Introducing Erica Anzalone
Sean Glatch | September 23, 2024 |
Erica Anzalone is the owner and founder of Witch Lit. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and a doctorate in English from UNLV, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship. Her first book of poetry Samsara won the Noemi Press award. Poems from her second collection have been published in The Literary Review, Juked, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. Her latest creative non-fiction “Tarot for the Bardo” can be found in Autofocus Literary Review. With over two decades of teaching experience, she is always excited to support writers on their journey to publication and beyond.
What existing writing inspires you to write?
Writers who are rethinking how we teach writing are exciting to me. The memoirist Melissa Febos comes to mind. I love the lyricism in her work, and how she writes about trauma in a compelling way.
In a class I took with her, she said that sometimes if we edit a work too soon, we risk “cutting vital organs.” This has inspired me to take greater risks in my work and get messy. Writing poetry requires such extreme precision, that her advice was liberatory. I do think revision is important, but it has its time and place in the last phase of writing. Her advice is the opposite of Hemingway’s “Kill your darlings.” I’d prefer to put my darlings into daycare until they find a home. I try to extend this same care to my students.
When I began writing poetry over two decades ago, the Poems for the Millennium series edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris were a huge inspiration.
As I get older, I’m inviting more of the weird into my work, including crossing genres like science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My inspirations include Yumiko Kurahashi, Octavia Butler, and Shirley Jackson.
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
My poetry professor Bill Knott – a cult legend in his own right who had faked his death and resurrected – told an anecdote about the painter Cezanne and the poet Mallarme that stuck with me. Cezanne said that he had a lot of ideas for poems. Mallarme said, “Poems aren’t made from ideas. They’re made from words.” This made me pay attention to the materiality of language and what Flaubert called “le soul mot juste” – just the right word. The novelist Geoge Saunders also writes line by line, letting the language lead him.
On that note, the poet James Galvin once said to me, “My ear is smarter than my brain.” In the sonnet experiments in my book Samsara, I relied more on my ear, and the results are more surprising than if I had planned out the poems.
What made you want to be a writer?
I began reading voraciously as a kid, and writing came naturally. My dad passed away when I was seven. That night, I was reading outside on a tree swing by porch light. The only thing that tore me away from my book – which was probably something like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis — was the uncanny feeling that something was wrong with my dad. After he died, I turned to writing as a way to heal.
What are your current writing projects?
I write a Substack on witchcraft and writing (witchlit.substack.com). My latest creative non-fiction “Tarot for the Bardo” uses Tarot as an inspiration. Otherwise, I like to write piece by piece, going where the energy is, and let the work tell me what is unifying it into a book later.
What do you like to do outside of writing?
I enjoy hiking, reading the Tarot, and rituals on the new and full moons.
Check out Erica’s upcoming course!
Word Witch: Exploring the Strange Magic of Embodiment
Infuse your writing with the weird and wonderful: discover the transformative power of embodiment through the archetype of the witch.
