The Poetry Saloncast
by The Poetry Saloncast
Award-winning Poetry Saloncast hosts Tresha Faye Haefner and Douglas Manuel interview their favorite poets and poet entrepreneurs, asking them what got them started writing and what keeps them going. They focus on the creative process and the little-understood techniques of editing a poem to a finished piece. Then we put those techniques into practice and discuss how they helped us grow as poets and as human beings in our season wrap up.
Episodes
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S5 Ep60: Can Art Really Save Us? An Interview with Douglas Manuel about His Latest Book, TroubleFunk
Troublefunk is an American Love story, and it’s also about the many things that “push against a relationship and against love.” In his book, Manuel investigates his parents’ love story, what brought them together, what pulled them apart, and how music factored into that story. The poems center...
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S5 Ep59: What You Refuse to Remember: An Interview with M.T. Vallarta
W. H. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen. But how do you actually do that? How does a writer embody nothingness? In this interview MT Vallarta discusses her collection What You Refuse to Remember, from Small Harbor Editions. This collection is created of short prose poems separated by...
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S5 Ep58: The Sailor Moon Transformation Sequence
Why This Poem Matters: Listen to Tresha Faye Haefner discuss Rita Mookerjee's poem, "The Silor Moon Transformation Sequence." Hear her explain why it matters to her personally, and what it teaches her about the craft of writing poems.
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S5 Ep58: False Offering with Rita Mookerjee
Inspiration, mental health struggles and what to make with a giant bag of tapioca starch, this conversation has it all. Rita tells me about her new book, False Offering, and a bit about her upcoming book, Banana Heart. She discusses the way her partner, Dorothy K. Chan helped her get back into...
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S5 Ep57: Sarah Browning: Poetry, Politics and Really Hot Priests
“If we can’t face it, we can’t change it.” In our interview, Sarah Browning discusses her latest book, Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). It tackles subjects such as racism and gun violence, but also memories of being a nerdy girl in high school and the year she was lucky enough to…
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S5 Ep56: Kelli Russell Agodon and Susan Rich: Demystifying the Manuscript
Please enjoy our interview with Kelli and Susan on their new book! Here are the key take aways I got from our discussion. You don’t necessarily need to go in chronological order. Start with the juciest parts or the most vulnerable poems. Get an outside perspective. It’s the best way to be...
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S5 Ep55: Jose Hernandez Diaz: Realism and Surrealism
Jose calls his book, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) “two books in one.” The first section is deeply autobiographical, but the second half is truly surreal. Jose and I talked about honoring his writing and life. In the first section the speaker subverts stereotypes around growing up…
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S5 Ep54: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo - How Love Leads to Revolutions
Audre Lorde Pleasure Activism adrienne maree brown Octavia Butler Chen Chen, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” Khadija Queen’s “I’m so Fine” Take-Away Quotes “I thought about (the book) like a jewel setting. The Gettysburg poems were the center ring. The first and last...
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S5 Ep53: Nadia Colburn: A Dawn Practice to Call Yourself Back
In this interview Nadia discusses her second book of poems, I Say the Sky from published by University Press of Kentucky. You can take Nadia’s 7-Day New Year Writing and Meditation Program, starting January 17th, for free when you buy a copy of her book.
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S5 Ep52: Lindsey Royce: Writing With and Without God
How do you process the passing of someone you love? In this interview, Lindsey Royce discusses her latest collection, The Book of John. Already an established poet, when her late husband, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Royce wrote consistently about what she experienced during his last year…
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S5 Ep51: Angela Penaredondo - Layered Themes, Layered Voices
Tresha talks with Angela Penaredondo about her third collection, nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press, 2022). Angela discusses how personal and world history inspired her book. She relies on reading and research to generate writing, but sometimes allows another voice, less conscious and...
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S5 Ep50: Jane Muschenetz - Writing Home
We're born in a specific place with a specific history. How do these arbitrary facts affect us as artists? In this podcast I talk with Jane Muschenetz about her collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023). Jane was born to a Jewish family in Lviv, a city once under...
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S5 Ep49: DeShawn McKinney: The Value of Deadlines
Can a writer finish a book in time to meet a deadline? In our interview with DeShawn McKinney we discuss the genesis of his first chapbook, father, forgive me from Black Sunflower Press, 2003. Deshawn explains that he wrote a large portion of the book in 12 hours in order to meet the deadline for...
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S5 Ep48: Joan Kwon Glass: The Tribe of Invisible People
How does a person deal with grief in poetry? In this interview Joan Kwon Glass discusses her first full-length collection, Night Swim, winner of the Diode Poetry Prize (2021), which explores the death by suicide of both her nephew and sister. Glass believed nobody would want to read her book, but...
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S5 Ep47: Jon Pearson - A Creative Pep Talk
Do you struggle to make time for your creative self? In this episode, creativity experts and writers Tresha Faye Haefner and Jon Pearson discuss their different approaches to making time and finding motivation for their writing. As Jon notes, the difficulty is not writing but "starting" to write....
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S5 Ep46: Heather Bourbeau: The Poetry of History
-"We thought we knew a lot about our history. We were wrong." - Heather Bourbeau How do you write poetry about historical people and events? In this interview, Heather Bourbeau discusses the way she tackles the personal and historical in her new book, Monarch. Broken into four parts, the…
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S5 Ep45: Jessica Cuello: Does the Lyrical "I" Lie?
How do we know what other people know? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner talk with Jessica Cuello about her third collection, Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her book explores issues of childhood trauma that children are taught to lie about...
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S5 Ep44: How Seasons Stir the Imagination
In this interview, host Douglas Manuel gets his chance to interview Lois P. Jones, who interviewed him on Poet's Café. Lois discusses how winter stirs her imagination for poetry (as Wallace Stevens put it, "One must have a mind of winter") because of its mystery. Doug, Tresha and Lois discuss how...
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S5 Ep43: Edward Vidaurre: Waving the Flag of Activism
Get inside the mind of poet-activist, writer, and publisher Edward Vidaurre as Tresha and Douglas ask about his book Cry, Howl from PricklyPear Press and his work running FlowerSong Press. He talks about riding the bus to school and seeing others reading; how that inspired him to seek out authors...
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S5 Ep42: Kelly Cressio-Moeller: The Moon Wrote This Poem
In this interview Kelly Cressio-Moeller discusses how music, art and cinema play into her writing. As a student of art history and a drummer, Kelly describes how she created flow in and between poems to make her first collection, Shade of Blue Trees! When Pulitzer Prize winner Dianne Seuss gave…
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S5 Ep41: Ellen Bass: Try Try Again
Does a poem start with an image or with sound? In this interview Douglas Manuel and Tresha Faye Haefner ask Ellen Bass about her writing process. She tells us about ways she uses an image to start a poem and her use of tools like sound to distract her "overly logical mind" while her more…
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S5 Ep40: Kelli Russell Agodon: Why Poets Need Restrictions
How can you cope with anxiety? Try writing a book about it. In this interview Kelli Russell Agdon discusses her latest book. Originally she tells us that the book began with two separate manuscripts melding into one. One book was a collection of poems about the broken world, and another about the...
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S5 Ep39: Diannely Antigua: Speaking the Words that Are Not Allowed
Were there certain topics that were off limits to talk about when you were growing up? Any words you weren’t allowed to say? In this interview Diannely Antigua discusses her book Ugly Music, a book where the speaker explores her complicated relationship to sexuality against a strict religious...
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S5 Ep38: Tanaya Winder: When Poetry Makes Music
In this interview Tanaya Winder discusses the way she has combined poetry and performance with social advocacy to help others feel seen in real life and on the page. Once a student at Stanford driven to pursue a degree in law, Tanaya eventually turned to poetry seeing it as a way to help...
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S4 Ep37: Meghan Sterling
In this interview Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books, 2022), passionately discusses the complexities of love and how profound that experience is as a mother of a four-year-old girl. She says love is, “An enormous braid of hope, fear, longing, joy, exhaustion…
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S4 Ep36: Kai Coggin: Making the Moments Holy
In this wide-ranging interview, Kai Coggin tells her story of meeting Sandra Cisneros along with her middle school English class and how the famous author encouraged her to make time for her own writing as well as bringing writing to others. Now Kai Coggin on her fourth book Mining for Stardust,...
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S4 Ep34: Welcome Doug Manuel and Season Preview
Big Announcement for the podcast: Kelly Grace Thomas is stepping aside as co-host with Tresha Faye Haefner. Kelly has a new baby! With an infant in the house she's focusing on being a new mother, and stepping into her prodigious shoes is creative powerhouse and high-spirit extraordinaire Doug...
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S3 Ep33: Brian Sonia-Wallace: Poetry in Service
“What does it mean to call every stranger friend?” That’s a question poet and innovator Brian Sonia-Wallace asks as he discusses his unusual journey writing spontaneous poetry at events. In his twenties Brian Sonia-Wallace put out a typewriter on the street to write poetry for strangers and has...
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S3 Ep32: Gustavo Hernandez:
What does it mean to carry a landscape with you when that landscape belongs to someone else? In this interview, Gustavo Hernandez discusses the way poetry has helped him deal with living as an immigrant, and what it means to have two places always with him - California and Jalisco, Mexico. He…
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S3 Ep31: Lynne Thompson: Embracing the Unknown
Many poets are beguiled by the fundamental where did I come from question. Much of Lynne Thompson’s work traces the threads that influenced her sense of identity and how it interacts with politics and race. At the same time, the job of a poet is to find a new angle on how to address issues that…
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S3 Ep30: Kim Addonizio: Finding the Voice of a Poem
How do you find your voice? What about the voice of a poem or piece? In this interview Kim talks about her influences, and how they have helped her find her own voice. She also talks about getting past her own voice to find the voice of the poem itself, and how she helps support her students in...
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S3 Ep29: Cameron Morse: The Poetry of Confession
What can we learn from reading the Confessions of St. Augustin? In this interview Tresha asks Cameron Morse to discuss his latest book, Far Other, titled after a line from St. Augustin. Cameron discusses his interest in the Confessional Tradition, how it began around 300's BC, and what it can…
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S3 Ep28: Sonia Greenfield - Balancing Grief and Gratitude
How do you find the place in your poetry for your complete self - the sorrow and the joy, the eventful and the mundane, the gratitude and the grief? Is the balance found in a single poem or across multiple poems? In this interview award-winning poet Sonia Greenfield talks to us about her journey...
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S3 Ep27: Nancy Lynee Woo: Living your Creative Mission
Do writers have a duty to share their work? In this interview Nancy Lynee Woo discusses what it’s like to come out of an Emerging Writers Fellowship, to wrestle with the pressure to become a “literary celebrity,” and the difference between trying to get published by a journal, vs. sharing art…
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S3 Ep26: Jon Pearson: Unhinging Your Mind
Prolific writer, cartoonist and public speaker Jon Pearson talks to Tresha and Kelly about unleashing the inner genius of the imagination. Pearson talks fast, draws fast and writes fast, and his ideas about freeing the mind from our adult restrictions have inspired thousands of souls. Hear from…
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S2 Ep25: Creative in Quarantine II - Jennie Linthorst, Arthur Kayzakian, Brian Sonia Wallace
Our second poets panel on surviving 2020 as a writer and poet is chock full of great suggestions and helpful life tips to staying creative and staying sane while keeping your distance from other people. Three amazing talents - Poetry Salon teacher Arthur Kayzakian, creativity coach Jennie…
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S2 Ep24: Bonus Minisode - Julie Hartley and Tresha on narrative types
This short segment is an excerpt from last week's interview where Julie Hartley, founder of the Centauri School of Writing and Tresha Faye Haefner talk about narrative types, truth in memoir and expanding that to the poetry field. It didn't fit in with the flow of the epsiode itself, but was too...
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S2 Ep23: Julie Hartley: Founder of the Centauri School of Writing
Listen to this bonus episode to hear Julie Hartley talk about how she turned her love of writing into a career. Julie and her husband founded The Centauri School for Writing in Canada, plus a Costa Rica-based camp and retreat center that runs a whole slate of classes for both teens and adults.…
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S2 Ep22: Creatives in Quarantine 1 - Brendan Constantine, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Nancy Lynee Woo
Bonus episode! This week, we gather three amazing poets - Brendan Constantine, Jeannine Hall Gailey and Nancy Lynee Woo - for the first of two panels on how these poets are coping with stay-at-home orders during a global pandemic. Are they reflecting the national scene in their writing? What…
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S1 Ep21: Tresha Haefner and Kelly Thomas Season Two Wrapup
We've interviewed some amazing word artists for Season Two - Arthur Kayzakian, Victoria Lynn McCoy, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Antionette Brim, and Dorothy Chan. Kelly Grace Thomas and I review all the lessons we've learned this season and read a couple of poems that were changed fundamentally by the...
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S1 Ep20: A Writing Prompt You Can Use Everyday
The COVID quarantine has sent our schedule all higgeldy piggeldy, so this week we grant you, our loyal listeners, with this writing prompt from Tresha that will serve you throughout all your years as a writer. Really, this one's the one. Print it, laminate it and sleep with it under your pillow....
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S1 Ep19: Arthur Kayzakian - Writing the Opposite Gender and Letting Language Lead
In this episode we interview Iranian-Armenian-American poet, Arthur Kayzakian who has just joined The Poetry Salon as a workshop facilitator! Kazakian talks about what it’s like to grow up in a war zone and migrate to a different country, how he learned English as a language of abandonment, and...
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S1 Ep18: Victoria Lynne McCoy: Processing Grief with Poetry
How do we create a safe space to process our grief through art? Victoria Lynne McCoy discusses Carmen Maria Machado's metaphor of a "house for grief" and how she enters that house to find the material for her poems about the dead, and then finds her way out again, back to her daily life. Listen…
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S1 Ep17: Marie-Elizabeth Mali: Writing Yourself Stronger
Can writing poetry make you a stronger person? In this interview Marie-Elizabeth Mali, author of Steady, My Gaze (2011) discusses the ways writing helps her explore her own nature, and come to terms with parts of herself she doesn't necessarily like. Specifically she discusses the way diving into...
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S1 Ep16: Antionette Brim: Speaking Your Voice to History
Is there a special way poets have of explaining love? What about history? Or the Bible? In this episode, the poet Antoinette Brim discusses the challenges she had in taking on the topic of women in Genesis in her most recent book, These Women You Gave Me. Hear about this and other topics of her...
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S1 Ep15: Michelle Bitting: Preparing the Body for Poetry
In this interview captivating poet Michelle Bitting discusses the connection between movement, mythology, and writing poetry. A trained actress and dancer, Michelle says that writing poetry is a lot like being in a performance, where one needs to generate and sustain a certain mood in which to...
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S1 Ep14: Dorothy Chan: Food, Sex and Sonnets
Poet Dorothy Chan discusses pleasure, pop-culture, and the addiction she has to writing sonnets. Sonnets, she says, are like appetizers on a menu at a fancy restaurant – small, experimental, and the perfect size to taste without filling up. Unlike traditional sonnets though, Dorothy has pioneered...
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S1 Ep13: Second Season Teaser
Our second season launches next week. Listen to this and find out which poets we'll be interviewing in the coming eight weeks. Plus join our growing community on Patreon to get commentary on your drafts on our private Facebook Group.
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S1 Ep12: Terrie Silverman: The Magic of Mentoring Storytellers
What is a “Story Mentor” and how does Terrie Silverman, founder of Creative Rites, make magic happen through her mighty teaching powers? Silverman works with her clients to help them discover and refine their voices in such mediums as memoir, personal essay, storytelling, alt comedy, fiction, and...
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S1 Ep11: Paul Shirley: Writer’s Blok, Home of Community and Productivity
How does a former basketball player for the Chicago Bulls wind up with two published books and a writing center in Culver City? How does he keep dozens of writers on track to completing their novels and screenplays? Writer’s Blok founder, Paul Shirley, describes his origins as an artrepreneur in...
About this show
Award-winning Poetry Saloncast hosts Tresha Faye Haefner and Douglas Manuel interview their favorite poets and poet entrepreneurs, asking them what got them started writing and what keeps them going. They focus on the creative process and the little-understood techniques of editing a poem to a finished piece. Then we put those techniques into practice and discuss how they helped us grow as poets and as human beings in our season wrap up.
Hosted by
The Poetry Saloncast