Tsering Wangmo Dhompa Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was raised in India and Nepal. She is the author of Rules of the House and In The Absent Everyday, as well as In Writing the Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press). Her work is deceptively simple; her prose poems and vignettes gesture lyrically to a rich present and a memory-drenched past. She was kind enough to answer some questions that we asked her recently. What is the most satisfying thing for you about writing? I like the feeling that I'm slowly fitting a puzzle between the larger ideas floating in my head to the practical motions of day to day living-how the awkward and indefinable ideas collapse or comprehend the daily necessities of eating, breathing, working. How did you become a writer? I was twelve years old when I felt I needed more than just the word love to let my mother know how much she meant to me. Of course, I ended up using clichés and the word love over and over in all the poems I wrote to her. That was the beginning. How does your job influence your writing? Do you find they overlap, or are they very separate endeavors for you? Writing is personal and internal and a part of me in a way that my job cannot be. They are separate yet ironically because I have to write when I can, outside of work, or despite work, I think the predicament of a working existence hovers over my writing. Sometimes in my writing it becomes something of a burden and "not working" gradually becomes a wistful wish. How did publishing your first book change the way you saw yourself as a writer? My close friends and family members are not poets and we don't talk about writing, so I don't view myself as a writer when I'm with them. I think writers saw me differently after the publication of my first book—amongst them I am now seen as a poet. How do you create space in your life for your writing? I can't write in public spaces, I'm too aware of the people, the movement around me. I like to write when I'm alone, preferably in the quiet of my room. I try to stay open so that the things that draw me and move me are able to announce themselves in ideas and words. I find short bursts of time on weekends and in the evenings to write. And if I can't write, I try and read. What was your MFA experience like for you? How did it affect your writing life? I was just beginning to figure out what I wanted with the MFA program when I graduated. The MFA helped me find a way to work with my "working life" and my writing. It was very encouraging to be with writers in class who called themselves writers. I still say, "I write poetry" as one might speak of a hobby and many of my co-workers don't know I write poetry so clearly I feel some hesitation there. On a more practical level, I was more open to what I could write after reading what and how others in my class wrote. Your voice in your writing seems so straightforward, yet it often makes amazing imaginative leaps. Are there other writers who have influenced you? As a child I loved best the books that explored alternate worlds and states of existence--The Magic Faraway Tree, The Wishing Chair—so perhaps my view of the world was shaped quite early as not quite completely here and all. I also read Yeats, Wordsworth and Keats when I was a teenager and I still go back and read them every now and then. There are nuances I haven't explored so it's hard for me to put down specific names and say I see their influence in my work. Do you read a lot of contemporary poetry? If not, what sorts of things do you read? I am trying to read more contemporary poetry, by which I mean American contemporary poetry. Michael Palmer's work is very grounding for me, I find a balance in his work that is very important. I'm afraid to declare that I don't read as much poetry as I do fiction. I've always loved fiction—I read more fiction. What are you working on right now? My writing habit doesn't revolve around projects, I tend to just write individual small poems so I have some new poems I am working on. I'm also writing short stories. In May I will be leaving for Tibet for four and a half months and I hope to begin a book about the nomadic region. Maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. How do the ideas of syntax and form figure in your composing process? I don't have any fixed notions of how syntax and form work while writing but I do know that balance is very important for me. Form and syntax seem to grow out of a need for a certain balance or harmony between form, rhythm, idea and image. If I think too hard, it gets too rigid so I just try and follow my breath. My lines leap from here to there but I need to feel grounded in that chaos. Not too tight, not too lose. How would you express yourself creatively if you were no longer able to write? I would turn to gardening or perhaps carpentry.