About

WELCOME
I’m Miriam Sagan, poet and writer. Here is my bio:

Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent include Bluebeard’s Castle (Red Mountain, 2019) and A Hundred Cups of Coffee (Tres Chicas, 2019). She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the creative team Maternal Mitochondria in venues ranging from RV Parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for a haiku pathway, and projected as video inside an abandoned grain silo in rural Itoshima.

You can reach me at msagan1035 at aol.com.

TO CONTRIBUTE
On Miriam’s Well I’m looking for guest bloggers, published poets to interview, and projects to cover. The blog focuses on poetry–particularly of Santa Fe and of the Southwest–but I’m also covering land art, painting, travel, and serendipitous ideas.
I welcome your comments and suggestions!

Look at the categories list and send me something that fits. I really look forward to your work.
Miriam’s Well publishes previously published work as well as unpublished, and does not consider that it has acquired any rights to your work that is posted.

A YEAR OF BLOGGING
Here were my thoughts about the first year of blogging:

I’ve now been blogging for a year, and I’ve certainly been enjoying it. It has allowed me to follow out many creative threads–and within a community. When I started I originally if privately defined the blog as a place for my own work and that of my community. I thought of community loosely–including people I saw frequently, students, old friends, family, and lines of connections that would include people like my step cousin’s friends. Of course the internet extended this even further, but it is a definition that works for me.

I like all the usual things–audience, comments, connections, serendipity. I’ve particularly liked interviewing poets and now artists and having a forum for book reviews that less formal than the columns I produced for so many years in newspapers and magazines. Blogging my trips and retreats has been very rewarding–I so want you to see what I saw, taste what I tasted.

Secretly, I think I started the blog “in case something happened.” But what? A brilliant poetic idea, a personal disaster, the collapse of civilization, or access to some great recipes? The blog is a kind of holding tank, although I don’t yet know everything it is holding.

My only frustration, if it can even be called that, is that I feel I’m missing some use of the blog. And what else is out there? Are there couples or households blogging together? I don’t mean a team of three editors–I mean something like three people running an organic farm who don’t necessarily get along all the time. I’m still looking for the intimate, the funky, the bywater…and the collaborative.

What is a secret made public? Or even just the private exposed? Gossip? Wisdom?

I look forward to more.

Miriam Sagan working at The Land/An Art Site. Photograph by Hope Atterbury.

Back of the book photo by Matt Morrow.

A recent interview with UNPRECEDENTED REVIEW describes my working process.

1.      What is your writing process like? Do you write early in the morning or late at night? Do you write every single day or occasionally?
When I started off writing seriously—I was about 16—I wrote a poem a day. Bad poems, no doubt, but I was hard at work. Now I’m 62 years old, and I’m still production oriented. But my process has gotten more relaxed over the years. It used to be first thing in the morning. Now it is just when inspiration strikes. I have an office at home, a writing studio in my yard, an office at work, a notebook in my purse…and yet I’m happiest writing in bed, preferably in a motel somewhere remote and beautiful or funky. I write most days, but if I can’t write for some reason I no longer freak out—I trust the process more.
2.      What inspires your poetry?
Intensity. A sense of connection, Falling in love. Having my heart broken. The birth of my daughter. Being widowed. Falling in love again. Travel. The Southwest. National Parks, diners, roadside attractions. Iceland. Solitude. Death. Buddhism. Judaism. Beauty. Destruction.
And also—very importantly—reading poetry, other poets, great masters or my inspiring friends.
I feel each poem comes out of a very particular if fleeting state of consciousness—the passing moment. I want to share that.
3.      What was the biggest challenge for you when you began publishing?
Insecurity, I guess. I was published young and frequently by the small press world, which has remained my home. But then I’d hate what I wrote, and would suddenly see its flaws once it was in print. And then I’d get an attack of shame and fear over how exposed I was. I once told my father he couldn’t read a book I’d written—I think it was DIRTY LAUNDRY: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery (La Alameda Press, re-issue New World Library) which was a joint diary kept by me and my first husband Robert Winson. It was pretty raw stuff. I told my dad—“I need privacy” and he retorted “You have a kind of odd way of showing that!” which was funny and true. It remains a problem to this day.
Rejection is an obvious challenge. I didn’t like it when I was starting out—I still don’t. But I got used to it. The self-loathing is harder—it still remains. I’ve learned to sit with a book when it comes out and have some emotional space before it goes public and the promotion begins.
4.      What advice would you give other poets trying to break into publishing?
You just have to persevere. Send out, send out, send out. Don’t get sidetracked by rejection—it doesn’t have much meaning. There are so many great magazines out there—and very lively e-zines. Try new magazines, but do read so you get a sense of the editors’ taste.
Also, build your community. Create it if you have to—start an open mic, a magazine, a writing group, a reading series, a blog. Promote yourself but with your fiends and fellows—it is much easier and more fun.
And write a better poem. I recently was serving as interim Poetry Editor for The Santa Fe Poetry Review. I read 3000 poems. The majority were generic. Poetry is not a neat tidy art. Aim high, fail beautifully.
A fine poem will always get published if you send it out enough.

5.      If you could only write one more poem in your life, what would you write it about?
A perfect haiku that awakens the reader to the nature of the world and the nature of the self. It’s a great question, but I have to tell myself—dream on! It may not be possible.
6.      How do you want to be remembered in the world of poetry? Or in other words, if you could write your own obituary for your poetic legacy, what would you want it to say about your work and yourself?
Actually, twice in my life other people have said things that remain my sweet spot. Jim Sagel, a northern New Mexico writer who died too young, once introduced me as “an activist for poetry.” He was too—and that impetus to bring poetry into my communities has been a powerful force in my life. Recently Julia Goldberg, a DJ on Hutton radio who has been a friend for many decades called me “Indie before there was Indie” which made me happy. It made me feel cool, which I’m still susceptible to enjoying, but it kind of packaged a lot of what I’ve done, including secret give aways of poetry books for years at various locations around town. (I’m currently stocking a half dozen Little Free Libraries in Santa Fe with poets). I’ve put poems on earrings, metal street signs, windows, porcelain birds, glass sculpture, Miami’s South Beach, poetry posts, trees, and more…right now I’m designing a public art haiku garden with poems on stoneware pebbles So maybe I don’t exactly want to be remembered as myself—I’d be happy if people stumbled across a poetry installation and were touched by the words..