One chapter of my new book-in-progress will include a chapbook-length excerpt of ten poems from Gray Jacobik's collection Little Boy Blue, followed by a interview with the poet. Yesterday, as I was working on my questions for Gray, I realized that this is the first interview I've ever conducted. Somehow I hadn't realized how challenging it would be to shape questions that are both focused and open-ended. I wanted them to center on the kinds of issues I'd already brought up in the book: issues of language--punctuation, sentences, characters, etc. I also wanted to highlight that this was a chance to read a larger selection of a poet's work rather than a single excerpted poem--that is, to think about the way in which a poet creates a dramatic and thematic arc in a collection.

Anyway, it took me all day to write six questions, although I do think the act of writing questions about a work of literature was in itself a productive way to think about the work.