Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. She is the 2022 winner of the Robert Golden Poetry Prize. Klein is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including (Text) Messages from The Angel Gabriel (Gnashing Teeth Press, 2024). Her full length collection Another Life is forthcoming in 2025. Klein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, The Atticus Review, HAD, and others.
You can read Seascape with Grief and Taxidermy in the October 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I wrote “Seascape with Grief and Taxidermy” on a particularly stormy night, when I had to go to the airport to pick someone up. Our airport is only accessible by a short ferry ride, so I used the rare alone time to just observe the landscape and write down my impressions. The poem was heavily influenced by what I was reading at the time, Richard Siken’s The War of the Foxes, as well as by the recent death of my beloved aunt, Bridget.
How do you revise your work?
My poems are all revised using micro-editing. After I draft a poem, I leave it alone for days or weeks to give myself some distance. After that, I edit in short sessions by focusing on just one aspect of the poem. One day I’ll edit just for word choice, the next day for sound, the next day for line breaks, etc. This allows me to edit the piece intentionally, without getting too overwhelmed.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
It’s simple, but hearing from individual readers that they enjoyed a particular poem or piece of writing is really meaningful to me. I’ve also been blow away by the times where other poets, writers, or teachers have used my poems in their own classes or workshops. As a teacher myself, the highest honour I can give a piece of writing is to bring it to my students, and knowing that is happening somewhere with my writing never fails to make my day.
What are you working on now?
I just sent my publisher, Riot in Your Throat, the final edits for my debut full length collection of poetry. It was quite a process to participate in the editing process of the largest body of work I’ve published to date, and since then I’ve been enjoying just working on stand-alone poems. In some ways, it’s easier to complete and edit poems without having to think how they relate to other pieces I’ve written.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I have a pretty packed life–full time job, five year old, grad school–so the majority of my writing happens on weekday mornings in the 20 minutes between getting my son and myself ready to go and actually leaving the house. I’ve been joking that I’m going to dedicate my next book to school lunches, because without them I wouldn’t have any daily writing time at all.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
Yes! I’m part of the Thursday Night Poets, a group of people who all met through twitter, and meet virtually every week to share and give feedback on poetry. It has been an incredibly transformative experience for me to be working with people who are all focused on writing, revising, and publishing poetry with the goal of publication. It’s also just a great group of people–it’s so much easier to hear feedback when you know that each person offering it is reading with kindness and good intention.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
As part of my undergraduate degree in secondary education for English, I was required to complete a thesis project. I mistakenly believed that writing original poetry would be an “easier” thesis than a research based project. I submitted the first terrible poems I ever wrote as part of my thesis proposal. Luckily, one of my professors took pity on me and committed to working with me on a creative thesis. It’s hard to overstate how much that generosity changed my life, because without it I don’t know that I would have entered into creative writing in the same way, if at all.