Ask the Author: Irene Cooper
Answered Questions (6)
Irene Cooper
I write copy as well as literary stuff, so...always writing, really. Sometimes I have nothing to say. Then I read, or stare. I got a late start, by many standards, and frequently had to wedge the writing in between other life tasks. Which is not to say that when I got the time, I produced nothing but gold, far from it. But I wrote something I could work with later—an essay that really wanted to be a poem, a little scene that could grow into a story. When I think of writer's block, I imagine a lot of internal noise around, Is it good? The better questions are, are you working, are you thinking, are you reading, are you allowing your imagination some breathing room?
Irene Cooper
I don't know. Making something out of the air feels like something to say, except I'm very attached to the idea of legacy and influence and how we connect as writers and thinkers to what's come before. Maybe that: solitude and connection in one tiny brainspace.
Irene Cooper
Develop a practice, whatever that looks like. I feel like there's often a equation between how much a person writes and how concerned they are with whether it's good or not. Write as much as you can, when you can. Revision is the best thing ever, everything and anything can happen in revision, it's its own creative act.
Irene Cooper
I have finished a crime novel/thriller set in a smallish Colorado resort town, about a woman, Eleanor, who loses herself after her daughter drowns in the river, and subsists working for the local PD finding the bodies of crime victims. One day she finds a living child, which leads to a series of kidnappings and recoveries involving a local megachurch, a craft beer company, a cannabis corsortium, Eleanor's estranged surviving family and her two new besties, a forensic botanist and a young autodidact bike cop.
Also, poems.
Also, poems.
Irene Cooper
Panic, oftentimes. Other times I want to explore how far or in what direction I can take a little fact or anecdote. Sometimes it's about trying to attach sound to feeling.
Irene Cooper
A prompt my friend Ellen Santasiero offered up at our local writing salon put the picture of a house in my head, the kitchen, specifically, and a body pacing within it, worrying a shoebox of photos. Other bits of history and speculation and trivia attached to this image like velcro, or some other sticky thing.
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