"Flying Between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar: An Interview with Linda Dove" by Jay McPherson

The founder of Woodbury’s national journal for professional writers and poets, MORIA Literary Magazine, Linda Dove has been writing poetry herself for several decades now. She puts her heart, mind, and soul into learning and writing, digging deeply into the throes of literature before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and finally piecing together the puzzle that is a poem. Having received a BA in English from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, one of the original “Seven Sisters” colleges, Dove worked with neo-formalist poet, Mary Jo Salter, and the Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, to complete her senior thesis, and, with their endorsements, moved onto graduate school, earning her Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature at the University of Maryland, near the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she could access the original manuscripts she needed for her work. Dove’s dissertation focused on women’s poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; more specifically, it “was an in-depth study of the sonnet sequence and its conventions and what happens when women engage with a traditionally masculine form of verse.”

Since then, she has moved on to working not only as a writer, but as a college writing professor. Dove actually worked as a professor before she found herself as a poet, which has had a definite effect on her poetry. She went on to say that “a lot of [my poems] take up language and poetics as their subject — and I am sure that comes straight out of my training as a literary scholar.” In the past decade, Dove has also turned her attention to a new focus on building community in the poetry world, including through social media — such as “Lit Twit” (literary Twitter) — and her work with the online magazine MORIA. Dove founded the magazine in the fall of 2017 with a group of five students, who enrolled in the original “Digital Publication” course. The idea for a literary magazine was first introduced to her by the Chair of the Writing Department at the time, Reuben Ellis, who thought that starting a professional magazine would not only give students hands-on experience in the world of publishing but also provide new insight and perspective into the current trends in the literary world. With Woodbury University’s ever-growing writing department, it was a fantastic opportunity not only for students, but for Dove as well.

Working as a professor, heading a magazine, raising a 14-year-old, and herding pet chickens doesn’t leave much time to write, but Dove still manages to squeeze it into her busy schedule. Preferring mornings, she tries to set aside time every week to focus on her personal writing projects and submitting her work to journals. Her process involves a cup or two of coffee, a few poems for inspiration, and a focus on the concrete rather than the abstract emotion. “I collect words and images and stories and dreams and lines I love from other people’s poems and keep them in the notes file on my phone, so I always have a seed to start.” Dove also finds support with several groups of writer friends, meeting or corresponding several times a month to get feedback, celebrate acceptances, and commiserate over rejections. While it’s easy to put personal work on the back burner when you have such a tight schedule, Dove has found it best to actively seek ways to hold herself accountable, so she doesn’t lose track of things. Even when she’s creatively hit a stand-still, she has methods to work around it, keeping a folder of loose-leaf, “touchstone” poems that work to inspire her. Reading is what inspired her to take up poetry, and to this day it continues to spark inspiration.

Having started work on her first book of poetry in 1999, the full collection was published in 2009 after a decade’s worth of work. Her book, In Defense of Objects, won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press. Having so many poems gathered into one book made it difficult for Dove to find an overarching narrative in the pieces, leading her to the idea of focusing on the theme of objects. Following her first book were three chapbooks in 2011, 2017, and 2019. Dove prefers chapbooks to longer collections, as the shorter length allows for a more discrete narrative than a full-length collection does. Each of her chapbooks contains poems written serially: Fearn is a series of poems where every title starts with “Fear Is…”; This Too is a series of persona poems where every title starts with “St. Nicholas of Tolentino…”; and O Dear Deer, is a series of experimental poems about her experience serving on a jury of a murder trial in downtown Los Angeles. Despite her preference for chapbooks — after another decade of collecting poems — Dove has been putting the final touches on her next full collection, which has the working title of Coin.

Dove’s advice for poets of all kinds is to read everything. Reread what you don’t like on the first read, study how it does what it does, practice imitating it, absorb as much knowledge as you can to better inform your own work. Don’t be afraid to try something new and don’t cling to poems you’ve written. Allow yourself the freedom to change and experiment with your own work, and, while this sort of evolution isn’t automatic, seeking out new voices and studying unfamiliar poetry will broaden your horizons and help you to grow. When writing poetry, Dove explains that she hopes

to surprise myself into learning something I didn’t know when I started writing the poem. On a good day, I hope to recreate that experience for a reader. As a poet, I very much feel that poems invite you into the work of discovering what they want to say, as opposed to what you want to say. If you start writing a poem with the belief that you already have it all figured out — you already know what you want to say — you’re missing a huge opportunity to play and to learn. The best poems arrive like a guest at the door — the lines just start knocking, unexpectedly.

Jay mcpherson

Jay McPherson is a young transgender man currently studying Professional Writing and Animation at Woodbury University. He’s been both writing and drawing since he learned how to hold a pencil and has spent years debating which he would rather pursue as a career. After remembering he’s been working on a book since middle school, writing became the obvious choice. He has a deep love of rainy days, cats, and his many works-in-progress. Someday he’ll finish one (hopefully it’s the book).