An interview with D M Gordon

The following interview was conducted by Joan Axelrod-Contrada, moderator of the Are You Ready? Submitting to Literary Journals panel at this year’s WriteAngles conference.

Why did you become a writer? When did the writing bug first bite you?

I wrote as an early teenager. I remember a long extended poem, “Black Jack,” in rhymed couplets about the riderless horse that followed JFK’s caisson, empty boots turned backwards in the stirrups to indicate a fallen leader. Freshman year in college I took my first creative writing class and was the only student ready with material. I’d never had any work critiqued before, and the professor used my sonnet to prove that the sonnet was dead. I’d also written a quirky short story about a date where the boy confessed he was Jesus, and the professor said the author was psychotic – at least that’s what I heard. I knew that wasn’t true and only thought, alarmed, I’m going to flunk creative writing. So I dropped the course, and went on to have a music career that took all my time and artistic energies. Years later, when I returned to writing, I finally honored the fact I’d been creating sonnets and short stories on my own when I was so young, and finally affirmed the sonnet is not dead!

What is the most rewarding part of being a writer?

Re-reading and revision. That’s where a writer gets to marvel at what’s been created where nothing existed before, to enjoy what is, and then make it shine and bring it to its true self.

The most frustrating?

How hard it is to face the everydayness of the blank page.

Can you tell us about your latest release?

I’d like to tell you about what is poised, making the rounds in the hands of a wonderful agent at top publishing houses. Though no one has bitten yet, there has been a lot of praise. It’s a novel called GEOGRAPHY, about a family-less boy struggling to find home in the far northern islands of British Columbia in the 1960’s.

What inspired it?

The stories of men I’ve known who had difficult upbringings, foster care or abuse, and rather than blame their past, grew up to create the world as it should be. I started writing a composite account of their fictional childhoods, intending to write about heroes, but GEOGRAPHY became its own story.

You’re sitting on the Submitting to Literary Journals panel at this year’s conference. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re planning?

Submission is either daunting, if you haven’t done much of it, or odious, if you’ve done a lot. I know that as moderator it’s your hope that we give folks a leg up on the process. With special dispensation from the conference, I’m also sitting in on the afternoon panel called How To Stop Warding Off Poems and Learn to Love Them. Patricia Lee Lewis, Doug Anderson, and I will be talking about the difficult, obscure poems, how we’ve learned to enter them; we’ll be leading the group in a what we hope will be a revelatory experience with a short, difficult poem.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently juggling. Poems. 30 poems in November for The Center for New Americans. And the prequel to GEOGRAPHY set in Seattle 1925-1946, about the life of a prostitute – but whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably not like that. And a short story about a boy trying to get in between his mother and their neighbor as the adults are on the brink of an affair.

Where can we find you online?

I have a website for my editorial services. Or Google D M Gordon and Diana Gordon, (though there’s a Canadian Diana Gordon who writes poetry and paints).

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