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Writer's pictureAdam Gaffen

Adam Interviews...Kathryn Winograd!


The logo for Adam Interviews: A hand holding a pen, superimposed over an old-fashioned typewriter

Good morning!

Do you know what event I'm participating in next week?

Here's a hint: it's the second year I've been a part of this festival.

Give up?

It's the Trinidad Get Lit! Literary Festival - sixth annual!

And you want to know something else?

Today's author is going to be there too!

That's right - so let's meet her.


Kathryn Winograd is a celebrated Colorado poet, essayist, and photographer whose work beautifully captures the essence of nature and human experience. With eight published books to her name, Winograd has garnered numerous accolades, including the Colorado Book Award for her poetry collection "Air Into Breath" and a Bronze Medal in Essay from the Independent Publishers Book Awards for "Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children". Her writing, which spans poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms, has been featured in prestigious publications such as The New Yorker and has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. As a longtime educator, Winograd has shared her passion for the written word with students at various institutions, including Regis University's Mile High MFA program. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with this accomplished author about her latest work, her creative process, and her unique perspective on the interplay between language and landscape.


Star Trek or Star Wars? Hmmm, Star Trek with Admiral Jean-Luc Picard!


A book that pleasantly surprised you? Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel (Shocken Books 2004). Discovered a kind of prairie field hand-planted by Chatfield Botanical Gardens, which got me thinking about tall grass, which got me thinking about early pioneer women who traveled by wooden wagon on the Overland Trail in mid 18th century, which got me thinking about my new grandson (3 weeks old), and, voila, I found myself writing a new poem about him, tallgrass: carson, after reading these staid, yet heart-wrenching diaries written by these pioneer women— I write on my lap with the wind rocking the wagon, Algeline Ashley— and the beautifully written foreword discussion of these diaries and their place in history by Mary Clearman BlewI have not told you half we suffered. I am not adequate to the task, wrote Elizabeth Smith Geer, who traveled in a wagon across a wild country with seven children in 1847.

storms now, the Canadian smoke

pushed out by wilder

winds    beautiful rain.

 

the hummingbirds stray

            into the leadwort, blue sky

flower, what I really want

 

to call them, spilling out

of the little grave    of a garden

someone once bricked

 

into our back porch.   if your mother

            walked the tallgrass plains  

even a century ago  . . .

(from tallgrass: carson)

 


A capital K over a capital W, separated by a single line

Coffee, tea, or cacao? Coffee now, but I think I just make it as a thinly disguised melted chocolate sundae . . .with caramel.


When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?  Just after highschool, stood up by a guy working the flying elephants from an amusement park where I worked the front gate shop, complete with a thousand “sex-finders” I had to inventory each month. He was supposed to drive down to our farm for a spaghetti dinner homecooked by me, who was no cook. (Oh! I’m beginning to understand something new here . . .) He never showed, so I retreated to the pink-walled bedroom of my childhood and pulled out a journal and started writing. I remember  “bare branches” and a bird or two, the grey lid of my father’s pond bulldozed out of the fields. By the time I got done with the poem, I thought, “What boy?”


Where do you get your information or ideas for your books? A long time ago, I read a nonfiction book by the poet Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whale Light (Penguin/Random House).   That book taught me the beauty of a poet’s research: not just information/ ideas but but metaphor and the lyricism of science.  I  am just finishing up an interview for the Colorado Poets Center with the Colorado poet Alysse Kathleen McCanna on her new poetry book, Fish Wife (Black Lawrence Press). It’s a gorgeous book that creates a trope of fishwife and runs with it. We the readers get to revel in shole and fish hook, pitted coral, wishwife in salmon petticoat. For my own work, I have happily traveled through packrats and middens, earth goddesses and monoliths of basalt, gold mine tailings, and Krikaya, snow mixed with breath.


When did you write your first book and how old were you? I have a talented great niece, a thirteen-year-old, who started writing and illustrating a whole series of books in the first grade with a little girlfriend. Impressively, the six-year-olds made the agreement that each book would have a lost teddy bear and that would weave the series together. I, on the other hand, did not have that youthful vigor almost sixty years ago, though I do remember reciting poems my mother typed out in the dining room at the giant rolltop desk rescued from a flood by a junk shop and bought by my father.  I remember ribbons—a bright red second-place one for a poem about stars like swans in a velvet sky.  My first book, published, was my thesis from my PhD program at DU: the first inkling I had that the thesis was a viable work was a letter from the poet Richard Hugo, then the Yale Series for Younger Poets judge, who wrote to tell me that my manuscript had “just only been beaten out” by one other and would I please submit next year.  My thesis advisor, a winner of the Yale Series himself,  arranged a meeting with me at a coffee shop to goggle—I don’t think it was exactly a compliment—at the manuscript I had so labored over. (Alas, nothing happened the next year either.) But the manuscript did get published, somewhere after the “raising the surprise twin babies years” by Ashland Poetry Press and won the Colorado Book Award. I was then forty or forty-one. An age that seemed ancient—back then.


What do you like to do when you’re not writing? At the start of Covid and our great isolation, my daughter and son-in-law gave me a camera. I started going down to the river, mask-less, and taking pictures as part of a community naturalist zoom class I was taking. I got hooked and started taking streaming photography classes by National Geographic. Something clicked: I remember posting my first photo on facebook  . . . terrified.  I can’t even remember what it was. The responses by my writer friends and random facebook friends were surprising and infinitely encouraging. Taking photos is such a creative outlet, one that is in some ways the same and the antithesis of writing: in both I am looking for the beautiful image and yet, unlike writing, I am not tied by photography to a desk. I am “in it,” as one National Geographic photographer put it, whether I find an image or not.  Since starting those four years ago, I have exhibited my work in an exhibition, sold a couple of photographs, had one of my photographs selected as the cover for an online journal, The Green Briar Review, and have successfully submitted my photographs along with my essays and poems in online journals like Terrain.org, The Ekphrastic Review (just nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net), and Tiny Seed Literary Journal.  My newest book, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye,” is a hybrid photograph and prose poetry book, egged on by some faithful facebook fans.


What does your family think of your writing? Funny you should ask that.  I am working on an essay right now that includes the poem, “Song,” by Christina Rosetti, a fabulously famous Victorian poet. My mother bequeathed me the dog-eared poem with instructions to read it at her grave. The poem is a nihilistic beauty from a poet whose work is often labeled as devotional.  I am not so surprised by my mother wanting no religious artifacts wielded about at her burial—she always whispered her agnostic concerns in my ear that my wonderful but “born-again” sister would want to throw some huge, religious funeral in her honor—but I am surprised by the fact that my grandmother inscribed the book of poetry this poem appeared in as one for my mother’s quiet hours and that my mother did indeed turn to these poems in her quiet hours, evidenced by the numerous slips of paper I found in the pages of the book:  poems of loneliness and beauty by  Langston Hughes, Chang-Tsi, and maybe, most astonishingly, poems maybe written by my mother and father. (I can’t wrap my head around my father even copying out a poem in French, given his predilection of merrily reciting bawdy limericks to me during my entire doctoral studies in poetry.)  My mother, someone who poetry obviously meant a great deal to, didn’t talk to me about my poetry much, though she and my father supported me financially, paying for the MFA program in poetry at the University of Iowa, which eventually got me to the PhD from the University of Denver. Yet, after her death, I discovered a box in which my mother had saved everything I had ever published.  My father, my sister, my brother: all loving, but clueless about poetry. I married the playwright/lover of poetry I met at the University of Iowa: he has been my rock (annoying at time—yes, even rocks can be annoying) for the last forty-three years.

What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your books? How much I love creating books. Before the book begins, there is that trepidation, that half-glimpse down into the gaping yaw of the book to become, and the sudden paralysis of confidence and creation. (I really do like writing, but . . .)  But then, if I can mix my metaphors, you begin the sculpturer’s slow chisel, the winnowing away, much like on a block of veined marble: the whole entity in waiting. And then once the discovery begins, there is the awe-ful journey into emotional and temporal memory, vision, voice, emotion, intuition through which the book, when you are lucky, begins to write itself. That book process became so clear to me when I wrote the chapbook, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic. Bereft of anything else to do, I sat on our cabin porch each morning and wrote whatever came to me: junco or hummingbird, phlox or a child’s lost shoe.  Poem beget poem and then the poem of the book, the last “poem” as I think the poet Edward Hirsch once said, unveiled itself.  So hard then to leave the music. 


Cover of the book 'This Visible Speaking' by Kathryn Winograd, featuring a serene photograph of a reflective body of water with a small island in the center, surrounded by a calm, blue sky.

How many books have you written? Which is your favorite? I have written eight books in total: each with its own love story.  After getting my Ph.D, raising my twins and teaching only part time,  the twins one day opened their mouths simultaneously to wail about me about something and I discovered a small white tooth growing from the roof of each mouth. My husband made $17,000 at the local community college.The aftermath of the tooth frenzy?  I took a job with a small tech education company and discovered my pleasure in writing thinly disguised poetry tech articles to the delight of the editors I worked with. I teamed up with a professor from the University of Massachusetts and wrote two book for McGraw Hill on the then very new elearning craze. Eventually, I would write a third “tech” book for Scholastic on teaching poetry in the classroom. My first poetry book, Air Into Breath, finally came out and won the Colorado Book Award. After being whacked in the head by the muses at the low residency MFA program I taught in for about ten years, I published two books of creative nonfiction, which I love, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, winner of the Bronze Medal in Essay, Independent Publishers Book Award. Pandemic brought isolation and Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from the Pandemic with its own story: typed in the final period, decided to send it off just to be done with it, entered Finishing Line Press’s Open Chapbook competition and didn’t win, but as a semi-finalist, the book was published. Started writing blog posts about my photographs and ended up with my last book, a hybrid of poetry, photography, and prose, maybe the most beautiful, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye. 


Do you have any suggestions to help someone become a better writer? If so, what are they? Over forty years of teaching to writers spanning the gamut of six-year-olds excited to “fish” words out of a plastic bucket with a fishing pole and create crazy sentences to Supreme Court judges guarded as to what they can publically reveal, even in a personal poem, I have learned two valuable lessons: learn the basic craft and then learn to pitch off the “editor” perched on your shoulder. Writing/ Photography—it’s the same.  Like any craft, each has fundamental “rules” that need to be learn first, in any way possible, whether that be through manuals, books, subscription tv and zoom classes, workshops,and the study of the greats. In, say, poetry, do you know the basics of structure and form, line and image, sound and accentual, to name just a few elements?  In photography, do you understand composition, depth of field, white balance, ISO?  Once you do, then you can do the real work of poetry, or photography,  or whatever, and dig down into the heart and imagination to find your own vision, your own voice and the intangibles of art that craft can’t teach you.   


What is the most unethical practice in the publishing industry? Well, now I think it’s the same mechanism  that I program to vacuum my rug: AI. That little robot is such an excellent little monkey, tracking around the same pattern in my house under beds and the piano bench and the family room couch where settles the natty doghair and the hopeful spider web. I love my irobot. But my god, is the AI robot going to write and illustrate the children’s picture books I’ll read to my new grandson? Write me what Keats called, “The poetry of the earth [that] is never dead?” The legitimate publishers are fighting the inswell of AI, but I hear about the publishers who already embrace it, like the academics, or I should say the administrators of the academics who have succumbed and demand that their professionals—lovers of the true and human word—embrace AI for the students who may very well become our writers and artists of the weird and sterile future. Children’s writing? Journalism? Poetry? Novels? Photographs? Fine arts? The scary thing is that AI can be so minutely and intricately inserted into anything that there’s no understanding its borderlines. When does Grammarly stop being a spelling and grammar tool and become a dictum of “human” expression?


Who shot first, Han or Greedo? Okay, Adam, who are you?


Do you write novels, novellas, short stories, episodic fiction, poems, screenplays, or something else? What is your preferred format? I consider myself a poet who took up creative nonfiction at a relatively, I say, relatively, advanced age in a writer’s life. I prefer poetry simply because it sings to me and I find it to be so malleable and so essential to any other kind of writing. Poetry is imagery, metaphor, sound—musical and essential—, compression, leaping, unearthing . . . It is of the thing and “around” the thing deeply written about. It's fact and heart-vision. Beyond that, I love writing anything I can—poems, children’s poems, lyric essays, articles, researched essays, interviews. All, for me, are wedded by poetry.


What is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Again, Adam, exactly who are you?


What does literary success look like to you? I don’t have this answer, so I’ll answer. If my younger writer self saw me now that younger self might very well, say, wow, I really made it. But I haven’t. I mean I don’t have agents knocking at my door; publishers clamoring over zoom; readers hunkered down outside in the azaleas. I work at every publication I get and every publication I get is superseded by decades of rejections. But I can say pretty confidently that I publish now pretty much everything I hammer into a publishable state. And I’ve published in a lot of great places and won awards I never even knew about. But all I need to do is look into a writing magazine like Poets & Writers and read about the newest writers and their plethora of agents, editors, writing communities, publications, awards, honors, retreats, fellowships, grants, deserved accolades, and I’m out back hacking at the garden dandelions in despair. I just helped the poet Sydney Lea with one of his latest collections of essays, Such Dancing As We Can, and was shocked when he worried over the “much hated” marketing and publicity-making of this book. What?! This was a man who was the poet laureate of Vermont, who received a Governer’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, writer of sixteen books of poetry, collections of essays, a novel, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a recipient of countless fellowships . . .he’s feeling the same knife-pangs I do at the prospect of getting the word out about a book? So I don’t know what literary success is.  Is it hobnobbing at every writer’s conference and retreat (and, yes, having plenty of fun) or is it at the desk, in the rocking chair, on a rock, deeply alive and writing?


What do you have coming next? I’ve discovered in “retirement” from teaching that I really like taking classes. Zoom classes. I just took a Zoom workshop with the wonderful children’s writer Denise Vegas on the picture book (you have to look at this author picture of Denise. Why aren’t we all children’s writers?). This fall, I’m taking an eight-week workshop through Granta called “Nature Writing: Rewilding Language.”  I’ll be in a cohort of 15 writers from around the world, all of us bent on becoming better nature and environmental writers. I’ll also be part of an advanced manuscript critique workshop at the Women Writing the West Conference in October., where I’ll also be presenting with Page Lambert, Sandra Dallas, and Lynne O'Connor on The Land: Through a Woman’s Eyes. In September I join a multitude of wonderful writers and teach multiple workshops at the three-day Get Lit writing festival in Trinidad on the chapbook as inspiration, case study for the braided essay, and writing the photo. I read from my book, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye, on October 9th, starting at 6:00 p.m., at the Boulder Bookstore for the Colorado Poets Center. I’m in the midst of working on CPC interviews with Alysse Kathleen McCanna, Fish Wife, and Erin Block, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry for her book, How You Walk Alone in the Dark. These interviews will be available mid-september through the Colorado Poets Center newsletter. (Poets, if you haven’t already, sign up to be part of this free poets’ collective.)  Fourth Genre this fall is publishing an “Inter-Review: with Sydney Lea and Kathryn Winograd” on our latest books. My essay, “Memories of a Suburban Naturalist,” with my photos, will be out this fall on Terrain.org. I just published This Visible Speaking this spring, so this fall and winter I’ll be submitting it to various book award contests. In photography, I have an interview coming up with the Littleton Fine Arts Guild to become a member of its collective, fingers-crossed. And I am working on a new batch of essays and poems, the poems with my delightful new writing partners in crime: Carol Guerrero-Murphy and Jonah Bornstein. And somewhere in the next couple of weeks, I’m judging a poetry contest.  And, most importantly, tickling the delicate toes of my new grandbaby.

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