Essayist, Poet
Kent, OH
June 1996, four weeks
Maggie Anderson is a poet, writer, editor, teacher, and the host of The Slowdown. She used her Anderson residency to work on two projects: a new collection of poems, many of which take as their source the experience of living in Denmark for a year and of traveling in southern and eastern Europe. She took extensive notes for these poems while she was abroad and has, during the previous three years, done considerable background reading in geography, culture, history, and language (more notes). During the fall of 1995 she began to be able to see the skeletal poems she had been working on as whole bodies, whole houses, and Anderson now has a vision of how they might fit together as one large part of her next book of poems that she hopes to complete early in 1997.
The second project is to work on little prose pieces about place. She works in the empty spaces (when she can find them, when she is not teaching, editing, or writing poems. She hopes, in some ways, this “off to the side” quality to the writing becomes a part of the style of he pieces themselves: not sloppiness or lessened importance, but a grounding in fruitful separation and also a kind of exile. She has completed about five of these pieces and hopes to rework them and begin more during her stay at the Anderson Center.
She’s published several books of poetry and prose, including Good Bones, Keep Moving, Dear Writer and Dear All. Her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful was a New York Times bestseller. Anderson’s poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Guardian, the Paris Review, Tin House, the Washington Post, and The Best American Poetry.