Interviewer: How do you climb out of a dry spell of writing?

Jane Hirshfield: By longing. I grow lonely for poems, the way you would grow lonely for an absent lover. And then they return. Longing is the ladder we meet on.

//

Sometimes my longing for writing is my longing for certain people or places. To write about those people might resurrect them. To write about those places, I might return to them.

<<