Member Spotlight: Hope Coulter

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Now more than ever, we’re assaulted at every turn with inpouring verbiage from the trivial to the supremely consequential, the fake to the true. Authentic, struggle-generated writing gives us a path to clarity. It’s not a quick, straightforward path—it’s a hard-won process. As Melville said, “Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.” And that’s the human beauty of it. Through the activity of writing we can arrive at a window of vision, rubbed clear amid the grime.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Well, after you start laundry, file your nails, and reorganize your desk drawer, you have to pull yourself out of the pool of self-loathing. Reread your old notes, old scrap files, old journals you’d forgotten about. Read a poem or favorite passage or two. Close your browser, silence your phone, and move devices out of the way. You’re physically clearing a space for your attention, your creativity—the good stuff that got us into this in the first place. Stare out the window. Then tell yourself you can stand anything for 25 minutes, no matter how torturous. Pull out paper and pen, start a timer, and write—slowly, slowly, badly or not. Enjoy forming the letters. When the chime rings, there: you’ve moved forward.

What is your favorite time to write? Morning, after I’ve had coffee and fed the birds.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Hemingway was once asked in an interview how much he knew about an entire story as he was writing it—do you have the ending in mind all along, etc. This is a common thing writers are asked. But to me his response is larger than most, and helps me have faith that there is something going on in my work in progress, even if I haven’t quite uncovered it yet. He said: “Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out. Everything changes as it moves. This is what makes the movement which makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.” This is refreshingly at odds with formulaic teachings about plot and structure: you must have a hook! your character must reach a crossroads at XYZ point! It gets at the mystery of why some works are strangely powerful and timeless. It’s similar to Flannery O’Connor’s statement that “Art is selective. What is there is essential and creates movement.” Nobody can really advise about exactly how to do that selecting, how to follow the movement. Still, just hearing these literary greats point to this subsurface movement and affirm that it’s there and it’s what one should follow—that somehow helps me move forward.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? It’s that same metaphor I mentioned earlier. Through writing we have the chance to clear a small window of insight and clarity amid the chaos. We’re subjected to a stream of many abuses of language in the public sphere: deadly lies, fakery, and mass cheapening, all done through words, it just goes on and on. So the effort to reclaim language and make it instead into something surprising and strange and maybe beautiful, something essential that might even outlast our present turmoil—that gives me relief and hope.

Hope Coulter’s Rumors of Peace is out September 22 with Cornerstone Press.