Ann Chinnis
Oyster River Pages: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?
Ann Chinnis: In my forty years as an emergency physician, I wasn't able to access the emotional bandwidth to write. Once I transitioned out of clinical practice, I found myself yearning to understand my story and how it changed me, so that I could know my myself and my world more fully. Plus it brought me immense joy to find the words to describe my experiences in emergency medicine.
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
AC: I know it is an act of choice, faith, and hope when any reader reads my title and decides to read my poem. There are a LOT of poems out there that they can read instead. Because of that, I feel like I have a contract with my reader to show them in the first line or two how to read my poem and what to expect of me. I feel like the goal isn't to dazzle them but to keep them beside me/with me throughout the journey of poem.
ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?
AC: Both! It depends on the material I am dealing with. There are times when the material I'm dealing with is very difficult to work through- maybe embarrassing, shameful, lots of grief or loss- and I need the strong mask of a "persona narrator" to help me keep excavating. It is as if the writer "is me, and is not me". The work of keeping that mask in place is tough. But when all is on the page, it feels like a "redemption" of sorts to have created art from pain.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
AC: First piece of advice that I found helpful is that you don't have to write what you are not yet ready to say. Don't ever feel coerced, whether in a class or a workshop. It is your story. Reveal it as you are ready. And also, if you are not revealing something, your reader is likely not emotionally connecting with you. So that is a balancing act to navigate. The second piece of advice is don't sweat the dry spells. The ups and downs of our creativity are inevitable parts of being human. Usually what happens to me when I have a down in my creativity is that I'm wanting everything to flow onto the page easily and beautifully. A lot of times it just doesn't happen. Then I intimidate myself and dodge writing. The thing to do is sit down and write. Remember that writing anything is better than writing nothing, and that a first draft, in any shape, is better than no draft!
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
AC: My hope is that my readers feel a twinge of recognition when they read my poetry that they have had an emotionally similar experience and that the twinge or tug allows them to make sense of their own story in a new way. I hope that the experience of recognition is one of pleasure for them- in the music, the language, the images.
