Mary Szybist
(2004)

How would you characterize the value of your YWW teaching experience in the larger context of who you are as a writer/artist?

I worked at YWW both as a counselor and as teacher.  Both experiences enlarged my world, my artistic practice, and my sense of possibility as few experiences in my life have.  I wish that I had had the opportunity to attend YWW as a student; I know it would have helped me become more open to myself—and to my own “multitudes”—much earlier than I did.     

What do you find yourself most often reading or listening to lately and why?

I can’t seem to escape an obsession with Yeats; the grandeur of his vision has a hold of me.  I’m also loving Bye-And-Bye, Selected Late Poems by Charles Wright, Jorie Graham’s P L A C E, Jennifer Grotz’s The Needle, On Tact and the Made-up World by Michele Glazer, Useless Landscapes or A Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell, For the Mountain Laurel by John Casteen,  Troubled Tongues by Crystal Williams, Book of Hours by Marianne Boruch, and Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith.