#Conversations with coleman how to#
#Conversations with coleman full#

I might start with something I could see out the window, something from the passing landscape. So, I got my little Zoom recorder for recording music, and I’d turn it on while I was driving and start saying something, not usually with any kind of plan. And I’d been listening to poems in the car, trying to memorize them I still remember “Those Winter Sundays” from that time, though why it would stick and not the others is a mystery. But I couldn't get up at four in the morning, because I’d been awake several times each night with the baby already, and then she was up for the day by five. Not writing is bad for me - bad for my mental state. And it was art and a nonprofit, so there’s always more you can and should be doing. I’d gotten a toe-hold at the museum, but I was working my ass off trying to not screw it up or maybe get health insurance or, later, a raise.

#Conversations with coleman full#

I was also in full economic panic - a new baby! - that I would need to feed real solid food in only a very short time, during a down economy, in expensive California. It was the only the time I had free: I had a new baby at home, so any time there I spent being with her, taking care of things around the house, and supporting my wife. PATRICK COLEMAN: I actually can’t remember how I got the initial idea, but I “wrote” it aloud by speaking into a digital audio recorder on my hour-long commute between where I live, in the eastern San Diego county backcountry, and where I was working, at the San Diego Museum of Art, down in the city, in Balboa Park. RYAN TEITMAN: Can you talk about how you composed this book? I talked with Patrick over email about the anxiety that comes with living in the path of wildfires, working in the cracks between genres, the intersection of literature and visual art, and what Raymond Chandler would be doing in San Diego circa 2001.

#Conversations with coleman how to#

In poems that exist somewhere between prose poem, flash fiction, meditation, and memoir, Coleman navigates how to live - and be an artist - in a land that can turn dangerous at a moment’s notice.įire Season was published by Tupelo Press on December 1. Coleman lives in a California neighborhood that was partially destroyed by wildfires in 2007, and Fire Season chronicles the fear that runs through his daily life, the increasing danger due to climate change, and the joys and struggles of having a new family. THE POEMS IN Patrick Coleman’s first book, Fire Season, are dispatches from a landscape that can change from idyllic to deadly.