Teow Lim Goh discusses the process and discovery in writing her latest chapbook, Faraway Places (June 2021), with Rogue Agent for issue 76.
From the interview:
I felt I was onto something, but I didn’t know what it was. I worked by instinct. I found that if I thought too much about what I was trying to do, the poems would not come. At some point, I felt I had exhausted this vein of writing and decided to see if I could put them together as a book.
I printed out the poems and started shuffling them around on the floor. It took a few weeks, but I saw there was an implicit story that I was trying to tell. Many of the discarded drafts that became the source texts of this book were from my travels in the American West in my twenties, trying to figure out who I was and what kind of writer and person I wanted to be.
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