Josh Smyth: How I Wrote ‘Billboard’
“During these visits, I am immersed in familiar company, and it isn’t until I have short moments away from family, in solitude, when I take stock of my surroundings and focus on the unfamiliarity of everything”
“During these visits, I am immersed in familiar company, and it isn’t until I have short moments away from family, in solitude, when I take stock of my surroundings and focus on the unfamiliarity of everything”
“I’m always thinking about who gets to speak and be listened to, and who gets silenced”
“When I attempted to put my feelings on paper it became clear that it would be a long, slow process with hard work and determination at its core”
“If you let your characters speak, you can give them enough rope to hang themselves: they reveal their own nature without the narrator having to comment; you’re showing and not telling”
Why is it that some poets are more ‘discoverable’ than others?
“She noticed my predilection for rhyme and then warned that using it should sound ‘blindingly inevitable'”