Poetry News

Jenn McCreary’s Interview for The Next Big Thing

By Harriet Staff

We’re looking forward to Jenn McCreary’s book, & Now My Feet Are Maps, forthcoming from Dusie Press this Spring. On her blog, McCreary talks about the inspiration for the manuscript in The Next Big Thing: 

The fantastic Sandra Simonds tagged me to take part in The Next Big Thing, a series of self-interviews with writers which operates much like a zombie contagion— each writer tagged then infects another set of writers, until we are Zombie Poet Nation.  Or maybe it’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which we will all be connected, but through a series of interviews rather than by association with the movie Diner. Or maybe it’s like that commercial Heather Locklear did in the 80s, where she told two friends about Fabergé Organics shampoo, & then they told two friends, & so on, & so on…

The idea for & Now My Feet Are Maps came from bedtime reading with McCreary’s nine-year old twin sons, Caleb & Malcolm. She found that revisiting fairytales and folklore ”rekindled [her] childhood indignation at the treatment/fate of certain female characters.” McCreary writes:

This book project is ultimately concerned with the overarching issue with which I seem to wrestle in all of my work– the woman at the center of the heroic quest:  as healer/caretaker, as mother/lover, as maiden/witch/crone.  Fairytale & folklore here provided the lens through which this larger issue is examined, dissected, & reassembled.

You can read the compete interview on McCreary’s blog.

Tags: Dusie Press, Jenn McCreary, The Next Big Thing
Posted in Poetry News on Thursday, January 24th, 2013 by Harriet Staff.