While readying your submission 
to our 2015 1/2 K Prize, read our interview with 2014 winner Amy Woolard. Here she discusses her good friend David Lynch, the absence of poetry in the law, and her experience with returning to writing after a ten-year dry spell.
Amy Woolard is a public policy attorney working on foster care, juvenile justice, poverty, and homelessness issues in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Court Green, Fence, The Journal, and Best New Poets 2013, among others, while her essays have run on Slate, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, Indiewire, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlottesville, Va. You can also find her on Twitter @awoo_, and on her website, www.shift7.me.
What was your inspiration for the character of the girl in “The Girl Next Door to the Girl Next Door”?
I’m going to pass the mic to my good friend David Lynch on this one & hope it doesn’t come off as pompous of me:
“It limits it,” Lynch said, when asked why he’s reluctant to talk about his work in detail. “It stops people from intuiting and thinking on their own. Nothing should be added. Nothing should be subtracted. A film, a book, a painting—it’s done, and this is it. There’s a comfort when your ideas are realized. You’ve worked so that all the elements are working together and it feels complete and correct. Then you say it’s done. Then it goes out into the world but it doesn’t need any more explanation. It is what it is. In cinema, cinema is such a beautiful language—as soon as people finish a film, people want you to turn it into words. It’s kind of a sadness—for me, the words are limiting. Whereas this language is the language that you love. The language of cinema. It’s about love, is what it’s about.”
Seriously: I tend to write about two girls in various scenarios. They’re two actual girls at the same time as they are amalgamations. The poem is just a scene I’m shooting of them. It’s also about love. Read more…
