Nance Van Winckel Filterable Transcript| CTRL+Shift: Writing practice at the dawn of the digital era

Interview with Nance Van Winckel

Liberty Lake, WA on October 30, 2013 | Interviewer: Devin Becker

1	Devin Becker: OK, So, if you would please state for the camera your name, your date of birth, and where we are?	[0:00]
2	Nance Van Winckel: OK, I'm Nance van Winckel and I was born October 24th, 1951. We are in Liberty Lake, Washington.
3	DB: OK, and you've been living here for?
4	NVW: I've been in this area since 1990.
5	DB: OK
6	NVW: But my husband and I just moved out here to this little condo in '07
7	DB: OK, and by the way, it's a beautiful, beautiful view of the lake.
8	DB: OK, so here's the sort of digital and physical sort of question, but… So, what genres do you work in as a writer?
9	NVW: Poetry, primarily, but also I write short stories.
10	DB: What kinds of devices do you own or have access to for writing?
11	NVW: Well, for writing… Electronic devices, you mean?
12	DB: Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.
13	NVW: Yeah, I work on 3 different computers. This big iMac here that I use and then I have a laptop Mac, and then I also have an iPad.
14	DB: OK, and you write on the iPad?
15	NVW: I have a keyboard extension for it.
16	DB: And what program do you use to write in? Do you just write in like notes or…?
17	NVW: I use Pages on the app
18	DB: Oh, you use Pages.
19	NVW: I email it to myself, and then I move it in to Word.
20	DB: OK-
21	NVW: I use that one when I'm on the road.
22	DB: When you're on the road, it's just the iPad…?
23	NVW: Yeah
24	DB: And you're on the road quite a bit?
25	NVW: When I go to Vermont-
26	DB: OK, when you go to Vermont-
27	NVW: --when I'm doing any kind of traveling
28	DB: You don't travel with the laptop. You just travel with the iPad?
29	NVW: Yeah, I don't really take the laptop with me. I have an older laptop and it's pretty heavy.
30	DB: Yeah, they seriously are.
31	DB: OK, So you have 3 devices. And you are a Mac user?
32	NVW: Yeah, I'm clueless with PC-clueless.
33	DB: Would you call one of these devices you primary device?
34	NVW: This one
35	DB: That iMac?
36	NVW: Uh-hmm
37	DB: OK, and then so, how do you… (You sort of said this but) How do you manage your files between your devices? You email them to yourself?
38	NVW: Yes. With the iPad I email files to myself (Do I do it any other way?). With the laptop, I have put things on a memory stick and moved things back and forth that way. When I have to give a presentation in Vermont and I have been doing a lot of powerpoint things lately with art, text and art. I bring a memory stick and use that to set up at the college. They have all good Macs and a good tech person who will help me get set up.
39	DB: So for your work, now, do you work exclusively on computers, or do you kind of go between the physical and digital environments at all?
40	NVW: I work in longhand, on yellow legal tablets, or just whatever. I have different notebooks that I have. That's what all these notebooks are here; these are my various writing projects in process. They each get their own little notebook.
41	NVW: I worked longhand for… Gosh, I don't know-at least 3 or 4 more drafts, at least. Sometimes more like 10 or 12. It just depends. Some things give me more groove than others before I will type something.
42	DB: And we're going to come back to that.
43	NVW: OK
44	DB: What's the transition from the notebook into the digital? Do you type it out yourself?
45	NVW: Yeah.
46	DB: OK, and is that a moment of revision for you usually, or is it--?
47	NVW: Yeah, yeah
48	DB: OK, and …
49	NVW: And then once I get it in to a document, I'll probably revise it again a number of times.
50	DB: OK
51	NVW: I'm doing different revision operations (Maybe we're going to go with this?)
52	DB: We're definitely going to talk about revision more in depth. Yeah, that sort of like locating the practice now and then we'll see where we're at with that. So, these are the questions that, professionally, I'm interested in.
53	DB: So, how do you then save these notebooks in your pre-writing and all that? I mean, is there a… Do you just keep them in a box somewhere, or…?
54	NVW: This is 'they.'
55	DB: This is it, OK. But like your older ones, like ones with finished projects?
56	NVW: They're all down there on a shelf.
57	DB: They're all down there on a shelf?
58	NVW: Yeah
59	DB: OK, and then for your extra digital files, how do you save those? Do you save them just as Word docs?
60	NVW: Yeah, I save them as Word docs and then when I'm done with them and the books are published, then I just put them on a back-up disk and take them off my hard drive here.
61	DB: OK, do you print out your writing to revise it?
62	NVW: Often when it gets to the computer stage, not so much.
63	DB: OK
64	NVW: I'm just working on the screen for quite a while.
65	DB: And then a sort of last section on this is: how do you back up your work and (as you say) when you're finished with something, you put it on an external hard drive. Is that your digital archival back-up?
66	NVW: Right
67	DB: OK, and you don't use any Cloud-based systems like Dropbox or Google Drive, or anything like that?
68	NVW: Yeah, I do use Dropbox but… Not really so much for backup, but to send things to people.
69	DB: To send things and share things, and...
70	NVW: Yeah
71	DB: OK, are files saved in more than one location then?
72	NVW: Well, I do have a back-up drive and-
73	DB: So, on the hard drive on the computer and then in the back-up drive as well?
74	NVW: Yeah
75	DB: Do you keep print copies of your final drafts, or…?
76	NVW: Oh, yeah
77	DB: OK, so that you have a paper archive as well?
78	NVW: Yes
79	DB: What do you do? How do you keep that? Just in the boxes like the notebooks kind of, or…?
80	NVW: Yeah, they're usually with the notebooks. I just, once I print them out, I do some final kind of tinkering usually with the galleys. I'll keep a copy of the galleys when they book's actually coming out, and that gets filed with the notebooks then-when I'm done with it.
81	DB: OK, and this is kind of just a quick question from me, personally, and librarians but… Have you ever received or sort out information about methods for digital archiving activities, like best practices?
82	NVW: No
83	DB: No, OK. And would you be interested in information about that?
84	NVW: You know, maybe. I was thinking about that the other day. A couple of… I was thinking about making a book of selected stories from my 4 books of stories--
85	DB: Oh, yeah
86	NVW: --And realizing that my first 2 books of stories, I don't know if I can access the computer files of them anymore. They're like on floppy disks, or zip-disk, or something.
87	DB: Oh, yeah. A zip-disk
88	NVW: I don't know if I could. You know? Does that mean I'm going to have to retype those suckers, or what?
89	DB: There's usually a way to get them
90	NVW: Yeah, if I could even find them.
91	DB: Yeah, yeah. So, there's always that question
92	NVW: There's that, yes. You know, when we moved out here… Yeah, so that would be a major task-to locate and … So, I could probably use some help with that
93	DB: OK, yeah, and that's definitely something typical of that period, especially the 90s with all the different word processing softwares and all the different ways of saving them sort of put people Yeah, what do you do?)'
94	DB: So, that was a sort of quick beginning	[00:08:45]
95	NVW: OK
96	DB: (I'm just going to check this to make sure… It looks like…)
97	DB: How long have you been writing in a more professional capacity, in a way that was sort of feeding you or giving you some sort of assistance…? When do think that you started writing as a vocation? Or as something that led to something that would be your vocation, which is probably teaching?
98	NVW: I guess since graduate school. I went to graduate school and I thought I would just do that for a year that was my plan. I would go to graduate school in creative writing for a year and then I would go to medical school. I had been a pre-med major all through college but when I got to graduate school I was totally happy doing my writing thing and I never looked back. So I started my so-called practice there where I worked every day on my writing. That was 1975.
99	DB: And where was that?
100	NVW: I went to the University of Denver.
101	DB: And was that a one year program?
102	NVW: No I actually stayed the regular two years.
103	DB: So you stayed 2 years and got your mfa. My next question is how would you describe the arc of your career? Where went from there and then elaborate?
104	NVW: From there, I taught. I got my first teaching job at Marymount College of Kansas, now defunct. So I taught there for three years and then I got a job at Lake Forest College, which is just north of Chicago, and I taught there for 11 years, and then I came out here in 1990, and I've been here ever since.
105	DB: And you retired from ..
106	NVW: I retired from Eastern (Washington) in '07, but I'm continuing to teach at Vermont College.
107	DB: So now we're going to get to the specific writing practices generally, and I have it delimited into three stages: a drafting/prewriting/notebook stage, and then an organizational stage, and then an archival/storage stage. And I'd like to go through and ask you about your practices by stage, and talk about those stage by stage.	[00:11:12]
108	NVW: That makes sense.
109	DB: I'd like to start by talking about the ways you draft and create your work initially. So what is your typical compositional practice? And what I'm interested in here is, when you first started writing how were you generating and composing your writing at that point?
110	NVW: So yeah, early on - one of the things that's different now- is that early on I would probably just work on "a" poem, so I would write. I would have a page in my notebook, and there were lines, and I would move things around on the page, and then I would have another page in the notebook with a different poem. But over the years I've started working on maybe two or three poems almost kind of simultaneously, on the same page, which feels kind of nutty, but what I was experiencing that led me this way was that a lot of times things would be coming to me - images, lines --- that didn't seem to belong to the poem I thought I was working on. So I realize it might be helpful to not confine myself. So that's why that was one of the main transitions. I think that happened maybe half-way along. In the late-eighties or so I started experimenting with that and I liked it. I liked having just a page with a poem one margin, and another going down another margin, and one going across the bottom. Something like that.
111	DB: On one notebook page?
112	NVW: Yeah, on one page. And then a lot of times what would happen is - I didn't like one or two or all three of them, and eventually one of those poems would kind of gel and get its own page.
113	DB: It's own page in the notebook?
114	NVW: Yeah.
115	DB: Could you put that at a certain book, or was that just sort of gradual?
116	NVW: I think where I really started experimenting with that was a book called Beside Ourselves.
117	DB: That was 2003 or something
118	NVW: Yeah, that was really also the first book that was more a deliberate series.
119	DB: Yeah, I think I kind of figure out where that happened, and see that.
120	NVW: And then I liked that. I like working in series so much when I was writing that book that I also just decided I wanted to keep moving in that direction. I liked those series poems. And they maybe leant themselves more to that practice with several poems happening at the same time in early draft stages.
121	DB: How is that different than your fiction writing?	[00:15:10]
122	NVW: I don't really see a lot of similarities between writing stories and writing poems in terms of the drafting process … well, in terms of anything. Stories are really different. One of the first things I learned about writing stories in the drafting process is "oh! it kind of helps to know a few things about what happens in this story" unlike a poem where you're just kind of launching into the unknown. It seemed helpful to have a few scenes in mind. What some of the lines of tension, story lines, almost, not an outline, but I would often write down four or five sentences that would later become scenes.
123	DB: And that would happen in the notebook?
124	NVW: Yeah. Or just a scrap of paper in the car when I'm driving.
125	DB: And then did you grab those scraps of paper and put them in a notebook. Did you accumulate that detritus of composition …
126	NVW: Once I write the scene I throw out the piece of paper.
127	DB: So it's gone. That's gone.
128	NVW: But then my process in making stories would be - I try to write a scene a day or so in the initial drafting phase and then I just try to stay with that scene. Blow out the edges. Often it's like three times as long as it's going to actually be in the final story. Usually compressing, compressing, compressing, but initially I kind of move around, see what's happening in the periphery, sort of stay in one scene at a time and I don't worry about the order. I'm not writing the first scene first. I often start with the middle scene. I kind of know I'm writing the middle scene. I move around the chronology of the story because I have these lists. And often when I'm working on one scene I think of another scene and then I'll just write it on another sheet of paper, again, a sentence that'll prompt me so I don't forget. The process is very different [from writing poems]. When a story is happening, when I'm getting an early draft. It comes really fast. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Because it takes all my time. I've been known to cancel classes - I'll say I'm sorry I can't come in today.
129	DB: That's dedication.
130	NVW: Because I feel like I'm going to lose it.
131	DB: So when you said it's happening it feels like it's come to you, and it's not inspiration, it's accumulation?
132	NVW: So much is going on. I go out and I take a walk every afternoon in this park. It's actually part of my writing process. I take a walk in the afternoon, and it's like 'shut up' I'm just trying to take a walk!' People are talking in my head. It feels like this overpowering thing when I'm working on a story. It just comes over me and wakes me up in the morning. People wake me up in the morning. They are chattering away. It's very unnerving. I often push back at a story until I am really sure that I have quite a few of the building blocks in place. Because otherwise it just seems like a struggle and a fight. And it's going to occupy - it takes me like 10 ten-hour days in a row for a story.
133	DB: And this is all hand-written too?
134	NVW: Yes.
135	DB: Does your hand cramp up?
136	NVW: No.
137	DB: I guess your thinking and then you're writing down and then you're thinking.
138	NVW: Yeah. I don't know about the hand but the brain ..
139	NVW: And then, it's so much… Because I don't… I don't know how other writers do this but because I'm not writing the scenes in order, I'm kind of deliberately writing them out of order. I write the scene I see most clearly in my mind first and I'm not worrying about where it's going to go. Then I just put the whole thing away for a long time-that initial mess of a draft-and worry later about kind of arranging the scenes. I'm often moving things around not based on when they happened but what's more interesting to come next.
140	DB: OK, and so when did… Were you studying fiction as well as poetry in your graduate school? When did you start to write these stories?
141	NVW: I did take up a fiction writing class in grad school. I was in the poetry group but we had to take a fiction class, and I was terrible. I was terrible at it because I didn't have any sense of what made a story. But when I started teaching, especially when I moved to Lake Forest College, they thought, "well any poet can teach fiction writing. It's debatable if we can get a fiction writer who can teach poetry." So, they hired thinking that I could figure it out.
142	NVW: So, I think I just accidentally taught myself to write fiction by trying to help my students make their stories better and trying to diagnose: 'What does this story need?'
143	NVW: I remember so many days walking to my fiction writing class and trying to think about what I was going to say to this writer about her story-how to address its troubles-and I realized that I was internalizing all of this. And then the first time I got a sabbatical, I remember I was driving into Chicago for a little adventure for the day (and I was so happy I had this sabbatical I was going to work on poems, of course) and I got this idea for a story. I remember I was just writing on my car seat while I'm driving-just this little note to myself about what the story-kind of just a synopsis, like one sentence of what it would be. By the time I got in to Chicago, I had 5 story synopses written on this piece of paper, and then I just came home. That's what I did for my whole sabbatical-I wrote a bunch of stories and that was the 1st book of stories. Limited Lifetime Warranty, it was called.
144	DB: Yeah, and what year was that?
145	NVW: I think that was like 1983 or so.
146	DB: OK, and so you've been… Stories kind of happened to you. And they've been similar the whole time that you've been writing?
147	NVW: Uh-hmm'
148	DB: Have poems, in similar ways, come upon you? Or is it a different process than that?	[00:23:00]
149	NVW: Poems are more like a daily practice for me. I like poems. They don't… For me, they're more about sound and imagery, voice. Who's talking in my poems-They're often some part of me that I didn't really know it was there. You know, some aspect of personality that I'm kind of exploring who uses a language a different way maybe than my ordinary daily life self.
150	NVW: So, I like that kind of quick pop of a poem.
151	DB: Do you start mostly with a line or an image, or does it change?
152	NVW: I like a line with an image in it.
153	DB: OK
154	NVW: I like… One time I was writing an article about Charles Wright's poetry (I really like Charles Wright), and I said something in there in the review about: "the hand of the image in the glove of sound." I took that out of the review because I thought that sounded a little precious or something, but for me I like that kind of thought… They're sort of indivisible.
155	NVW: They come together.
156	NVW: But I remember talking to Charles one time and I asked him a lot of the same questions you're asking me about composition because I was taking him to the airport after our reading and I'm plugging him for everything he can tell me about how he works. He says, 'Well, you know, after I do 3 or 4 drafts then I'll turn it over to my ear.'
157	NVW: I liked that.
158	NVW: He said, 'I drive around town and do errands-go in the store, stuff like that and I memorize the poem I'm working on and then I just start moving the words and the lines around, and then I start moving the lines and the stanzas around. Just kind of trying to figure out. I'm listening to the sonic values.
159	NVW: I liked that. I'm doing that.
160	DB: So, I guess that's a good space to move on to revision. I mean, so when you're revising a poem, are you revising mostly by sound, or the sonic values, or are there different stages?	[00:25:40]
161	NVW: Well, you know, every poem just presents different troubles to me. I guess these are some of the questions I have to ask myself (but this is just for me. I don't know that these would be other people's problems by any means but). I'm asking myself, 'Who the heck is talking at this part? Who is this person?' Because sometimes I just- And I mean that in a physical, literal way. I have to see a figure almost. You know, maybe it's me, but it's me when I'm 12, or it's me with big, red hair.
162	NVW: So, I'm asking: Who is this person? Where is she, or he-sometimes I think I'm in a kind of gender shift. I like that because I was a real tomboy as a little kid. I think I kind of squashed that little tomboy down and he likes to come back and say things once in a while. He's a little bit of a sassy, snotty kid. And I like him!
163	NVW: So, who is she; where are we in the poem? I need to get located in time and space. And what the heck is going on? What dramatically is happening in the poem? A lot of times I'll have a fix on one or the other of these questions and am really feeling unclear about the others.
164	NVW: So, I kind of know questions to ask myself, and that's what I do in the really early stages of drafting a poem and trying to figure out the answers to some of those.
165	DB: And how do these questions translate into the basic physical manifestation of your writing? Are you still in your notebooks working with this?
166	NVW: Yes, still in notebooks
167	DB: And are you writing these questions in the pages, or…?
168	NVW: No, no I'm just… What I'm doing is I'm just giving my imagination a chore, a task. I'm staring in to space and trying to see: where is the set; where is this unfolding? Trying to give myself-
169	DB: I'm interested in this material, and I'm realizing-
170	NVW: That's right, you're a poet, too.
171	DB: But I mean it's also like, [writing] happens so much up here [in the head]. It doesn't happen on the page-it doesn't happen. It happens a lot, a lot just going to the store and thinking about things, listening to your own sounds, which is another hard thing to document, or to sort of record.
172	NVW: Yeah, and see, none of this takes place with fiction. With fiction, you sort of have that. You got all that as you walk in to the first scene.
173	DB: Right, well then, what is your mode when you're revising a story? Like how do you work through the drafts of a story?	[00:28:50]
174	NVW: Well, with a story I'm really I really think a lot more: why does this happen? or why did this happen? (in the past tense). I ask myself a lot of questions about motivation, with characters, on what their relationships are like; how did they get to this moment. I'm often trying to think about some details or back story.
175	NVW: Again, all these things--it's really helped to have heard myself ask my students these questions for the last 30 years because they're kind of in there.
176	DB: I bet.
177	NVW: Yeah, the questions to ask yourself- But I think what I'm mainly doing once I have addressed some of these questions, mainly have to do with interiority, and psychology of people. In revision, I'm just trying to get the story to move along. I'm really paying most attention to the pace, and I think in that regard, now poetry and fiction maybe have a little more similarities when you get to that stage of revision where you're really starting to tighten.
178	NVW: (Are we there now? Is that what we're talking about?)
179	DB: (Yeah, absolutely)
180	DB: (OK)
181	NVW: So then with a poem, I slash mercilessly. I'm a slasher, and I move things around, but often when I'm moving around, I've got too many lines on the landscape, on a row here. I've got 10 lines about the freaking place where we are, that's boring. But sometimes I won't cut them-I'll just take 4 of them and put them in a different place. I don't worry too much about like how to get back there because that's easy to do later.	[00:30:30]
182	NVW: Same in fiction, I'm really thinking about pacing. I'm thinking about- The opening of the story, I'll just start with a scene that we're going to catch back up to in the middle because it's got some interesting dialogue or something interesting that's going on with the characters. I'm going to start there and then circle back, and then catch back up to it midway through the story, 'Oh, here's where that scene comes.'
183	NVW: That's typical for me to move around like that. So, I'm just going, 'OK, we've got to see the dialogue. Now, we're going to have: how did these all start. Now, we're going to have a scene where we've got some dream or some thinking. Now we're going to go back to dialogue.' I'm just kind of having some syncopation of pacing things.
184	DB: And that kind of happens throughout your books, too, right? Not only within the story but within a collection of stories- there's sort of that same repetition of images, repetition of scenes. Or not repetitions, but kind of allusions to the same place and time and space.
185	DB: So .. When you're revising the entire book, or when you're putting together the book itself, is that also happening?
186	NVW: Yes.
187	DB: OK, so have these modes of revision that sort of focus on pacing, the moving around and changes, have these changed over the course of your career? When you were first starting out writing, did you have to come to this kind of way of revising, or was it there from the beginning?
188	NVW: No, it's been a slow, gradual process.
189	DB: OK, and then in the beginning … Were you doing it more by the book, so to speak …?
190	NVW: Oh, gosh. I don't know how I was doing anything at the beginning. You know, my first book of poems, I had help. I've never had an editor again like I had with my very first book.
191	NVW: Larry Lieberman at the University of Illinois Press. He weeded out some of the weaker poems but also helped me to shape up some new things I was working on, and put them in. Helped me with the arrangement and, you know, I've never had help like that again. But that was very instructive to me. He would write me these interesting little letters where he would explain why he thought this ought to go here, this go there, and this stanza needed to be gone, this was stupid …
192	NVW: It was just so helpful to have somebody be such a close reader with me. I've never had that again, ever.
193	DB: So, do people play a role in your revision process now, or is it pretty much just you?	[00:33:56]
194	NVW: Well, my husband reads everything and he's a really, really tough critic-really, really tough.
195	DB: That's good to have.
196	NVW: It's very good, but… he's a smart reader and he also kind of know what I'm capable of, and if I don't measure up, he'll tell me.
197	DB: Yeah, so you don't… you're not corresponding with other writers with poems, or…?
198	NVW: I have a couple of fiction writer friends that I have shared work with. A novel… I had a 2-book contract with the book of stories before this one, and they wanted the second thing to be a novel-the publisher who I told you they decided they were going to go quit fiction
199	DB: Right, right
200	NVW: --fiction. They wanted the 2nd book to be a novel. So, I tried three times to write a novel, and I got 200 pages in three times. I showed a couple of those books to friends who are fiction writers and they confirmed for me what I thought was true. The way I phrase I phrase it to myself is: they didn't have a big enough engine.
201	NVW: I like short stories-
202	DB: I know. I'm not-
203	NVW: I like the go-cart.
204	DB: I like short stories, too. I was struck though in Quake … I was reading that and I thought… I mean, it read to me and felt to me a lot like the way that Jennifer Egan's Visit by the Goon Squad worked, in that separate stories were all kind of investigating certain kinds of dilemmas and interesting kinds of metaphorical or metaphysical ideas.
205	NVW: Well, thank you. I like that Goon Squad book, too.
206	DB: Yeah, well, I mean, what if she'd called this a novel… I mean, I was just wondering. It's not…
207	DB: Anyway, there's just… It's just very arbitrary, but it seems like you composed them very much kind of separately but they are related, right? I mean, they're linked stories.
208	NVW: Yeah, they've all been linked.
209	DB: Yeah
210	NVW: I really love all the different possibilities of ways to link stories, but in terms of the engine, I like a little small engine that I feel like I can fix what's wrong-with the little, small engine.
211	DB: Yeah, I get that.
212	NVW: And I don't know if I could… The novel thing, it's kind of overwhelming for me to think about how much you have to sustain; how much it needs to drive the big novel.
213	DB: Right
214	NVW: I love novels. I love reading them, but I'm intimidated by the arc, how huge it needs to be, and how much (maybe) you need to know before you sit down.
215	DB: Right, there's a certain research part of it.
216	DB: Does your writing entail any sort of research, historical or otherwise…?
217	NVW: Yeah, Quake was a good example. I loved doing all that research on the gypsy culture and the country-I just loved that, and that just really fed my stories when I was working on it. And this new book that has a dinosaur dig in it, that was really fun. My husband and I went on a dig in Montana. That's part of the research for that. It was fun.
218	DB: Did they just have that like dinosaur versus dinosaur discovery, or something, this summer? Did you see this?
219	NVW: Eh-hmm
220	DB: Like this private digger found these perfectly reserved fossils of like a tyrannosaurus rex or like stegosaurus like right next to each other, they must've died like mid-fight. And they sold… Like instead of giving it to the Smithsonian, they sold it at auction for some ridiculous price.
221	NVW: Really?
222	DB: There was some sort of debate about that.
223	NVW: Just like a couple of femurs or something, or a couple of… Or the whole--?
224	DB: The whole
225	NVW: --the whole features? Wow!
226	DB: I mean, it was just like an insane find in the Montana's bone district.
227	NVW: Well, what I understood was… This isn't pertaining to your thing but what I heard was that all those glacial floods (what happened) and they basically washed all these bones over. So, there'd be like this giant bone bed of 20 different species just because they've been washed by the flood like that at the same place.
228	DB: You probably know more of that. I just thought that was sort of exciting. '
229	...	[00:38:43]
230	DB: I guess a couple more questions about revisions. One of the like… I've been reading this book called The Work of Revision which is really an interesting book kind of tracing the history of revision from the Romantic up to the Modernist Period, and then kind of like how textual criticism works with it. She was… Her name… Hannah Sullivan wrote it, and she was sort of delineating kind of three modes of revision. One being a creative or additive, like Joyce adding all this stuff to Ulysses, and then this sort of excisive or subtractive way that you seem to do, and then there's that sort of substitution. And I'm wondering is there a primary mode between those three that you used for your revision or is it a combination?
231	NVW: I would say I really kind of start with the accretion first, and then go in to the subtraction. And then probably this substitution is like a tinkering I do at the very end.
232	DB: OK, and physically, where do these processes happen? I mean, when you're taking something away, does that happen in the notebook, or does that happen on the computer, or does it happen in both spaces?
233	NVW: Usually, I've excised much of what I'm going to take out before I type it up.
234	DB: OK
235	NVW: So, I probably-as I said, I probably do 2 or 3 handwritten drafts and I'll actually rip the notebook page out. I have notebooks and notebooks where I have a big X through the page so that I do not get confused that I'm actually done with this version, and now if I look hard enough in the notebook, there is a later version of these poems. But I throw the old, ripped up pages in the back of the notebook, and there's a newer version somewhere in there. But the older ones are fatter and often… I'm also experimenting with line break, then too, with the shaping issues…
236	DB: So, just to confirm, you're doing that in the notebook?
237	NVW: In the notebook still.
238	DB: OK
239	NVW: And then I feel like when I move it to the computer, I'm sort of getting to a place where I want to look at it… There's something that… I'm sure you're going to hear this with lots of writers my age-that there's something about when you type it up that starts to make it look permanent, especially for me in terms of the shape of the poem, the line lengths especially in a poem. I'm less inclined to fiddle with line lengths once I've got it on the computer. I do that. For some reason it still feels easier for me to do it on the page because like I just stick my slashes in there.
240	DB: OK, so once they're actually broken in to lines on the computer, then it seems… You don't feel like you have that freedom to do--?
241	NVW: Well, I do. I do.
242	DB: Right
243	NVW: I do experiment or something. I'll go, 'Oh, this is 15 lines. That's so close to a sonnet. Why don't I help it along?' You know?
244	DB: Yeah
245	NVW: So, then-
246	DB: You feel like there should be another term for a 15-line poem.
247	NVW: Yes'
248	DB: OK, so and then at that point, are the poems ordered into the way you'd like them in the book?	[00:42:25]
249	NVW: Oh, no. Never
250	DB: OK, so how's that… What's that process like?
251	NVW: That's just another process of just printing out all the poems and just living with them. That takes, I don't know maybe a year, two, maybe even longer sometimes of experimenting with sections, you know, the arrangement. I'm working right now on a book of prose poems-just really struggling with what's it even going to be in this book, sorting-
252	DB: So, there's a number… So, once you get to the computer, are you putting like all the poems from one notebook in one word file say, or you're putting them in individually?
253	NVW: No, I don't put… Each poem is its own file until I really start to make the book as a book.
254	DB: So, just technically, then you call that file whatever the title of the poem is?
255	NVW: Yeah
256	DB: And then save it in a folder with…?
257	NVW: My folder is called "Poems."
258	DB: No, that's fine
259	NVW: I know, and there are some subfolders in there like-
260	DB: OK, for a book would you make a subfolder then, or…?
261	NVW: Oh, then each book gets its own file then.
262	DB: OK
263	NVW: Yeah
264	DB: OK, but… So the poems are kind of in one big folder, and then as they accumulate in to a book then they'll be one file.
265	NVW: Exactly, and when they get published then I put them in another file called "Published Poems."
266	DB: OK
267	NVW: So, I don't get confused in sending stuff out still.
268	DB: Yeah
269	NVW: And then there's some old… You know, I've files called "Poem '08" that are just like…I'm probably not going to do anything with them now, but they're still sitting there.
270	DB: They're still in there, somewhere.
271	DB: OK, and is that the same-Does that same sort of transfer happen with fiction, too?
272	NVW: Yeah, I mean I've got a file in there just called "Stories In Process." I don't know if they're going to be a book.
273	DB: You're sort of figuring them out.
274	NVW: Yeah'
275	DB: So, we'll get back to the computer stuff a little bit more. Let me just sort of talk a little bit-move from revision and talk a little bit more about kind of organizational (and we're already kind of taking about it-these things all sort of mesh in but…).	[00:45:05]
276	DB: So, I mean… OK, with the computer then, you know, you move from your notebook and then you type it up. That sort of moment of revision for you, too?
277	NVW: Uh-hmm
278	DB: And then you have several other different moments of revision when it's on the computer, but some of those happen on paper because you print them out?
279	NVW: Right
280	DB: And then that arrangement happens physically usually first?
281	NVW: I'll look at it on… I'll come back to it over a period of a couple of weeks on the computer then (once it's on the computer file) and look at it, probably tinker with it a little bit more before, and then I'll start sending it out probably.
282	DB: OK
283	NVW: So, fairly soon after I type it up-maybe a month, 2 months. There comes a point where I feel like I'm making it worse. My tinkering's starting to make it worse. That's the only thing that stops me.
284	NVW: And then I start sending it out, and if the-
285	DB: Are we talking about the entire book right now, or are we--?
286	NVW: No, just individual poems
287	DB: Just the individual… OK, yeah
288	NVW: --and if it comes back rejected, often I'll tinker with it a little bit more and send it back out again in a week.
289	DB: OK, so you use the sort of publication and submission process as a sort of revision prompt?
290	NVW: I do, I do.
291	DB: OK, that's interesting.
292	DB: And then, so they come together in one file as your book thing and then you send that out to publishers. Is that a similar sort of thing- if it's rejected then you revise again, or is it once it's in that file, once you've got it there, you just sort of want to give it a space?
293	NVW: I'll probably revise it a little bit more if it comes back rejected, but usually once it gets in book form, it seems sort of subtle to me and often (this may also be the case)… the reason for that being that I've probably moved on to another book and all.
294	DB: OK, another notebook that will then become a book, or…?
295	NVW: Yeah, yeah… No, an actual-I'm actually compiling another book at that point when I start sending one out.
296	DB: So, how many books do you usually have going, or how many projects at one time do you usually have going?
297	NVW: Well, I almost always have a book of poems in process that I'm working on like I said right now I'm working on trying to shape up this book of prose poems, and then I almost always have a book of fiction that's sort of in process-right now, I'm working on a e-book novel, novella thing. And then I'm doing the Photoems now. So…
298	NVW: In terms of like publishing individual pieces now, I'm really doing those a lot. '
299	DB: OK, and then so, in terms of just saving and archiving your work (we talked a little bit about this), you keep your notebooks basically in boxes on the shelves, and then your files are in a folder and they stay in the same folder, and then you put them to an external drive at some point.	[00:48:37]
300	DB: Is there any other archival or back-up procedures that you go through for your work, or is that pretty much it?
301	NVW: I guess that's pretty much it. I mean, my publishers I think have copies, you know. They have pdfs of everything.
302	DB: Right, right
303	NVW: So…
304	DB: You rely on them?
305	NVW: I rely on them-that those are not going to go away.
306	DB: Sure
307	NVW: I don't think they will, will they? They won't go away, will they?
308	DB: Yeah, that's…
309	NVW: Because that's what they send me to proof now.
310	DB: PDFs?
311	NVW: Yeah
312	DB: OK, and they used to send you galleys or printed copies?
313	NVW: Yeah
314	DB: OK, do you do much revision at that stage, or is that much more type of--?
315	NVW: No, they don't want you to.
316	DB: OK, so then I guess one question more and then I want to talk about kind of computers specifically but… Do you see kind of in this talking that is there… Was there sort of … Can you kind of delineate stages of your own writing over the course of your, you know, the years you've been writing sort of professionally? Do you see distinct stages, or do you think it's just been kind of a gradual…?	[00:49:50]
317	NVW: You mean that's where things have just changed dramatically?
318	DB: Or like, you know, it could've changed like a couple of years, but I mean, would you say there are stages, or would you see it kind of similar? And if there were anything that kind of prompted some of these changes, what were those (I guess is what I'm kind of going with this)?
319	NVW: Well, I think it's mostly been gradual. I've grown more comfortable doing some revision work on the computer and especially with the fiction, and maybe because fiction still feels like a newer form to me. One shift that has felt a little bit more dramatic with composing is that I have found myself, when I'm working on short stories, actually doing some new composing work right here while I'm sitting. Like I'll be working on a story thinking… I'm typing in from my notebook…
320	NVW: Actually I remember working on this one story and I had written something-a note to myself in my notebook that said, 'Flush out her dream right here,' and I had forgotten to do that. So, I remember sitting here doing it while I was typing in the story in to my Word file, and I though what I wrote was OK. It sort of freed me up then to do that more frequently-to let myself do some of the initial composing although I still kind of like have a little cue what it's going to be. Like there's a little whole that I forgot to do, and I have a note to myself in the notebook to do that.
321	DB: Good, and does that… I guess, how… What's the difference in feel between, I guess-dare I describe it as-2-handed writing versus 1-handed writing?	[00:52:07]
322	NVW: Yeah, one of the things I like about doing it on the computer is that I can close my eyes which is really odd but I like it. So, it seems to lend itself to… not to dialogue or action, but to real kind of interior moments where I'm in a character's mind and I want to replicate her thinking process. Like I said, the first time I ever tried it was where I kind of tried to render a dream that the character had had. So, I closed my eyes (and of course, we can type with our eyes closed but I can't write with my eyes closed).
323	DB: OK, it'll be really illegible.
324	NVW: Yeah
325	DB: Huh, that's fascinating.
326	DB: OK, so then in terms of computers, generally, when did they enter in to your writing process?	[00:53:10]
327	NVW: Well, I remember when I moved to Lake Forest College… (I knew you were going to ask me this. I was trying to think about this the other day) We got these… I wish I could remember… KayPros
328	DB: KayPros? OK?
329	NVW: Have you heard of those?
330	DB: No
331	NVW: Oh my God. They were these huge, gray boxes. They were given to us - this must have been 1980-right around there, 1980 - At Lake Forest College, all the faculty got these KayPro computer things, and really all they did was word processing but I liked them. I remember a lot of the faculty were complaining but I like them because I was moving from this electric typewriter, or something, and this machine was so much easier to do corrections and everything. So, I took to the computer right away. I really liked it.
332	DB: In 1980?
333	NVW: Yeah
334	DB: Wow, OK, that's very early I think.
335	NVW: Well, I can remember the exact year.
336	DB: But somewhere… I mean, you started teaching in Lake Forest in?
337	NVW: In '79
338	DB: So, it's….
339	NVW: It was right around there-when we first moved there.
340	DB: Yeah
341	NVW: And that's all they did. They didn't do… There was no internet, or…
342	DB: Right, right, right.
343	NVW: Yeah
344	DB: So, you were just word processing and… Did this… Well, the advent of this computer and then maybe like the kind of more… the prevalence of computers kind of like change your writing practices pretty drastically eventually, or…?
345	NVW: Well, you know, the academic world- I don't know if I hadn't been in the Academy, if I would have the same relationship with technology as I do because everywhere I went to teach, I was presented with a new computer when I walked in the door. And it's nice because, you know, Apple made its money by habituating, habitualizing people (What's the word I'm trying to say?)-
346	DB: No, I think…
347	NVW: --to their technology. That's how they became so great, you know-get all these freshmen hooked on Apples when they're in college because they're in the labs and then the next thing you know, you've got generations out there…
348	DB: Right
349	NVW: So, anyway, I'm a total Mac person. I love them. They seem really intuitive to me to use them-but I've grown up with them. I mean-
350	DB: So then… I guess, what about the software that you use? Did you start with the sort of basic word processing, then did you move to an Apple word processing software, or was it like Word Perfect or…? Do you remember? I mean… I can't even name them.
351	NVW: Oh, gosh. I'm not going to be able to remember all the different program names, but… Yeah…
352	DB: And now are you using Microsoft Word?
353	NVW: Yeah
354	DB: OK, but you're also using Pages?
355	NVW: Yeah
356	DB: So, you're moving between software. Has that been a newer thing since the iPad, or…?
357	NVW: Yeah, I may get a new iPad pretty soon, and I don't know if I want to buy another Microsoft Word.
358	DB: Yeah, Pages seems to…
359	NVW: And it's fine.
360	DB: Yeah
361	NVW: It moves in to Word just fine.
362	DB: Right
363	NVW: But I learned Photoshop when I was the magazine editor. I edited Willow Springs for about 6 years, and so that was in 1990. I took over the editorship of that magazine when I came out to Eastern. They were doing the magazine with… Oh, my gosh. There was no computer technology. The woman who had done it before me was like-she was into the light board thing, which I had learned in college, in journalism class. You know, with the sticky, peel-y things?
364	NVW: Do you actually know this stuff?
365	DB: I think I saw this in high school in my journalism class. So, yeah.
366	NVW: And I could not believe they had no computer program or anything. So, a guy in the journalism department gave me a copy page maker to put on the computer, and I instantly fell in love with it. I just, 'Oh, I love this."
367	NVW: I love doing the art for the magazine. I did the covers. You know, I mean I found the art and made the covers myself because there was nobody else to do it.
368	DB: Right
369	NVW: And so, I learned PageMaker at the very beginning when it was just out, and as you probably know, that became Photoshop.
370	DB: Right
371	NVW: So, I just kind of stayed with it all these years, and now-
372	DB: So, essentially, you've been using Photoshop for 20 years. Wow, that's awesome.
373	NVW: I buy every other Photoshop. That's been my MO. I don't try to keep up with every single new one. So, I'm on 5 now, but I will probably get 7 when it comes out.'
374	DB: I'm a little worried that they're not going to do that anymore. They seem to be moving to that like subscription basis.
375	NVW: Really?
376	DB: Yeah
377	NVW: How do you mean?
378	DB: You know, we buy it a lot for the digital computers, and I'm starting to hear that they're… You know, they're offering it now so you can basically pay monthly fee and get Photoshop, or get InDesign, or get the Design Suite.
379	DB: So, I'm not sure how often-if they're going to be selling those like Student/Teacher kind of like Editions anymore.
380	NVW: Oh
381	DB: Or if they're going to be charging a subscription fee which in my mind is going to be way more expensive especially because we have so many copies. It might be cheaper, overall, for an individual but…
382	NVW: Interesting
383	DB: Yeah
384	DB: So, I'm not sure. I'm not actually positive about that but I sort of have heard on the wind that that might become around.
385	NVW: Wow, that would be…
386	DB: I don't know-
387	NVW: Hey, it's a tax write-off. So…
388	DB: Yeah, there you go.
389	...	[00:59:43]
390	DB: So, you were pretty familiar with computers from pretty much most of your professional career, As they became more prevalent at large, does that affect… I mean, I guess, it affected probably your correspondence with your editors and what-not with things like that.
391	NVW: Exactly
392	DB: Did that affect anything in the way that you write? Did it start to feel different, you writing feel different?
393	NVW: It felt more constant, I guess. Like my students at Vermont College, they want to send me their work everything online now. I feel like I cannot get away from sitting here, you know, 10 hours, 12 hours a day.
394	DB: Yeah
395	NVW: That part, I don't like as much. I like reading, you know, in a comfy chair and I feel like we're moving away from that now, that that's becoming less. You know, and I'm writing e-books myself now, so I'm a culprit, too.
396	DB: Right, right
397	NVW: But I can read my iPad in a comfy chair.
398	DB: Yes, yes, you can.
399	NVW: I still like reading in bed but once I discovered that I can read my iPad in bed, I was happy. '
400	DB: I'm sort of interested to- I guess in sort of typographical, or graphical things. And I mean, you are familiar with PageMaker. Did any of that like ability of the computer adjust or…? I mean like I think in Quake with those breaks that were kind of like little lines-like little jagged lines (I don't know where those came from)-if that was a computer thing, or…? Do you know what I'm talking about?	[01:01:16]
401	NVW: The section breaks?
402	DB: Like the breaks within the stories, that would be like… Yeah, like section breaks that had kind of…?
403	NVW: I think that might have been the designer, the book designer.
404	DB: Oh, that was the book designer.
405	NVW: Yeah
406	DB: OK, but did any of that influence your writing? I mean, did you start to… I mean, you obviously work with fonts and design aspects and layout. Did that influence anything with your poems? I mean, I know they also… You know, a lot of them have… At least the earlier ones some of them would move kind of tab by tab, and then I mean there's other different sort of strategies in the earlier poems, too. But they're… I don't know. I guess…
407	NVW: I'm trying to think about what you're asking me because I'm just not remembering if there's any particular way that that changed in my writing itself.
408	DB: Yeah, I mean I don't think it was a… I don't know if I can say that it was, but I guess
409	DB: When you're writing in your notebook (Maybe that's the way to get)-when you're writing in your notebook, are you writing with some sort of indentation, Or other things like that? Are you pretty much writing down the left margin? Does that sort of layout thing transfer in to the computer, or…?
410	NVW: Right, right. You know, what little experimenting I've done along those lines with poems, I've done on the computer screen. '
411	...	[01:03:00]
412	NVW: I mean, that's I think my… I know we're going to talk about this later. What I'm doing now, I'm doing this altered book pages.
413	DB: Right
414	NVW: I don't know if I showed any of those because those are locked files. But I'm doing these altered book pages, and that's where all of everything I know about Photoshop And my poetry is finally coming together in to something that feels more, I don't know, my own.
415	DB: Yeah
416	NVW: Different
417	DB: Yeah, so… And we can talk about that. I mean, what… So, it that different from the Photoems?
418	NVW: Yes
419	DB: And it's… What sort of formatting do you use …?
420	NVW: I'll show you
421	DB: Yeah, I'd love to see
422	NVW: So, I put these online. I've been… This is mainly what I've been publishing lately. I've found this old encyclopedia up here from the '30s and I've been scanning the pages-especially pages that have a lot of graphic material in them. (Let me just show…)
423	NVW: I put them on this website but in a locked gallery because this is how I share them in with editors. So, let's see. I'll try to find the encyclopedia once I… Let's look at this right here.
424	DB: So, ZenFolio. Is it like a web service kind of?
425	NVW: Yeah, this is really for a photographer's website but I just like it because it has really clean look, and their slideshow mode is really nice.
426	DB: Yes
427	NVW: So, this is the book I'm doing with my husband right now, and these are his illustrations.
428	NVW: (So, I can actually put this in a slideshow. You can see the…)
429	NVW: So, this is my fiction project that I'm-
430	DB: This is the novella?
431	NVW: This is, yeah. This, I will only… I haven't shared this with any editors yet because I'm only just putting this online. (That's a section divider page)
432	DB: (I can see that now)
433	NVW: This is called Pull for Stop, and then the story goes like this. So, these are Rick's pieces and then I have this little story that goes with these characters in the book here. Each page, I think of it as a little like flash fiction. So, I kind of think of them as linked flash fictions.
434	DB: And they're relating in some way to the image?
435	NVW: Oh, yeah
436	DB: OK
437	NVW: So, that's that book. And I was telling you about the encyclopedia, and that's Book of No Ledge.
438	DB: OK
439	NVW: So, this is how I send them out now to editors. I'll probably send like 2 or 3 of these pieces in, you know, the online submission or whatever. And then I send them a link to this.
440	DB: To the whole…?
441	NVW: To this gallery, and the password that they need to access it because it's a locked gallery. That way I can kind of track on how many people are looking (editors are looking) at my stuff at the same time. And then when somebody takes a piece, I put these little asterisks. (This is my screwed-up thing) So, they kind of realize all those are out of commission then.
442	DB: Sure
443	NVW: So, that's what… So, now I'm kind of actually putting a poem. (I hate all the sales stuff in here, but) Then I'm kind of replacing the text that was here in the encyclopedia with a poem.
444	DB: And so, you'll do that in Photoshop. Like you'll erase the text and you'll… Are you trying to match the font in some way it looks like? Or…?
445	NVW: Yeah, yeah, I am.
446	DB: And those are kind of images from the text originally?
447	NVW: Yes, actually they're from like 3 different pages in the text, and then I colorize them, too.
448	DB: Those are cool. That's like a really neat project.
449	NVW: It's really been fun. I like doing that. You can see I've kind of done a little bit of erasure stuff right here-
450	DB: Yeah, yeah
451	NVW: And then this part is my poem over here. So, I like…
452	NVW: (I should put these in slideshow so they'll come out larger, see them better)
453	NVW: But I kind of like having a mix of what was the encyclopedia language with Nance talk, kind of. I like going back and forth, so that's… This has been where I've really started to use the technology much more than I was before. So, I have all these little… This is the straight encyclopedia-Nance stuff, and I hope they kind of talk back and forth to each other-the language.
454	DB: Yeah, I know. I see what you're saying.
455	NVW: My language here and their language
456	DB: Well, it sort of like-it contextualizes it and sort of de-contextualizes it. Yeah…
457	NVW: Yeah, this is my little conversation with Proust. I've been reading Proust this year. Me and Proust are on a time-out right now.
458	NVW: Anyway, so that's what they look like. I like the pages from the encyclopedia that have all this graphic material so I can kind of take what was , you know… What do I have? I put all these kind of romance words around. In this one: timber wolf love nips, must axle me
459	NVW: But a person would have to sort of go in there and look a little bit. That's the thing.
460	DB: Yeah, I mean it's like you need it. It pays to pay attention, right?
461	NVW: So, that's where things have sort of evolved, computer-wise, for me. '
462	DB: And how's that… I mean, what's the… Does it feel different, or does it seem like it's the same creative process for you? I mean, it's visual and textual, so, there's that. But in terms of using the computer to make, is that a change?	[01:09:50]
463	NVW: Well, so the way I've been, I have some really interesting, different ways that I've been doing these that has never been even remotely like working on the poems or the stories. So, I'll print out first the original scans in black and white, and that's what I carry around in my little notebook. I'm still fixated to the notebook there.
464	DB: Right
465	NVW: So, I'm carrying those around in the notebook, and then I just actually start scribbling on the pages-scribbling stuff out. One of the things that I'm kind of doing with this book project-with the encyclopedia-is: this is my version of a collected poems of Nance Van Winckel.
466	NVW: So, I'm kind of mining some of my early poems because I-
467	DB: OH, that's really fascinating.
468	NVW: --The idea of doing a collected or selected, or something, is kind of boring to me actually. But this made it more interesting to do because I'll just pull out, 'Oh, I always like this stanza.' So…
469	DB: Yeah, yeah
470	NVW: I like this stanza." and then I just "Forget the rest of that poem," you know.
471	DB: Right
472	NVW: But these 5 lines I like. So, I'll sprinkle them in there and it's been fun to kind of find the visual material that I think they fit with.
473	DB: Yeah
474	NVW: So, anyway-
475	DB: And with the, you know, wealth of human knowledge form 1930 and the wealth of poems-
476	NVW: Exactly
477	DB: Yeah
478	NVW: And, you know, I feel like I'm kind of talking… I had… I sense one of the things that's going on in this project is that I'm talking back to history in a way and saying, 'No, that's not right,' and I like that. I like that versus-
479	DB: And I guess in some way the software allows you more purchase on making those deletions and adjustments-
480	NVW: Exactly
481	DB: --than it would have in like just crossing out, or a light board for instance.
482	NVW: Yeah, and the erasure thing that a lot of people are doing, that seems like… You know, I'm good friends with Mary Ruefle-doing that amazing erasure stuff. So I feel like "unless I could one-up Mary Ruefle …" I'm not doing that. I'm not going there.
483	DB: I know
484	NVW: There are people who are doing that so much better.
485	DB: Yeah, I've always been a fan of that Radi Os, the Paradise Lost deletion by Ronald Johnson which I didn't like… And I like… Who did one? Like Jonathan Safran Foer did it, and I was like, 'Oh, no.'
486	NVW: He did it?
487	DB: Yeah, he did some…
488	NVW: Really?
489	DB: I don't know. He bugs me anyway.
490	NVW: Yeah, a lot… Maybe too many people jumped on the erasure band wagon
491	DB: It's fun, but I mean, it's hard really to do it. I mean, in the way that Mary Ruefle does it. It's really, really hard. I mean like… Yeah
492	NVW: Here's what Mary Ruefle says, 'The way I do it is, I look at the page and then pretty soon, if I just stare at it for a while, a few words float up.'
493	NVW: Good, OK
494	DB: That's hilarious
495	DB: It's good to be-to have that happen would be fantastic.
496	NVW: It really would--a few words float up
497	DB: (Let me think here)
498	DB: I feel like we've answered a lot of these questions in the course of it. Yeah…
499	DB: Oh, can you find your files? Like if you're looking for a certain poem on your computer, do you have difficulty locating them, or is your organization is such that you pretty much know where things are?	[01:13:50]
500	NVW: I have lost things, yeah. Almost every week, I have little battle because I can't remember what I called something, or…
501	DB: Yeah, do you worry at all about the security or sort of fixity of these digital files?
502	NVW: No
503	DB: No. That's good
504	NVW: You mean somebody else accessing them, or something? That kind of security?
505	DB: Or, I mean the kind of fidelity of them, I guess. I mean, you do say that you have floppy disks and old WordPerfect that you can't access. Is that a concern to you, or you just think that would kind of take care of itself?
506	NVW: It's not a concern to me-maybe it should be.
507	DB: No, I actually don't think you should be, but… And I'm the one who should know that. So…
508	NVW: OK, good
509	DB: But I mean, there's definitely things that we can do. But I mean, it's one of those things that I think…
510	DB: Well, I guess the other question is, have the changes in computers… I mean like, you know, probably in the late '90s, early '90s, computers crashed much more often and you were more likely to lose work. Did that influence the way that you work on computers, or was that…? Or have you pretty much kept the same strategies?
511	NVW: I have pretty much kept the same strategies. You know, I've never had a really bad thing happen where I've lost a harddrive or anything like that.
512	DB: You're so lucky
513	NVW: I know, I know. And it's because of all the Macs.
514	DB: That's hilarious. They got you-they got you there.
515	NVW: They do. I just love all their products. I do. '
516	DB: So, a few questions about correspondence and teaching (although I think we've covered some of that), and then we'll talk about Photoons. Then that would be it.	[01:15:46]
517	DB: So, have you ever corresponded very much in like physical letters? Is that ever been a portion…? Or are they… I mean, related to your writing. I don't need to know like personal correspondence (not so much), but I mean like writing-wise, career-wise, is that ever a concern?
518	NVW: Oh, physical letters, I've… Well, like I was telling you with that first book of poems, I've kept all the letters that he wrote to me about revision. I don't know, they just… They're very dear to me that somebody took that kind of time with me.
519	NVW: And then I have a good friend who's a poet. I think I mentioned her to you.
520	DB: Yeah
521	NVW: Jennifer Boyden. And she really loves the physical letters, and I've kept all her letters that she's written me over the years.
522	DB: Great.
523	NVW: Because they're just so beautiful
524	DB: Awesome
525	NVW: And it just always seems like just the idea that somebody is writing this JUST to me, you know, this three page letter with her thoughts and ruminations about things and they're just so beautifully written; that she would take the time to do that, you know, it seems like a treasure thing because it's a passing, but do I do it … ?
526	DB: Do you have any similar feelings for any emails? Do you have emails that you would feel dear about?
527	NVW: I do keep some emails I have, you know, files with emails that I keep from certain people.
528	DB: And then, a sort of corollary to that, do you feel like a, and this is an odd question, but do you have any sort of feelings towards your digital files about like your poems? Are they dear to you maybe in the same way a notebook would be dear to you or…?
529	NVW: No, the notebook is dear-er
530	DB: OK, yeah.
531	NVW: I don't know why, that's weird.
532	DB: You touch it. A big part of it, I think. I mean, I don't know. It's one of those things. I don't know if that will change, like if someone never had like the physical in the future. If they'll have this special folder on their desktop… That just seems odd to me. '
533	NVW: You know, I try to be careful that I've always got a hard copy somewhere of the material that I'm working on. Like this book that I'm doing with my husband.	[01:18:15]
534	DB: OK, so that's some of the images I guess.
535	NVW: And there they all are.
536	DB: Oh wow, those are nicely printed.
537	NVW: To finish that thought about just being careful: Because if things go awry here, I really don't want to lose the work completely.
538	DB: Right
539	NVW: So I try to make sure that I have a hard copy. It might not always be the most recent copy--
540	DB: Yeah
541	NVW: --But there's a copy.
542	DB: Right
543	NVW: So, with this book, I did all of the arranging of it. I stuck them on that wall in the hallway.
544	DB: OK
545	NVW: All the pages were on that wall and I had little sticky things on the back and I was moving them around to make the sections of the book, but it was up there for like three months.
546	DB: Yeah, three months? So, would you come home and see them and make a few changes or would it be like a dedicated time you'd go to it?
547	NVW: Well, I was at that stage where the book where I had all these pages, but I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to arrange the chronology, again, of the story. So, I started experimenting with different orders of things, by trying the sections on the wall that way. Yeah, moving them around. So before, each page had its own file in there, and now, they have sections too. I think there are five sections in the book.
548	DB: OK, and those came from the wall?
549	NVW: Yes!
550	DB: OK
551	NVW: But I could not figure out a way to look at that many pages on the screen at one time. I mean actually see the print. So I felt like the technology wasn't allowing me to see the big picture the way I needed to.
552	DB: Need a big touch screen.
553	NVW: Yes!
554	DB: I'm sure they're coming, or I'm sure they're here, you just haven't seen them yet.
555	NVW: That's it exactly!
556	DB: You need a big wall that's a computer.
557	NVW: Yes! And if Mac makes it, I'm buying it.
558	DB: There you go.
559	NVW: It's going to be a million dollars.
560	DB: Yeah, that would definitely be expensive. '
561	DB: We did talk a little about your teaching and that you do correspond by email with your students mostly. Is that now?	[01:21:10]
562	NVW: If they insist on sending me their work as attachments and everything, I'll read it that way. I don't mind doing it with the poets, but with the fiction people, I would much, much rather they send me their work in the mail. And usually they're OK with it.
563	DB: So you can kind of take it and not have to be connected …
564	NVW: Exactly
565	DB: Yeah
566	NVW: I just do not like writing my comments with the blackboard program or any of those. The college has that available to us and I have done track changes in Word. I know how to use that OK. I just like to scribble in the margins.
567	DB: So in that aspect of your work and your life, you would just ultimately prefer physical correspondence in total?
568	NVW: Yeah'
569	DB: OK, yeah. I guess the other thing with like, writing and distraction, I guess, is like are you connected to the internet when you're writing? Do you ever have to like disconnect, turn off your Wi-Fi or something? Is that a problem or concern for you? Or do you use it, like are you looking things up while you're writing at all?	[01:22:20]
570	NVW: Oh well that's a good question. I don't like to be disconnected from the net anymore.
571	DB: Yeah
572	NVW: It's terrible. I like to check in with my peeps all the time now. And yeah, I use the dictionary on here all the time because it's just so much faster.
573	DB: Yeah, so it's a tool, and whatever writing space you're in, be it notebook or not, you're still using your computer as a tool to assist you.
574	NVW: Yeah, and I mean I've always got something going on that's like you know, right now, I'm talking to agents and if they email me, if I see an email come in while I'm actually working on something, I got to go see if that is from my agent.
575	DB: Right, right. And that distraction point of it is not a real concern for you? I mean, you are producing quite a bit.
576	NVW: It was more when I was younger, but I guess maybe I'm learning how to disconnect from it and go back to my work pretty fast then.
577	DB: Has there been something you've found to help… I mean like if you're distinguishing between your younger working and now…?
578	NVW: I guess maybe it's like a lot of younger people, I'm just more used to being attached to it. I'll be doing something on my iPad, communicating with somebody or talking on Facebook or whatever, while Rick and I are watching a movie at night. So there's much more multitasking.
579	DB: You've learned a sort of way of compartmentalizing it that seems pretty seamless--
580	NVW: Yeah
581	DB: And the last question about teaching: When you've had now, you're probably getting students who've grown up only with a computer, right?
582	NVW: Yes
583	DB: Has that changed your relationship to the way? Has that sort of changed your idea about what it does, its effects, anything like that?
584	NVW: Well, it's changed to the sense that when students talk to me about their own composing process, and of course they do everything on the computer, they don't ever, a lot of them, write anything at all in longhand.
585	DB: Yeah
586	NVW: I don't even know if they can. And so I'm OK with that. I feel like I sort of made my peace that people are perfectly able to write, to find a good composition process that works for them that doesn't have to do with paper and pens at all. So, I'm accepting of that. You know, I don't try to like, shove my process off or say to someone, "Have you ever thought you might like to write it on a piece of paper first?"
587	NVW: What, you know, why? that's - -I know, I know that I'm hanging onto something that's -
588	DB: If you would -
589	NVW: -the pen... The pen and paper to me, um, they have some, there's something else between the eye and the hand and the page.
590	NVW: And I still feel that when I'm working, especially on poems, that there's something happening between the eye and the fingers and the page. It's very tactile that I'm hanging on to that, which I like.
591	DB: And so you would say, I mean for those that are only composing on the computer and not ever going to handwriting, or never using handwriting at all, that's what they're missing, that sort of hand-eye coordination.
592	NVW: I don't know. I don't think they necessarily are missing it. I think they've probably learned or are learning to do a step in the composing process. You know, maybe that thing where you're writing with your eyes closed. I mean, that they grow up with that, and so they get the same whatever imaginative connection with the keyboard.
593	DB: Do you find that they're as open to revision as maybe an older student?
594	NVW: Well, they can be made to... They can... That's just part of the learning process.
595	DB: Right, so you don't think it's anything distinct to this generation?
596	NVW: No
597	DB: OK
598	NVW: I think they just have to... Many of them, some of them get it right away, that revising can actually make a work better.
599	DB: Yeah
600	NVW: I've been working with this woman right now who came in saying that she doesn't like to revise because she likes to sit down and write everything out really fast in one big draft.
601	DB: Right
602	NVW: And her stuff is a mess! And so it's my personal mission with her to help her to come to believe that actually revising or working on some other manner, you know, like maybe having writing a scene at a time -
603	DB: Right
604	NVW: -would benefit the work. But she's very young and it's her first. She didn't even have an undergraduate degree in writing so, she's starting at square one.'
605	DB: OK, well, the last kind of group of questions I have are about the Photoems and, um, but I guess you have a number of different... I was thinking of these as being your sort of primary computer assisted project, but you have several going at the same time, so you use, including the collected, uh, your novella, are there other projects as well? OK, and are they, um, are they supplanting your fiction and poetry writing or are they sort of just 'in addition to'?	[01:28:20]
606	NVW: I'm wrestling with this question myself.
607	DB: OK
608	NVW: I think the poetry right now, new poetry, is kind of going into the these altered book pages that I'm doing. I have four, four of those projects going on right now.
609	NVW: And, um, I am working on a book of regular poems (those prose poems).
610	NVW: But all the fiction I'm working on right now are all e-books now. I've just completed a novella, not this one, but a different one that's an e-book that's um in the form of a scrapbook form, photograph album.
611	NVW: And that's the one I'm trying to talk to agents about.
612	DB: OK, OK. And they're going to... And you have only, you don't expect any physical form at all, you just...
613	NVW: This is the question that we are trying to work through. I don't care about seeing it as a print book. Um, but apparently publishers don't want to take a book unless it can also have it as a print book, because they don't make any money on e-books -
614	DB: Yes
615	NVW: - so -
616	DB: You can blame Amazon, right?
617	NVW: Yeah, so an agent doesn't want to take me on as a client unless I am doing the print book. And the e-book is the sort of bonus.
618	NVW: So that's what we're kind of going around and around about and I then think, "Well, maybe I'll just go out there and do it on my own, or try to do it with an e-book publisher who is just doing that." So I'm just trying... I'm just … I am just... This is all new to me, new territory and I'm just trying to navigate it myself right now. I don't know what I'm doing.
619	DB: But in terms of like the process and the composition and everything, it still seems pretty much, you know, computer or non-computer, like it's still like the kind of - Well, I mean the computer's a big part of it, but still writing the notebook and pushing it in, or is it a lot of that still happening - Are the e-books happening on the computer?
620	NVW: No, I'm still writing the text part in the notebook.
621	DB: OK. Um, how does the sort of visual aspect relate back to your writing especially sort of maybe... I mean you use a lot of imagery in your poems and in your fiction, but now you are actually using images -
622	NVW: Yes!
623	DB: - so what's that feel like? I mean are you using them in the same ways you used imagery or is it a totally different...?
624	NVW: Well, I mean, you hit it right on t…he head That's it exactly, I mean everything I loved about poetry, you know, the image thing - now I'm making actual images. And, you know, I'm putting a little bit of text in there, and you know, now I'm starting to wrestle with well that's too much text.
625	NVW: You know, it's... Everything that's happening now has gotten to be less, less, and less text. I'm trying to find the right balance between the visual component on the piece and that sort of means minimal text, I think, so that they don't fight each other.
626	DB: I mean, so what is like... How do you find the right language for that? I mean that seems like a different, almost a different thing than writing poetry.
627	NVW: Yeah, yeah. I mean...
628	DB: It's like placing...
629	NVW: This is what, for me, when I turn 60 and I'm doing this work, it's made it exciting again, like when I was 20.
630	DB: Yeah
631	NVW: Because I am... Language has gotten, it's been refreshed by this new sort of interjection of the actual visual material in the same location with the text.
632	DB: Right
633	NVW: And it's made it like a brand new thing for me and I'm just, I don't know, I feel like I'm, "Oh good. Now I can get through to my 80s OK without being bored."
634	DB: Now, if you didn't... So kind of two part question, if you didn't have that facility with the computer that you have and that you developed from working with PageMaker and/or if you just had not worked with a computer, do you think you would've turned to visual art in a physical format?
635	NVW: No, it would've been too much to learn, I think. I mean, it still feels like a lot to learn. I mean, I take classes every week. I'm taking online classes. I mean, I still can't get how to do text on a path. What's wrong with me?! I can't make my paths good.
636	DB: Yeah, I am no Photoshop expert.
637	NVW: Yeah, well anyways I take these little online classes through Photoshop.
638	DB: Do you take any... I mean, your husband's an artist, do you take any sort of art instruction as well I mean -
639	NVW: Yes. Oh, yes. From him. Yeah, and I've been taking like regular college classes, too.
640	NVW: When I taught at Bucknell for a semester - when they asked me to come out there, I said, "Well, yes, I'll come. But, do you think it'll be alright if I sat in on an art class while I'm there? " I wanted to take some kind of photography class. But, they weren't offering anything so I took a film editing class instead. But, anyway I just, I felt like I just needed to be in that environment with visual artists where they're talking about composition - because that's, I was starting at the path, the beginning place - just composition and design.
641	NVW: And my husband comes in, I invite him to come home early a couple nights and month and I supply him with some wine. He sits here and I show him the pieces that I'm working on, some of these Photoems or whatever.
642	NVW: And I'll say, "Just, if you don't like a piece, just tell me and we'll move on."
643	NVW: So this is what he'll do, he'll go, "Next." But then, when he likes a piece he'll explain to me what he thinks is working and it's all about composition and design. And that's what I needed -
644	DB: And so that's a big part of your education, too.
645	NVW: That's what I needed to learn.

Interview with Nance Van Winckel

Filter by topic:

645 of 645 rows
(click a missing row to make it appear)

Reset Filters

645 of 645 rows (click a missing row to make it appear)

645 of 645 rows
(click a missing row to make it appear)