#georgraph

Bio: Molly Brodak is the winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and has published one book of poetry and two chapbooks. BANDIT is her first full-length book of prose.

1. Did you find it difficult to publish a book that was prose after having previously published poetry? Or was prose a genre that you wrote in a lot but just didn’t publish much? How is your work process different for prose than poetry?

Writing prose was very hard for me as a poet. I'm so used to condensing thought as much as possible. In the rough draft stage I would write a longish paragraph and be like, 'there I did it, a whole chapter!' I had to learn to be patient, put pressure on myself to stay in the moment and really tease out meaning in a totally different way from poetry. I learned a lot and I think it was instructive to my poetry as well.

2. Do you think you will write more books in prose? What writing or other creative projects are you working on right now?

I have another prose book in the works right now. I'm planning on writing a kind of travel narrative in the summer, so I'm doing prep work for it now. It's called Alone in Poland and I think the title says it all. It's funny, I'm starting to think prose may be the more flexible and freeing genre than poetry right now.

3. What is your day-to-day life like? When and where do you do writing?

I write in bed, surrounded by pillows and snacks. I like to be comfortable when I write, and I have no set schedule for it, just whenever the mood strikes. I never understood people who take these extreme austerity measures, like waking up at some miserable hour and sitting on a hard chair in the dark to write. I just wouldn't do it. I think writing is hard enough.

I teach some days of the week, and the rest of the time I'm reading, writing, baking, hanging out with my chickens and my husband. I believe, though, that 'writing' is always happening. The mind of the writer never really stops, and so being a writer is a way of experiencing the world all the time, a way of seeing and remembering.

4. You are really into baking. You are an amazing baker, it seems. How does the creative process of cooking overlap with the creative process of writing for you?

I don't like making comparisons between baking and writing. I like to think of them as opposites, in fact, and that I need them both in my life for balance. Baking is mechanical, precise, egoless. If you want to figure out how to make butter and sugar and flour do the thing you want, you have to submit your will to them. Writing is sort of the opposite of that--it's an exercise in self-talk a lot of the times, in saturated selfhood. I think I would go crazy if I didn't bake.

5. Michigan is a looming, ubiquitous background for your memoir. The memoir almost feels as much about Michigan as it does your family or even your father. How intentional was that in your writing process for BANDIT? What books do you like that have a real overwhelming sense of setting and geographical mood?