Nance Van Winckel Go to Transcript

"I work on 3 different computers. This big iMac here that I use and then I have a laptop Mac, and then I also have an iPad."

From interview section 1, "Devices and Digital Practice Play"
0:00:00

"I had been a pre-med major all through college but when I got to graduate school I was totally happy doing my writing thing and I never looked back. So I started my so-called practice there where I worked every day on my writing. That was 1975."

From interview section 2, "Writing Career and Education Play"
0:08:45

"Over the years I've started working on maybe two or three poems almost kind of simultaneously, on the same page, which feels kind of nutty, but what I was experiencing that led me this way was that a lot of times things would be coming to me - images, lines --- that didn't seem to belong to the poem I thought I was working on. So I realize it might be helpful to not confine myself. "

From interview section 3, "Poetry Writing Play"
0:11:12

"I don't really see a lot of similarities between writing stories and writing poems in terms of the drafting process -- well, in terms of anything. Stories are really different. "

From interview section 4, "Differences between Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing Play"
0:15:30

"Poems are more like a daily practice for me. I like poems. They don't-- For me, they're more about sound and imagery, voice. Who's talking in my poems-They're often some part of me that I didn't really know it was there. "

From interview section 5, "The Daily Process/Practice of Writing Poems Play"
0:23:00

"I need to get located in time and space. And what the heck is going on? What dramatically is happening in the poem? A lot of times I'll have a fix on one or the other of these questions and am really feeling unclear about the others."

From interview section 6, "Revision Practices Play"
0:25:40

"With a poem, I slash mercilessly. I'm a slasher, and I move things around--same in fiction, I'm really thinking about pacing. "

From interview section 7, "Poetry vs. Story Revision Play"
0:28:50

" I tried three times to write a novel, and I got 200 pages in three times. I showed a couple of those books to friends who are fiction writers and they confirmed for me what I thought was true. The way I phrase it to myself is: they didn't have a big enough engine"

From interview section 8, "Story Collection vs. a Novel and Book Revision Play"
0:33:56

"I probably do 2 or 3 handwritten drafts and I'll actually rip the notebook page out. I have notebooks and notebooks where I have a big X through the page so that I do not get confused that I'm actually done with this version, and now if I look hard enough in the notebook, there is a later version of these poems."

From interview section 9, "Modes of Revision in Poetry"
0:38:43

"It's just another process of just printing out all the poems and just living with them. That takes, I don't know maybe a year, two, maybe even longer sometimes of experimenting with sections, you know, the arrangement."

From interview section 10, "Poetry Book Revision (Ordering poems into a collection) Play"
0:42:25

"I'll come back to it over a period of a couple of weeks on the computer then (once it's on the computer file) and look at it, probably tinker with it a little bit more before, and then I'll start sending it out probably."

From interview section 11, "Where Revision Happens and Poem Revision and Submission Play"
0:45:05

"My publishers I think have copies, you know. They have pdfs of everything."

From interview section 12, "Saving and Archiving Work Play"
0:48:37

"I think it's mostly been gradual."

From interview section 13, "Stages of Writing and Shifts During Career Play"
0:49:50

"One of the things I like about doing it on the computer is that I can close my eyes which is really odd but I like it. So, it seems to lend itself to-- not to dialogue or action, but to real kind of interior moments where I'm in a character's mind and I want to replicate her thinking process."

From interview section 14, "Difference in feel between writing on the computer vs writing by hand Play"
0:52:07

"They were these huge, gray boxes. They were given to us - this must have been 1980-right around there, 1980 - At Lake Forest College, all the faculty got these KayPro computer things, and really all they did was word processing but I liked them."

From interview section 15, "Entrance of Computers into Writing Process (First Computer) Play"
0:53:10

"I like reading, you know, in a comfy chair and I feel like we're moving away from that now, that that's becoming less. You know, and I'm writing e-books myself now, so I'm a culprit, too."

From interview section 16, "Computers Effect on the Way Writing Felt Play"
0:59:43

"You know, what little experimenting I've done along those lines with poems, I've done on the computer screen. '"

From interview section 17, "Graphical/Layout Effects from Computers onto Poetry Play"
1:01:16

"I've found this old encyclopedia up here from the '30s and I've been scanning the pages-especially pages that have a lot of graphic material in them. "

From interview section 18, "Photoems and Altered Book Pages Play"
1:03:00

" I sense one of the things that's going on in this project is that I'm talking back to history in a way and saying, 'No, that's not right,' and I like that"

From interview section 19, "Differences between creative processes with Computer and Without Play"
1:09:50

"I have lost things, yeah. Almost every week, I have little battle because I can't remember what I called something--"

From interview section 20, "Ease of Finding and Organizing Files Play"
1:13:50

"With that first book of poems, I've kept all the letters that he wrote to me about revision. I don't know, they just-- They're very dear to me that somebody took that kind of time with me."

From interview section 21, "Physical vs. Digital Correspondence Play"
1:15:46

"I try to be careful that I've always got a hard copy somewhere of the material that I'm working on."

From interview section 22, "Keeping Physical Copies and Constructing a Collection via the Wall Play segment"
1:18:15