Kate Burak makes the best Christmas cards--often with moving parts. She also writes a mean textbook. So, I expect her novel to be just as rich. Her first YA book --"The Dress" -- comes out soon and she'll reading with other Massachusetts Cultural Council fellows next week at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
This from an interview in the the Mass Cultural Council Blog.
I love the way poetry contains both pictures and the sound of words. I revere poets. But I found that though I wanted to write poetry, it is the most difficult thing in the world. I stopped writing altogether after graduate school, and I suffered because I missed it. I mourned. And then I read Jayne Anne Phillips’ Black Tickets. I discovered poetry in story form. In fact, my first published story, which was rejected 32 times (it’s true) was finally published in a journal that I had targeted because they also published Phillips - Fiction magazine.
It was such a relief to be writing again, even though I wasn’t writing poetry. And as I read Mark Richard’s Fishboy, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Gabriel Garicia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth McCracken, I began to see the possibilities for me in prose. As I experimented, I began to find my own voice and that voice, it was clear, was poetry and prose merging. I have to say this has been both a plus and a minus for me, in terms of publishing. Some editors say the voice isn’t accessible enough. That’s my poetry influence, I’m sure.
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