Kate Garcia is a poet, teacher, and quilter from the Inland Empire of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Fugue, phoebe, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bartending for a Stamp with My Face on It, will be published with The Chestnut Review next year. She holds an MFA in poetry from University of Montana.
Today we’re delighted to shine our Teacher Spotlight on the talents of Kate Garcia, one of the newest additions to our teaching roster at Literary Arts. Kate plans on teaching a four-week in-person class called Poetry of Observation: Starting and Keeping a Commonplace Book, which begins on November 24.
You can learn more about Kate in the following interview, where she shared with us her thoughts on consuming vs. creating, the limits of introspection, and the surprising relationship between poetry and quilting.
Can you tell us a bit about the upcoming class you plan to teach? What’s it all about and what do you hope students come away with?
This class is for those of us who often feel like we’re consuming more content than we’re creating. I have found that, for myself, by keeping a poetry notebook (or commonplace book), where I am writing down anything and everything that interests me, I am able to take the act of consumption and turn it into an avenue for creativity. It helps me be less of a passive consumer and more of an active appreciator of others’ art. I find myself writing down, of course, lines from other writers, but also bits of dialogue from movies and TV, quotes from YouTube videos, pieces of written ephemera I see around the city—anything I could possibly make a poem out of.
I’m hoping that, through this class, participants can create a dedicated, physical place for their interests, observations, and musings. This physical place—the commonplace book—can be somewhere that you return to anytime you can’t think of what to write about. I hope that participants will begin to make this act of cataloguing a habit, so that creative inspiration is never far away.
I once heard a writer describe the people who had most influenced their work as part of their “literary family tree.” What poets, writers, or artists might be in your poetic family tree?
My favorite writers are those who are clearly working in and through a specific moment in the world and in their own lives. I love Maggie Nelson, particularly her hybrid project, Jane. I love Kimiko Hahn and Alice Fulton for poetry that feels totally transportive. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water was life-changing for me in the way she approaches documentation. I don’t think any of these writers set out with the intention of “timelessness”—their projects exist very much in the time they were written from very specific points of view. But that in itself is what makes them feel outside of time—the specificity of the work. I hope to get close to that in my own writing.
Current favorite poem?
‘Poem Sewn into My Hunting Jacket’ by Noah Davis
What are some of the challenges and some of the joys you’ve experienced when teaching poetry in particular?
Most of my experience is in teaching young poets and something that comes up a lot with young people writing poetry for the first time is a real resistance to breaking out of introspection. So much of the poetry I see early on in a young writer’s journey is really inward facing. That was actually the one of the origins of this class. I was thinking about ways to get writers out of that inner dialogue style of writing and think about how outward-facing, observational writing can sometimes lead to even deeper truths.
The joys of teaching poetry are much more expansive and harder to articulate. I just love being in a space with other people who are interested in a creative pursuit. There is a unique alchemy that happens with each group of writers and the specific vulnerabilities and perspectives they bring to a class. It’s always so fun and rewarding to see my students support one another in their work, become friends through poetry.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve received from another writer or teacher?
A former teacher of mine and brilliant poet, Keetje Kuipers, used to say this thing in class when a poet was obfuscating in their work: Risk clarity. Be brave enough to just say what you want to say, to risk making the argument of a poem clear. I think about this advice all the time when I feel myself writing around the thing I really want to say in a poem.
What’s your favorite place to write?
In bed.
When it comes to your own writing practice, what are some sources of creative inspiration for you right now?
I’ve been reading an older collection of essays from the poet Alice Fulton titled, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Reading these essays has made me want to make weirder poems, more experimental poems. Fulton thinks a lot about poems as three-dimensional things, with texture and depth. I’m not a huge reader of theory but Fulton makes theory exciting.
I also think it’s always helpful for writers to have other creative outlets that have very little to do with words. I’m a quilter and I find the act of quilting—the tactility, the repetitiveness—to be like medicine for my brain. I think that spending time on a quilt, away from poetry, in turn makes me a better poet.
Any forthcoming publications or projects?
My debut chapbook, Bartending for a Stamp with My Face on It, is coming out this Spring with The Chestnut Review. It’s a book about labor and power and loneliness and my dog, Bosco.
How would you describe your teaching style in 5 words or less?
We’re all learning here together.
You can register for Kate Garcia’s class ‘Poetry of Observation: Starting and Keeping a Commonplace Book’ here.
