With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.