Norman Minnick Will Run You Down

I mean, not with his car or anything. But his marathon workshop at the Indiana Writers' Center aims to run your brain down until your best ideas are exposed to air. Using exercises and prompts from Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones", Minnick will be leading his Writing Marathon Saturday, September 27, beginning at 10 am.

Minnick is the author of the poetry collection "To Taste the Water". You can read an interview he did with the Southeast Review here, where he says all kinds of useful things, like this:

MINNICK: None of this comes easy to me. The most difficult experience with the book was finding an order to the poems so they could each vibrate and experience some kind of electrical charge as they rubbed against each another. I especially suffered the waiting. I try to impose a habit, a structure, for writing and nothing comes. And I stress over it. I would like to be able to give in to the impulses that come at their own will... perhaps they would come more often.

SR: Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?

MINNICK: Let me follow the thought above, "I try to impose a habit, a structure, for writing and nothing comes. And I stress over it. I would like to be able to give in to the impulses that come at their own will... perhaps they would come more often." I would like to break the habit of expecting something from imposing a habit.