Laura Eve Engel
(2000 & 2002)
How would you characterize the influence of your YWW experience in your life?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that most of the big decisions that have shaped my life since I was first a student at YWW were and continue to be influenced by my experience with and involvement in the program, from studying poetry at UVa as an undergraduate to pursuing an MFA to teaching writing and thinking of myself now as a writer. And it goes without saying, but I still spend my summers at Young Writers. I have a lot to thank the program for, and I’m not quite done giving back.
What’s the best advice you can give a Young Writer (in general or in your specific genre)?
Read a ton. Write a ton. Cherish your community. Respect your reader. Nourish your sense of humor. Don’t worry too much about “finding your voice”; you will always be made up of multiple voices, and exploring them all is part of the joy of the project. Listen hard for those qualities that make your brain, your way of seeing, unique, and write from them.(And if you want a bit of practical advice, here’s mine: don’t pay for an MFA. Programs that will fund you are out there. Find one.)
What do you find yourself most often reading or listening to lately and why?
Lately I’m reading a lot of what is sort of generically looped into the category of “non fiction.” In my case, this is everything from Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven to collections of essays on New Mexico to Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey to Pierre Lazlo’s self-described “ignorant treatise” on salt (called, uncontroversially, Salt). These books are loosely related in that they have a relationship to the writing I’m doing, but reading these books is also a way of making the small slice of world that I can see—which gets smaller the colder it gets, out here—bigger.
I’m also reading an advance copy of What About This, Copper Canyon’s forthcoming volume of the collected poems of Frank Stanford. I think I’ll be reading and rereading this hypnotic, voluminous book for a long time to come.