response. I think overcoming automatic responses is the first step to meaningful conversation. When I asked my Facebook pals, "How was your day? What did you do?" the first response was, "Do you really want to know?"

Yes, I really want to know.

So, my day has been pretty good. It's had some variety, including time with people I like and time by myself, time to talk and time to make things.

Alice, Mistie, Fiona and I went to the movies this morning to see Oz, the Great and Powerful. It was pretty bad. I thought so, and I quite like James Franco. The little girls liked it, though, and I like going to the movies in general, so no hard feelings, crappy movie. Going to a movie early, though, made it feel like the day didn't really start until the afternoon.

Alice and I spent the afternoon making things. She drew a flamenco dancer and I started sculpting some clay figures. The pieces of clay I had suggested book ends to me at first, but I think I've ruined that idea by tilting their heads out of line. They look like beggars or some other rough, sad sorts. I think I will embrace their pitiful natures and leave them a little raw and featureless. They're going to be part of a series of raku pieces fired using my old high school journals. I have good lines to go with these two, but I'm brainstorming about incorporating the words in a different way. We'll see.

Now, the evening light is coming through the windows, all slanty and golden, and I'm feeling a little tired and quiet. When Alice goes to bed, I think I will curl up with a book, or maybe turn on an old movie and continue to carve

I'm terrible at small talk. Being quiet has got me mislabeled as shy, snobbish and, sometimes, curiously, sweeter than I am. If I can't think of anything to say, I'll usually be quiet, which lets people assign whatever tag they like to my taciturnity (a real word; I looked it up). Sucking at small talk isn't usually something I feel bad about; I prefer to think of myself as an all-or-nothing, profound-or-silent kind of gal. I don't like talking about nothing, but that jump from "Crazy weather we're having" to meaningful conversation is hard to make.

Davy Rothbart's book, How Did You End Up Here?: The Surprising Ways Our Questions Connect Us is a short manual for making small talk bigger. Rothbart is the editor of FOUND Magazine, which publishes "found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles– anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life." It's not surprising that he's a curious person, someone who wants to learn more about the people he meets. On a recent press tour for the magazine, he asked audiences, "What question would you most like to ask a stranger?" And then he started asking people those questions. The book is a collection of questions that hopefully move past small talk into real conversation. The idea is that people want to connect, and if you're brave and curious and ask people questions about their lives, they will answer.

A life long introvert with a life long aversion to small talk, I am curious but not brave when it comes to striking up conversation with strangers or even people I know casually. I would like to change that. It's a common misconception about us introverts that we don't like people or that we can get along just fine without social connections. We can't; we're just not good at making those connections, and we can get away with being crap at it because we don't need very many. Rothbart's strategy for connecting by asking questions seems solid to me. The people I know who are really good with people are the ones who know how and what to ask to get others comfortable and talking.

I'm going to start small by asking some of Rothbart's questions on Facebook and answering some of them here. If you'd like to join the conversation, you can jump in on the comments or, better yet, volunteer to answer a question in a guest post.

I've been making ceramics for about four years, but today was the first time I'd ever thrown on the wheel. My husband, Alex, and our various ceramicist friends have offered to teach me many times, and several art schools in the area offer beginners' classes, but I've never tried.

Part of the reason I've never bothered with the wheel is that I really like hand-building. I like using firmer clay and really manhandling it. I like the organic wonkiness of the pinch pots and sculptures I've made, and I don't really want to make functional ware. Truly, I've never wanted to use the wheel. Lately, though, I've been wanting to make bigger things, sculptures that would be difficult to fire if they were solid, different kinds of vessels. There are things I want to make now that I need this other skill to accomplish, but I've waited to ask to be taught because I've been a little scared of not being any good at it.

Fear is part of art. One of my poetry mentors used to ask me often, "What's at stake in this poem? What are you risking?" If you're not risking something, if you're not a little scared, you're not doing the work. If you know for sure that it will turn out well, you're not trying hard enough, you're not "reading beyond your grade level," to borrow an idea from my 4th grader's FCAT information night.

I like to think of myself as being a little bit brave. At least I like to think of myself as a person who isn't afraid of failing, an artist who believes in the experience more than the outcome, so I was pretty annoyed to realize that it was silly, self-conscious fear that kept me from trying the wheel. I was embarrassed to be a beginner. As Alex was showing me how to center the clay, I found myself giggling nervously, and I was glad that he knows me well enough to show me the steps and then leave the room so that I could figure out the details in private.

As you can see, I've got a long way to go before I can throw the larger, sculptural shapes I've been imagining. I might not ever get to those imaginary shapes. I might really suck at this and give it up as an artistic false start, but it won't be fear that keeps me from trying.

The list of frequently banned or challenged books for a particular year or decade typically looks like a list of the best in young adult literature, with a few gay penguins thrown in to shake things up. Something about teenagers thinking that really freaks out the squares. If you're a teenager, I hope that makes you feel powerful.

One of the most frequently banned and challenged books of the last several years is Sherman Alexie's YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, about a teenager who leaves the Spokane Indian Reservation to go to a better, wealthier, mostly white high school. There's a lot in this book about growing up in poverty, a lot about discovering who you are and how your past will inform and challenge who you become. Because the narrator is a 14-year-old boy, there's a fair amount of thinking about sex, though not a lot of action. Because he's growing up in poverty, there's a fair amount of substance abuse and death. Neil Gaiman sums it up in his blurb on the dust jacket when he says it's "funny and heartwarming and honest and wise and smart" and also likely to be "winning awards and being banned."

I read this book as an adult, but I saw a lot of my teenaged self in Junior. He is a smart poor kid. He loves where he comes from, but he has to leave home in order to survive. He feels guilty for leaving. We belong to some of the same tribes, Junior and me.

Like so many banned books, it's sadly ironic that this book gets banned. It's banned because someone wants to protect teenagers from all the scary, bad stuff this book talks about, but it's exactly the kind of book that might save them from it. If you're a bookish person, you can probably remember a book that blew your mind at 14 or so, a book that helped you to know yourself, a book you read at just the right time. This is that book for someone. I hope it's on the shelf when they need it.

Diary has been banned or challenged due to "offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group."

This week is the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, a week-long celebration of our right to read, learn, and explore. One of the events this year is a Virtual Read Out. You can make a video endorsing a banned book, reading from a banned book, or explaining why the freedom to read is important. I'll be posting short readings from some of my favorite banned books throughout the week.

Just to be contradictory, this first reading is from a book I don't really love; in fact, when I first read it in college, I hated it. The main character of Kate Chopin's The Awakening annoyed the shit out of me. Barely out of adolescence myself, I found Edna immature and selfish, her suicide the ultimate cop-out of a person too cowardly to make a place for herself in the world. I hated how dismissive she was of her friend, Adele Ratignolle, a woman who seems to be truly happy in her role as wife and mother. I was 20 years old, single, childless, with barely any sexual experience, and I was outraged on behalf of the cheerful, fulfilled mothers of the world.

And then I got married and I had a baby and I ran full speed into the wall of society's expectations of parents in general and mothers in particular. I realized that I didn't want what many people seemed very happy to have--a house and two cars and a 9 to 5 job and three kids. I realized that, however much I loved my husband and my child--and I loved them a whole fucking lot--I wouldn't be able to keep loving them if they were all I was allowed to have or want.

And then I read The Awakening again.

I still think that Edna is immature, but I also see how she's treated like a child. I still think her suicide is a bit cowardly, but I also see how few choices she has. I find that I sympathize with her very much as a fellow mother, and I feel grateful to have found a way to be myself: an artist, a parent, a spouse, a citizen--a whole person. I wish Edna had had more choices. I think she could have grown up to be quite the human being.

The Awakening is often banned for its sexual content. It also has some old-fashioned racist language (in the section I read, she uses the word "darkies," which makes me cringe). It was challenged in 2011 because some editions show a bare-chested woman on the cover.

Coincidentally, my cousin also read from The Awakening this week at her blog. Her take is a little different from mine and includes more historical context.