Faculty and Visiting Faculty

 

Julie sheehan

Associate Professor, Creative Writing
Julie Sheehan's three poetry collections are Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise (W.W. Norton), Orient Point (also from Norton) and Thaw (Fordham). Her honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and NYFA Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies.

FACULTY INTERVIEW:

What genre(s) do you write in?

I must confess to being a one trick pony who writes poetry and only poetry.

What is the thing that excites you about the act of writing?

The problem solving, and discovering what it is that I truly think through the poem.

Do you feel like your work is in conversation with other writers or work? If so,
who/what?

I wish my work were in closer conversation with Anne Carson's because I so love her mind, her imagination, her flexibility. I just think she's incredible. Because I use long lines and a kind of exuberance in some of my poems, I often get contextualized with Walt Whitman. One time I got compared to Fernando Pessoa, which was really fun.

What literary magazine would you recommend to your students?

All the usual suspects, but I want to shout out a magazine that one of our alumni, Axel Kolcow, started with some of their friends called Taco Bell Quarterly. It’s quirky stick-it-to-the-man type of stuff.

What is your writing process?

I find that if I know I have certain times sat aside, I can bank the muse. For example, when I had a very young child, I had someone who came in for two and a half hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that I could just sit down in the morning and write. I was always able to do it. I definitely need a little structure in my process.

How do you generate ideas?

I’ve never needed to generate ideas. I may need to sit down to work them out in a poem, but people do not lack for material. We all have material, just by being alive.

How do you manage when you get stuck?

I think writing's a muscle, so the reason I would get stuck is if my muscle has gotten pretty atrophied. I would need to regularly produce work of whatever quality in order to build the muscle back up.

Inspiration or perspiration?

You can’t build muscles without sweating a little bit. Perspiration!

If you weren't a writer, what job would you have?

This is a confession of my deepest, darkest possible secret: I think I would be a bookkeeper. I would really love how the little accounts receivable and accounts payable look when all lined up in a row with a number at the end. It seems low stress and gratifying. Mathematics is really an act of idealism. It's an imaginary system to explain reality and so are poems.

Do you have a writing tip for emerging writers?

Writing is not as solitary as it looks at first glance. Sure, the actual act of generating is solitary, but the act of welcoming readership, the act of being read? That's a social act. Make sure you're building a community of people whose work you love and who return the love for what you are striving to do.