Interview with Luisa Muradyan
Want to learn more about our guest judge? Read about our Luisa Muradyan’s journey of being published for the first time, her advice for new writers on how to revise, publish, & deal with rejections, & all things poetry.
Interview by the Associate Editor of Touchstone: Monica Kopenhaver.
Luisa Muradyan
Guest judge for the Summer 2020 Debut Prize in Poetry
Monica Kopenhaver: What was it like getting published for the first time?
Luisa Muradyan: I most definitely screamed. I drank an entire pot of tea too quickly. I baked myself a celebratory pie. I called my entire family to give a very detailed description of how I opened my acceptance email. I couldn’t believe that a complete stranger not only liked my poems, but they wanted to publish them. I had been submitting for a while before having any luck and the poems that were accepted were ones that were about my grandfather, they meant a lot to me.
MK: What are the signs that a poem is ready for publication?
LM: For me, this is a tough question. I’m a big believer in revision, and often the best lines from my poems come from multiple drafts. I think a poem is ready for publication when revisions start to feel counterproductive, when language has taken the necessary risks to say what the poem needs to say.
MK: What advice would you give to new writers wanting to be published?
LM: Perhaps the three best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten were:
1. Take your time. Really give yourself time to edit your poems and find the right journals that fit in with your voice. Some of the early poems I’ve published I look back on and wish I would have been more patient with myself. I see poems that were good but could have been better had I challenged myself and taken the time to develop the images and ideas in the poem.
2. Don’t be afraid to find your voice. While this sounds like it belongs on a Pinterest board, I remember when I began writing I felt immense pressure to write what I thought were “publishable poems.” I was trying to emulate the authors who I loved, but my poems ended up sounding like bad imitations. It is incredibly important to find the poets who inspire you and give you the courage to write, but it is also important to take the time to figure out who you are on the page.
3. Find readers that you trust. Your writing life will hopefully be a long one and during that time you will have seasons of abundance and lack. Finding readers that you trust can not only help you catch errors in your poems, but they can help sustain you when writing gets difficult. The goal when you stop writing is to return to the page eventually, and having a group of supportive fellow writers can help get you there a lot faster.
MK: At the beginning of your career, how did you handle rejections?
LM: I was lucky enough to have great mentors who shared with me their rejection piles. I learned early on that rejection isn’t personal and that it is always best to submit to journals that you like to read. I generally like to send out a submission the same day I get a rejection, it makes me feel like I’m immediately getting back on the horse. Another way to think about it is if you have a messy breakup, the most logical thing to do is to get on Instagram and immediately post hot pictures of yourself. I’m “posting hot pictures of myself”, but submitting to other journals in the wake of rejection.
MK: How do you find literature magazines and communities that are a good fit for your work?
LM: I do my best to keep an eye out for journals I haven’t read before. Typically, I find new writers this way or occasionally, I’ll look to see where a writer whose work I love has been published. There are also journals whose issues are great, but who wouldn’t be a good fit for my own work. Thankfully, there are lots of fantastic digital journals or digital versions of print issues that are also available for free, and this can be a good place to start when trying to get the feel of a journal.
MK: What poets and writers are you currently reading and which poets have inspired your work?
LM: Currently I’m finishing Rick Barot’s The Galleons and Danez Smith’s Homie, both of which are incredible. I tend to connect to poems through images first and these authors are some of the absolute best. Additionally, I’m forever inspired by Wislawa Syzmborska, Rita Dove, Adélia Prado, Stanley Kunitz, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robin Coste Lewis, Gerald Stern, and my ultimate queen Anna Akhmatova.
About Luisa Muradyan
Luisa Muradyan is originally from the Ukraine and holds a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston where she was the recipient of the Jeese H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellowship and a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. She is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press) and was the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018. She was also the recipient of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and non binary writers from the former Soviet Union. Previous poems have appeared in the ThreePenny Review, Coffee House Press, The Missouri Review, Poetry International, and The Los Angeles Review, among others.
The Debut Prize in Poetry is open for submission August 1 - September 1, 2020.
