Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

This question came to me from Alden Beane, my dog Beverley’s hydrotherapist, and it’s a great one because it got me thinking. (Beverley tore her canine cruciate ligament this past summer and has been swimming with Alden at True Balance Animal Wellness to try to bring back her strength. It’s working!)

While the first answer that sprang to mind is, “The next one I write,” I also think that’s sometimes true, but not always. (The piece I just delivered for the Spring 2024 issue of Berkshire Magazine fits that bill, but more on that later.)

I’m assuming she meant prose, so I’ll stick with that for now (perhaps I’ll do a poetry post another time). A few of my recently published pieces come to mind, as do a few older ones that I use as writing samples when I’m either pitching new pieces or want to share examples with students I’ve mentored. So here, in no particular order, are my favorite pieces of my own writing (so far) prose edition:

“Love & Patience on Mt. Pico” — Published in The Write Launch, this is a very recent essay about an ill-fated attempt to climb Mt. Pico, the tallest peak in Portugal, in the Azores. I owe a big shout-out to Suzanne Roberts for this one, for I started writing it in a travel writing workshop she led in 2020. (Also a big shout-out to my wife Samantha for being the foil in this one and my first reader as well.)

“Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley” — Published last summer in Berkshire Magazine, this was the first profile I did for the magazine and it was also the return to subject matter that means a lot to me–birds and nature. It got me out in the field again with a passionate scientist, which is something I used to do a lot of when I worked for The Nature Conservancy years ago. Thanks to my editor Anastasia Stanmeyer for the assignment!

“Hallelujah! I’m no Genius” — Published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal online, this was one of my first forays into memoir–and I owe the journal’s editor Mark Danowsky a big thanks for doing me the solid of writing to me: “I’ve been thinking about [Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast] Revisionist History’s Hallelujah. (Incredibly good.)…. Do you think you can write about how this construct (Picasso v. Cezanne) applies to approaches to poetic craft?” And then, when that wasn’t exactly what I delivered, for being delighted with the result! (A truncated version of this essay appears as a chapter in my book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances; if there’s ever a second edition of that book, I want to restore some of what was edited out.)

“Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility” — Published in Barzakh Magazine, this essay from my memoir-in-essays/work-in-progress, The Others in Me, is a deeply personal take on my journey of (re)discovering or uncovering my roots on the Azores and the mixed emotions and complex feelings that surround such a late-in-life discovery. A shout-out to my fellow 2018 Disquiet Azores Retreat attendee, Christy O’Callaghan, for being intrigued enough to publish it in her last issue as editor-in-chief of Barzakh.

“Poetry as Practice: How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction” — Grant Clauser, in addition to being a fine poet, edited the craft section of Cleaver Magazine and I wrote to him about this idea before it was finished. While I “knew” what I wanted to write, I struggled with its direction. Grant’s guidance–especially regarding minimizing the quotes and emphasizing my own voice, among other things, greatly improved this piece and proves the old adage that every writer needs an editor.

“Looking Out, Looking In: Gary Snyder and Sourdough Mountain Lookout” — On the tail end of my “Hallelujah!” essay, Schuylkill Valley Journal‘s Mark Danowsky pitched another idea to me. He knew I’d studied with Gary Snyder and he was “wondering if you have insight into his poem ‘Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.’ It’s a poem I’ve returned to again and again and I’ve never been able to explain why I think it’s so good (even to myself).” Well, it turns out I did…

Finally, two lectures that I turned into essays need be included in such a list: First, a craft talk called “Making Poems Better: The Process of Revision,” which was originally delivered at the University of Alaska Anchorage for its Writing Rendezvous conference in 1998. Then, in 2018, I updated the lecture and presented a 20th Anniversary edition of the talk at the Boston Book Festival. In that lecture, I discuss the revision process and examine in detail Donald Hall’s “Ox-Cart Man” and my own poem, “Black Angus, Winter.”

Second, the more recent “At Home in the World: A Reading and Reflection on Dwelling, Nature, Phenomenology, and Ecopoetry,” which was originally delivered at the Providence College Humanities Forum in September 2021. Professor Ryan Shea taught a course in environmental philosophy and included my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, on his syllabus. I spent a week with him and his students discussing my book, which was an amazing experience, especially given the fact that I was born in a hospital just a three-minute drive from the college. Who says you can’t go home again? The lecture was later published as an essay in Brown University’s Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies.

Thanks to Alden for a great question–and for helping Beverley to heal!