What’s your creative process like?
I like to give myself assignments. One year I wrote a page each day and that eventually became my book Gathering the Pieces of Days, which is being published by Unsolicited Press in April 2025.
This year I’m writing a couplet each day. I’ve strung some of those together into poems or picked out pieces to create short poems. When I wrote prose, I could get up and write each morning. With poetry I need empty space; I need time to breathe and stare out the window. That doesn’t happen most days, but by writing a couplet a day, I might be awake enough to recognize the poetry when it comes.
I also have a poetry group that I’ve been with for about twenty years, and we meet once a month. Even if I haven’t written all month, I write a poem for the group. And I get together with a group of poets to write each season, near the solstice and equinox.
Do you have a space dedicated to creative work? What does it look like?
During the pandemic, my friend John gave me a writing desk he fashioned from white oak. It’s in the back bedroom, which I’ve made my writing space. The desk is right at the window and overlooks a redwood tree. I have a separate office where I work as a freelance editor, so this space is dedicated to writing. When I’m sitting at the writing desk, where I’m sitting now, or on the little sofa under the bookcases, I feel like I’m saying, “Okay, here I am. I’m ready.”
The first photo shows the desk when I first got it in June 2020.
And the second photo is the desk when I’m writing today in June 2024.
If your work had a soundtrack, what songs would be on it? Why?
I’ve actually been thinking about this lately. Everything is amplified these days. You can’t even be on hold without music playing. If I could choose a soundtrack for my work or my life, it would be silence. Not a silence devoid of sound but a silence that allows room for nature to speak.
Give us some background on the piece you contributed to this issue.
“Sweet Things” was inspired by Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow Is Not My Name.” It came from a prompt during a summer solstice writing group in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. We were probably meeting on Zoom, rather than in person. The prompt was to write about those “two million naturally occurring sweet things …”
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet and freelance editor. Her work has appeared in many journals, including One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Eclectica, and in the anthologies Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life with Coffee, Eclectica Magazine Best Poetry, and A Trembling of Finches. Her chapbook Punctuated is forthcoming from Bottlecap and her book Gathering the Pieces of Days is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Northern California.