Dawn Terpstra
What’s your genre?
Poetry
Are you published?
Traditional publisher
What inspired you to become a writer?
As a family growing up on a teacher’s salary, entertainment for the week was found at the public library on Saturday mornings. I would stock up, checking out as many books as I was allowed, and then spend hours lost in the lush imaginations and language of storytellers. I knew from the time I was a second grader, when I wrote a twenty-page story, “Hanky and the Giant,” that writing was my true calling. Thankfully, I have built a career writing radio commercials, political ads, corporate marketing and communications and teaching high school English. Writing poetry has always been a therapeutic guilty pleasure.
What author do you admire and how have the inspired your writing?
My answer to the question about an influential author is often “the one I’m reading now.” There are too many choices! In poetry, early influences were the Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. I loved the landscapes and characters in novels by John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. In college, the quirky ingenuity of e.e. cummings was an obsession. In graduate school, I find myself returning to an interest in form and meter influenced by the work of A.E. Stallings, Marilyn Hacker, and Annie Finch. Combining form with poetry of place and the environment is currently where my interest and work resides.
Name three of your favorite books and their authors
Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
Swift: New and Selected Poems by David Baker
Shirt in Heaven by Jean Valentine
What’s one thing readers should know about you?
My husband and I live on 15 acres in rural Jasper county, where our hives of bees and two corgis are usually happy. I am an avid birder. I have no fingerprints. I defer to our granddaughters to touch everything and leave a mark.
What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
One is never too old (or too anything) to set and realize one’s truest, wildest writing goals. Ignore the naysayers. Believe in the (im)possibilities of your writing. You can always learn process. You can’t learn the desire and passion for your art. Own it.
Author Bio
Dawn Terpstra is a poet, writer and beekeeper living in rural Iowa. Her poetry appears in publications and anthologies including Verse Daily, Midwest Quarterly, Quartet, The Grist, Cities of the Plains, and others. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs from the Summer Kitchen. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is currently the Poetry Editor for River Heron Review. She is a graduate of Iowa State University with an undergraduate degree and two masters degrees. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University.
