Christopher Howell - Spokane, WA
Christopher Howell is a quiet man with a studied nature, and my visit to his lovely home in Spokane is pleasant and much too short.
We walk through his kitchen and into his office that looks over his back yard. The room is small, but well lit and we sit across a heavy wooden desk to talk while drinking coffee. As I do in all of these interviews, I start with the principal question: "Does place impact your work?" Howell answers that in complete and precise sentences. He works the phrases slowly, but they are elegant and well wrought.
I move through some other questions, and I can tell instantly whether or not they're good questions. Howell's face tells me instantly. A good question elicits a solid nod, an intake of breath, and the beginning of an answer. A question not quite as good brings a wrinkled brow. Howell can take an okay question and draw from it an angle that's interesting and far more in line with what I really wanted.
He's so good, in fact, that I try a new question, one I've not tried out on any poet yet. It sounds garbled as I sell it, but Howell sees an area of light in it. He gives me an answer I'll be able to simply type into the book. No edits. Sentences with punctuation. Terrific.
We finish chatting as the tape recorder clicks off. It's a sign.
The light has gone down quickly outside. It's only 5 pm, but it looks like 8 or 9 anywhere else. We go out into the bricked patio area off the back door of his house and we shoot some photos. We talk a bit about a new book of his coming out. He walks me through the house, out into the front yard to look for my wife. I see the lights of Winnie Cooper (the new name for the big beast) and wave back at Howell through the window.
Nance van Winckel - Liberty Lake, WA
Nance van Winckel lives outside of Spokane, Washington, in an airy and beautifully apointed 2nd floor condo that looks over Liberty Lake, a small, but gorgeous body of water surrounded by trees.
She shows me her writing studio first. The large high-ceiling room faces the lake, and is lit by a floor to ceiling window nearly 5 feet across. She tells me she has plans to add another window in the same room, and I picture the room with one entire wall of windows. It will be spectacular.
We go out to the living room and Nance sits on the couch and I face her in a rocking chair. We cover some general questions first, then begin to discuss some new things for me. Because van Winckel is also an accomplished fiction writer, my questions about place generate some new angles. We talk about how important setting is to fiction, how much more dense the physical world appears in a short story versus a poem.
When I question her about specific work, she recalls a trip to eastern Europe in the mid 80s, a time when the Berlin Wall and Communism still stood. Her visit generated nothing more than a few notes, but more than a dozen years later the physical landscape of her visit found its way into a series of poems she was writing that eventually became the much-honored collection Besides Ourselves. Van Winckel figures it took a dozen years for that rich and complex place to work its way into her subconscious, until the sights and sounds were as second nature for her as any that existed in her from her childhood or coming of age.
We shoot some photos after we finish chatting, some on the porch overlooking the lake. We wander out front of her place and shoot a few more.
As always, the visit is over too fast. I'm keeping to a schedule, of course, and the journey has really only just begun. We say our goodbyes.
