“I would love it if people felt the freedom and curiosity and the joy to read poetry as a process of exploration and discovery and playfulness.”
This is the seventh episode of Story Behind the Story, a monthly interview series featuring conversations with authors about their creative process. In it, host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to poet and former Santa Cruz resident Lauren Eggert-Crowe about her 2017 chapbook, Bitches of the Drought, where she explores women’s experiences with delayed anger. Lauren’s process for writing Bitches of the Drought mirrors that theme: while she wrote many of the poems in it over a single summer, it wasn’t until years later that she thought to combine them into a single collection.
In our conversation, we touch on the emotional impact of poetry, why so many people move away from poetry as they get older, and how we can learn to love poetry again as adults.
Lauren Eggert-Crowe is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Bitches of the Drought (2017), which was selected as runner-up in Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, In The Songbird Laboratory (Dancing Girl Press 2013), The Exhibit (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Rungs, collaboratively written with Margaret Bashaar (Grey Book Press 2015). Her essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Nervous Breakdown, Midnight Breakfast, Luna Luna, Angels Flight Literary West, and L.A. Review of Books. Her poetry appears in DUM DUM Zine, Hobart, Big Lucks, Black Warrior Review, Tupelo Quarterly, SpringGun, Sixth Finch, and DIAGRAM, among others. Her poetry has also been set to music, in “Diary of a Black Widow,” a multisectional song setting by contemporary composer Christopher Pratorius Gomez, which premiered with the Santa Cruz Chamber Players in 2010.She is the Reviews Editor for Terrain and serves on the leadership team for Women Who Submit.
