Member Spotlight: Christina N Cook

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing is important to me personally because it’s how I process my inner and outer experiences of the world—words a powerful way to shape my experiences into meaningful expression and share them with others. Many writers feel the same way, which makes it an important medium for the world. Reading the works of other writers enables us to understand the thought processes and perspectives of others—especially those whose life experiences differ widely from our own, who speak different languages (hence the critical importance of literary translators), who hail from different cultures and countries, who voice different genders, races, and religions. The cross-cultural pollination that written works afford is more important than ever in today’s increasingly fractured society, gripped as it is by leaders hellbent on dividing people according to any “category” possible: because a divided people is a weak people, whose softened minds and hardened hearts make them easy prey for racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic agendas. Writing creates more than poems, plots, essays, narratives, and characters: at its core, writing creates a rich communal space—an alternative to spaces overrun by social media posts and “breaking news” stories calibrated to provoke us, by “streaming” digital content designed to addict us. Writing—and reading—is an essential way to enrich our inner worlds on our own terms and build diverse communities in the outer world. It’s an essential way to secure our mental autonomy, to disempower provocateurs and power-hungry men.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I have two tried-and-true remedies, both of which I’ve “road-tested” many times. The first, and quickest, gets the body involved: print out the piece that’s giving you trouble and revise it by hand. Putting pen (my Lamy fountain pen, to be exact) to paper never fails to shift the stagnant energy. Honestly, it’s like opening the floodgates. Before I know it, my double-spaced type looks like lines of seed beds that exploded into a suddenly late-summer garden, complete with arrows, asterisks, and handwritten flourishes. My second remedy gets the spirit involved: I ask my work-in-progress (into which I’ve put so much attention and intention that it’s become its own body of energy) a question such as “what will help me move forward here?” Or I may ask one of my characters a more specific question such as “how are you going to get yourself out of this jam you’re in?” Then I take out my Tarot deck, pull a card or two, and lay them in front of me. I consider the cards’ visual images and symbolism, the archetypes represented; the animals, weather conditions, and landscape depicted; what the human figure or figures are doing and the expressions on their faces. Sometimes I go down rabbit holes of astrological, elemental, or mythical correspondences (T. Susan Chang’s book Tarot Correspondences is a treasure trove for all this). This remedy always leads me to particularly creative solutions to the “problem” that was blocking my writing.

What is your favorite time to write? My favorite time to write is when I have an entire day to dedicate wholly to my writing, when I have no scheduled appointments, errands to run, or pressing items on my to-do list. But alas, these days are infrequent—so I take any writing time I can get, in any denomination, and lavishly spend every last second of it.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Midway through graduate school, I decided to focus on writing poetry grounded in Greek mythology—a lifelong fascination of mine. After seeing the first few poems I produced, my mentor, poet Clare Rossini, encouraged me to unhitch myself from mythology’s antiquated storylines. Instead, she suggested that I lay creative claim to them; approach them in novel ways that reveal new perspectives and possibilities; challenge the outmoded assumptions with which they tainted much of the Western canon; diversify the spectrum of their voices… starting with my own. Shortly afterwards, I began translating the French poetry of Marie-Claire Bancquart, who did exactly that: the Greek goddesses and women in her poems have very different perspectives and agendas than they appear to have through mythology’s normative male perspective. Clare’s advice—and Marie-Claire’s enactment of it—has informed my writing ever since, be it poetry or prose, mundane or myth-inspired. The crux of this advice? Empower yourself to challenge all “received wisdom.” Reimagine every canonical narrative. That is the essential starting point—I dare say, the responsibility—of every creative writer.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? The same thing that scares me: we are living in deeply troubled times. What excites me about being a writer in these times is the deep sense I have of answering a call-to-arms. Toni Morison said it best with her oft-quoted words: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” So now when I sit at my writing desk each day and think of the lucrative professional career I gave up in order to be a full-time poet, translator, and creative writer, I no longer question the wisdom of it. I no longer question the value of what I do.

Christina N Cook’s Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart is out now with Aim Higher.