Look and Listen

Biography

RJ Clarken is a writer, photographer and graphic artist. Happily married to a terrific and very supportive guy, she is the mommy of gorgeous but rather mischievous young twins, and a crazed Cairn terrier. Her work has been published in Möbius, Asinine Poetry, USA Today Online, Sol Magazine and Trellis Magazine, among others. She is the Editor of Goldfinch (the literary journal of Women Who Write, a not-for-profit women's writing collective based in Madison, New Jersey), and she is currently at work on a whole bunch of stuff, including a middle grade/young adult fantasy novel series and even more humorous, quirky poetry.

Inspiration

For Mugging for the Camera, I was inspired by weird news, clever word play (and puns!), food, animals and a lot of other things, too. Whatever sounded interesting and different! I love to use poetic form because it allows for so much experimentation - and besides that, because my prose is sooooo wordy, it helps to keep me focused, succinct, to the point and far less yakitive (is that a word?) I also love rhyme because it's fun! The ubiquitous 'they' always say that one should not write rhyming anthropomophics, and while this particular book doesn't (generally) have talking animals, it does mostly rhyme. Future work will include the talking animals, too! Penny Wishes was inspired by a dream. For real! I had a very weird dream and I based the story on it. And believe it or not, that's not the first time this has happened. It took me a while to make it actually work, because of the issue of more than one voice which tells the story, but that work was helped in large part by my brilliant writing group - as well as my superb editor at Lilley Press! I think I always loved to write, and I've done just that since I was quite young. Unfortunately, when I was a kid, and I'd read over things I'd written and think it was all drek. Because of that, I often threw out a lot of my earlier writings. Some of it may indeed have been drek (you know - stuff like 'he was my love from heaven above' or 200-word run-on sentence stories), but there were probably a few gems in there, too. Now I'm more self-confident, but to be honest, that probably comes from having a very supportive group of wonderful people in my life.