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Member Spotlight: Oksana Maksymchuk

author Oksana Maksymchuk and her book Still City

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing changes us and reconstitutes reality itself. So does its twin — reading.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Writing, for me, is a conversation. When I don’t write, I read, I talk to people, I connect with family and reach out to strangers. I go to the movies and to museums and take long walks and cook and clean up. I don’t think of writing as disconnected from these activities. Rather, it’s one of the ways in which I engage with myself, with others and with the world. I don’t force myself to write — but when it happens, I do feel more alive and engaged than usual. It’s magical and transformative. I suppose that’s why some writers have such anxiety about having a writer’s block in the first place — they seek out the high, and try to recreate the conditions in which they have this experience. For others, of course, writing is a business and a day job, and it’s important to keep up production and present deliverables at reasonable intervals. There’s nothing wrong with either model, and different forms of writing lend themselves to different writing habits and writer’s block remedies. For me, writing poems requires disruption and change; writing academic papers and papers, by contrast, requires stability and routine. Ritual is important to both.

What is your favorite time to write? It depends on what I’m writing! A poem can arrive at any time, even when I’m physically drained, emotionally shaken, or cognitively depleted. By contrast, revising, editing, and writing prose is far more satisfying when I do it in the morning or in the evening, the times when I feel most focused and clear-headed.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Give no unsolicited advice. It’s true for writing, and true for other spheres of life.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? Ours is the time of upheaval and confusion. This can be terrible for us as persons, but it presents opportunities for us as poets and writers. In these capacities, we can flourish, organizing the chaos, giving it shape. It’s uncanny how the destruction of a person’s basis for happiness can be accompanied by her finding her voice and reaching the pinnacle of her artistic vision. We are very rarely willing to risk it all and give up on our comforts — yet such experiences are often formative for us as artists and thinkers.

Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City is out now with University of Pittsburgh Press.