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Eve Anthony Hanninen: What was it like to approach writing a poem in a non-linear fashion; did you feel constricted by
the pattern of your project requirements, or did you find it stimulating, provoking? And were you able to use a familiar
writing/creative process while working on your project?
Lynn Strongin: Difficult, scary; I liked using the familiar refrain, but also was able to stretch and enjoy it –
like warming up for a modern dance class, in a leotard.
EAH: What attracted you to writing, and when or where have you learned the most about writing poetry – through formal
education, personal passion, mentor, or equal combinations of resources?
LS: Music was my first creativity, composing. I was born wanting to be at the making end of art. Transferring to words
at age 17 was natural: music proved to be the bouncing-off board. Mother, a painter – that also was always in my life,
a large emotional, visual element translated into words for me, or rather, carried over, transposed.
Great question (about where/when): through personal, passionate response to music, art, words. Then through informal workshops
with Josephine Miles, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov.
EAH: What do you feel is the most effective method for stimulating growth in students? And do you enjoy collaboration with
other writers?
LS: Reading, and emotionally responding to life and to their works, along with others' writing. I really don't think creative
writing can be taught: it can be workshopped, as I have done in Oakland's Black Ghetto, and elsewhere.
Collaboration has its pros and cons. In the main, I am a loner, a non-joiner, both in terms of life-style and writing. Polio
at age 12 galvanized me: it cast me inward, where I found and created a richer world than the exterior one where I was always
aware of another pulse, a parallel child.
Lynn Strongin was born (1939) in New York City to an artist mother and psychologist father of Eastern European Jewish origin.
Raised both in New York, and parts of the Deep South during WWII due to her father being stationed there, she gained a sense
of this country's diversity and tongues. Early studies in musical composition branched out into poetry. She worked for Denise
Levertov during the political ferment of the Sixties in Berkeley. Began publishing in peace anthologies and little mags. She
had twelve published books by mid-2006, including several electronic chapbooks and one anthology, The Sorrow Psalms: A
Book of Twentieth Century Elegy, published by the University of Iowa Press. Her work has appeared in over thirty anthologies,
fifty journals. A chapter of her memoir, Indigo, was accepted for publication in The Dublin Quarterly, and another
chapter published in StorySouth was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent chapbook, Dovey and Me,
is reviewed in this issue of The Centrifugal Eye.
Lynn has made Canada her home for the past quarter century, but remains an intrinsically American writer. She is also Editor
of THE SORROW PSALMS and "Special Guest Reviewer" for New Works Review.
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