Questionnaire-Margaret M.

 

Your Name: Margaret Ann Miller

What you like to be called:  Margaret

Your email: mhollendbeck@gmail.com                            

Your birthday: October 13, 1989

Your genre(s):  Predominantly longer fiction; sometimes a little poetry here and there

My grad thesis:  it's a manuscript entitled The Geography of Half Our Lives and its about bodies, origins and time.  It has a genderqueer narrator.  It has lumberjacks.  It takes place in Colorado--sometimes Denver...sometimes the beautiful Rocky Mountains.

Why you are a writer:  Because I want to constantly pull apart language at its seams and end up feeling compelled and without choice to attempt to re-thread language back together in hopes of building newer and broader landscapes that do not possess such narrowly defined understandings of being a woman/man/person as well as creating liminality for any and all trans- identities, those ones that situate in-between or link between many.  There isn't enough liminality in novels, I feel like.  I want to let a little air in as I re-stitch.

First thing you ever wrote:  I'm not sure I remember the very first thing I ever wrote, but I had a million journals as a kid and I wrote a lot about my hyporallergenic poodle named Missy.  She was pretty awesome.

What your writing practices are? How often? How long? Where? With? Etc.: My writing practices used to be a bit more sporadic, but since graduate school, I've bogged down a little more.  I try to write a little every day.  I set blocks of time each day for writing even if its working on essays and the like.  I used to be a nighttime writing person, but being all of 24 has made it really hard for me to stay up past 10pm most nights so now I write in the morning and I kind of like that more.  So I usually write from about 8..8:30 until at least 10:30 on just a normal day and on writing days it's 8-12.  I also usually have one day a week where I write all day and I write alongside my best writing friend.  I like to move around a lot when I'm writing because being in new places I think helps me personally so I like going to my friend's house to work.  I like quiet places with lots of sunshine and windows when I'm writing.  I am not so much write by hand first type of writer.  I keep a journal and I will take down notes and lines, etc if I need to for later, but in terms of sitting down to write, I usually am on my laptop.  I can see the lines better and visualize the form of the scenes better on the computer. I don't always revise as I write, but sometimes I do when I feel the language or rhythm is really off in a sentence so it's nice seeing it easily on a computer screen. Plus, I have crap handwriting.

Anything else you wan to tell us?  I'm really excited to work with this class.  I had a lot of fun last semester and learned a lot in Micheline's thesis class and cannot wait to meet some more amazing writers.