What are you working on right now, Brenda Schmidt?

Well, I’m about to blow up my poetry manuscript. I worked on it in a poetry colloquium at the Sage Hill Writing Experience in 2010 and it’s ready enough to send out to a publisher, but I’ve held back for some reason. This spring I reviewed the project proposal for the book and realized the manuscript had become something else. I think I might have a better sense of what it’s about now. It has a plot of sorts, so there might be a novel buried in it. There might be a nonfiction book in it, too. To find out, I plan to use the manuscript as a chapter outline; each poem will serve as a chapter description. I’ll set some rules to push against for fun, blow the thing up and see what happens.

Brenda Schmidt’s fourth book of poetry Grid was published by Hagios Press in spring 2012. Flight Calls: An Apprentice on the Art of Listening, her book of essays, was published soon after by Kalamalka Press as part of the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series.