Paul Brooke
What’s your genre?
Poetry
Are you published?
Traditional publisher
What inspired you to become a writer?
Always nature has been at the forefront. My work focuses on the relationship of humans with the wild world. I am deeply interested in understanding why we mistreat the earth and how we can live in harmony with it.
What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
There are so many that it is hard to boil it down. In terms of poetry, Gary Snyder was an inspiration early as he understood the complexities of the natural world and he integrated a Zen philosophy, which I found intriguing. Later, fiction writers like Toni Morrison blew my mind with their historical retellings and incredible imaginations. Her book, Beloved, is my absolute favorite. Today, there are so many talented authors that it is a joy to read and discover new voices.
Name three of your favorite books
As I mentioned earlier, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, then Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridan, and Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems.
What’s one thing readers should know about you?
I love to travel and that often fills my writing. Recently, I went to Chile and I just finished a collection that fuses nature photography and form poetry. My newest work explores the often unheard side of Antarctica and I plan to go there very soon. For me, it is necessary to have experiences that show me awe and wonder in order to find inspiration. Those moments are transcendent and illuminating. Always necessary to building the best work I can.
What’s one piece of advice you would give to a budding writer?
Revise. Revise. Revise. Be patient with your work and be patient if you send it out. There will be tons of rejections. And for most young writers those rejections can send them running away. Run into the rejection and then submit again somewhere else.
Author bio
Paul Brooke has five collections of photography and poetry including Light and Matter: Poems and Photographs of Iowa (2008) and Meditations on Egrets: Poems and Photographs of Sanibel Island (2010). Sirens and Seriemas: Photographs and Poems of the Amazon and Pantanal (2015) was published by Brambleby Books of London, England, while Finishing Line Press published Arm Wrestling at the Iowa State Fair (2018). Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal: Panthera onca at the Meeting of the Waters was published by Academic Press (2020), while The Skáld and the Drukkin Tröllaukin: Photographs and Poems of Iceland was released by Gold Wake (2022). Brooke recently was awarded both an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a grant for publishing a diversity of writers. Click here to visit Paul.
