Member Spotlight: Alan Davis

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing is my vocation and my practice in the way that a seeker meditates daily or an athlete lives and breathes a sports activity. Without considered language fashioned into narrative or form, all we would have is noise.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Keep the pencil moving. Keep the fingers typing. If you get stuck and need focus, use prompts.

What is your favorite time to write? The morning: my imagination is either uncluttered or alive with dream imagery.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Don’t write only from the brain or the heart or the solar plexus. Write from all three, allowing both sound and sense to guide you.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? So much possibility. So much danger. So much diversity. All of it a jumble until a writer braids it all together with language so exact and sensory and rhythmic that the resulting narrative is meaningful and unforgettable.

Alan Davis’s Clouds Are the Mountains of the World is out now with Woodhall Press.