Member Spotlight: Katharine Coldiron
August 27, 2020
Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world?
Language is a unique medium with which to understand the world. It might be impossible to solve the world with language, but language clarifies and complicates the experience of life in equal measures, a paradox I can’t get enough of. I write to try to understand, even though I know I never fully will.
What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block?
I don’t believe in writer’s block, only in writer’s anxiety. Writers fret to fill any available space where creativity should live. Just relax. You won’t save or end the world with your project.
What is your favorite time to write?
After lunch, through to dinner. I’m most relaxed and open then, not feeling worried about doing enough with the day, as I usually am in the morning.
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers?
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed: writing is not coal mining. Quit complaining and do your work.
What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age?
The opportunities to build community among geographically far-flung writers and thinkers. I’ve struck out repeatedly with in-person writers’ groups, but finding the right people has been easy online. My little group of friends on Twitter would not have been reproducible before the internet. And I get to support remarkable small presses and magazines that I couldn’t have known about otherwise. That’s how AWP turns into a class reunion instead of a networking opportunity.
Katharine Coldiron’s Ceremonials is out now with KERNPUNKT Press.