How did you get started writing poetry? In the early 1980s, not long after I began employment at Nebraska Wesleyan University as a horticulturist, I enrolled in a poetry-writing class taught by the...

How did your interest in poetry begin? I came to poetry late. I was studying to be a fiction specialist. In fact, my dissertation was on Faulkner’s novels. But while studying modern poetry in preparation...

Your latest novel In Our Other Lives was released on March 3, 2020. What do you want potential readers to know about the book? The story is told from the perspective of an NSA/FBI investigation into...

How did your latest work In a Good Time come about? Could you talk a little bit about the title? Various pathways led to In a Good Time. While the final push to publication came quickly (the book was...

What is your reason for writing? Or what role does writing play in your life? I write to find out, to stay green, to keep learning. Writing teaches me what I should be paying attention to. Do you...

How did you get your start in creative writing?  I started classes in creative writing and photography at Northeast Community College back in 1980, after deciding that sorting mail all night, six nights...

How did you get into writing? When I was 19 years old, I wandered into a poetry slam team performance at a coffeehouse in Albuquerque, my hometown, and was hooked when I saw the team performing a poem...

How has your family inspired your writing? My family didn’t exactly inspire my writing as much as it provided raw material for writing. My writing is usually triggered by or suggested by interactions...

What do you find easiest about writing? This is an interesting question since I feel like we writers often focus on the hardest aspects of writing. I suppose for me the easiest part about writing is...

What inspired you to write Gathering Place? What notions appear in Gathering Place are those which have shown up in most of my writing. The fact that the book, a first, is published quite late in my...

How did your book Mass for Shut-Ins come about? Several years ago, Greg Kosmicki, founder and editor of Backwaters Press, said he’d like to publish my next book. I held him at bay for a time, knowing...

How did your book [email protected] come about? I’d had [email protected] in mind for the title early on and couldn’t shake it. It went through a dozen permutations while I wrote and collected the...