Q: How do you deal with criticism?
A: :Molly Fisk: Internally or externally? I don’t listen to a lot of external, and I don’t get a lot of external criticism. I’m sure people think it, but they’re not telling me, which is nice cause I don’t want to hear about it. But you know, you get rejection letters when you send your work out, that’s a kind of criticism. And that’s just part of the deal. So, I’m not trying to write to please anybody else, besides myself. So, I feel as though, thats my commitment is to write as well as I can; as well as I know how. When I learn something new and get better at writing, I don’t go back and change all my old poems. I feel like they were written by the person I was 10 or 15 years ago.
Q: Have you ever written a poem where you were in the moment, or were suddenly inspired?
A: :Molly Fisk: Yes, many of them have happened that way. Many of them with anger. Early on in my memories I was really angry because I felt as though if I had been hurt by somebody on the street that I didn’t know then I would have been taken better care of, then being hurt by somebody inside of my house. And I was livid about that for years and I got a great poem out of. The title A More difficult Beauty, The whole business I’m in is to take this stuff that happened to me that was gruesome and make it somehow matter or make it beautiful.
Q: What makes you want to take on the issues that many don’t want to take on?
A: :Molly Fisk: Part of why awful things happen in the world is because they are not talked about. Secrets are the things that hurt people the most. So they’re two things that I think happened for me, one is because my early memories of abuse were repressed and I didn’t know what they were till I was 35. I think there is something kind of physical eruption mechanism that happened with me that once I started finding out about them, I was not going to shut up. I was probably too open about reading poems in public when I first began to write those poems. And I say too open not because it was a problem for me but because it’s hard to hear that stuff. And I would get up and read 10 in a row, and I felt like I was bludgeoning people with information. Which I feel sorry for now, I felt like if I had started or known more about how much they affected people, I would have dropped two of them into a reading some evening instead of having so many. Cause you have to be careful with people, and I’m good at writing and I’m good at writing things that go right into your heart. I’m glad now that I figured out that you can not just hit people with stuff like that; it’s bad for them and it’s unkind. I don’t write a lot about Rwanda because I don’t know anything about it, I know the things a person in the United States would have read. I write about my own experience and that’s possibly why its sos effective.
