How did you get into writing? Do you remember your first piece of writing?
Throughout high school, I played guitar and tried to sing and sometimes tried to write songs, which feels like it was preparing me for poetry, though I didn’t know it at the time. But I didn’t first start writing, at least “seriously” writing, until about halfway through college, once I enrolled in a course on Modernist poetry and began falling in love with the poems of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. At that time, I would’ve been writing flimsy but necessary-for-me imitations of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “In a Station of the Metro.” But before college, my only experience writing poetry would have been from random school assignments I no longer remember. I do remember this: in fifth grade, I wrote a poem as a Valentine to the person I asked to be my Valentine. That’s the only instance I remember of making a poem of my own free will until midway through college.
How do you think nature and weather influence poetry?
Well, weather and the natural world influence me, and I think everything that influences me probably ends up influencing my poems. Poems are conversations with ourselves, but they’re also conversations with other people, and to my mind, they’re also conversations with our environments, since what are we if not one of many, many parts of the places we live? One of my best teachers encouraged us to write while existing halfway in our bodies and halfway in our minds. What better way to get outside of our minds a little than to attend to that which produced us, that from which we’re made?
What has teaching others to write taught you about your own writing?
Teaching writing has kept my fundamentals sharp, and it’s also kept me sharp as a reader—one great thing about teaching poetry is seeing how wildly different making poems can look from one person to the next, especially before we might gravitate toward what’s perceived as being fashionable or not. Here’s a helpful thing the painter Henri Matisse said: “Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.” And I think there’s potentially something in all of us.
What author has inspired you the most?
It’s impossible for me to name only one, but as for the dead: Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Franz Kafka. The living: Mary Ruefle. What they share is a fiery passion and distrust for the world and for language. They care, and they’re also darkly comic. They like to be solemn and silly in subsequent breaths. I’d definitely have them all around my table for some slow-cooker corn chowder if I could.
Do you have a writing routine or any methods that you use?
No routine. The poems come when they come. I don’t believe in waiting for poems, so I make the effort to sit down and write as often as time allows, but I don’t often stay in anything like a routine for too long. As for methods, I like to write first drafts—multiple—by hand. I like to collect language fragments and ideas to reference later. I like to save embracing a truly blank page for those instances when I’ve got the time and fortitude to disappear inside myself awhile.
What inspires your writing?
Oh, most anything inspires my writing. Grief from seeing what humans are doing to each other, to the planet. Love from feeling deep connection to people, places, things. Obsession over an image or a word. A book, piece of music, or movie that challenges me in exciting ways. The pull toward wanting to embrace imagination and tap into something that feels at the same time larger and smaller than daily life.
What is the hardest thing about writing, and how do you work through it?
One interesting thing about writing—poems, at least—is that it gets harder the older you get. Part of making poems is embracing the unknown and accepting that you’ll stumble your way through that dark, sometimes without making sense of anything. And while your trust and confidence in this process strengthens, the problem is that you can’t repeat what you’ve done before. There’s nothing formulaic or scientific about making poems—“always for the first time,” as André Breton said. Each time, you’ve got to invent a new path.
Are you working on anything currently?
I’m working on poems and some lyric nonfiction that revolve around grief, water, and art. Not sure what shapes may eventually emerge, which is where I prefer to be.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Make writing your practice, not your career. Focus on the daily act, not the publication. If you don’t like the routine struggle of writing, there are much easier ways to gain fame or money. Read, read, read. From all eras, cultures, genres. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” but how would you know unless you’ve done your due diligence? You’re part of a family whether you like it or not. May as well not repeat the same mistakes your parents made. May as well honor what needs to be honored.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
The late, great Thelonious Monk once said, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” Good advice.
About the Author
Trey Moody (b. 1982, San Antonio, TX) is the author of Autoblivion (Conduit Books, 2023), winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize and the Midwest Book Award, and Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. A recipient of the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, his poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, and Poetry. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, NE.
Website: https://treymoody.org/
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