“2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The uneven rhythms of grief don’t allow you to do or to feel life as you did before. Even the writer you were before is altered. It’s unquantifiable. Losing my mother forced me into the most difficult transformation of my life. Each poem drew me further into something I didn’t want to accept, which was that my mother was dead. Slowly, I understood that I also needed to put a lot of things in my life that frightened me to rest so that I could hear my own voice. It took some time for me to say that these poems were becoming a book. I didn’t want to say it.”
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Seeing the Body, what would you say?
”Be careful with your sadness. I don’t want you to die.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
”My friend, the incredible and generous poet, Willie Perdomo, once told me to work on my writing in pieces, breaking it down, and do a bit each day. I needed his wisdom. Because I can get overwhelmed. Left to my anxiety, I’ll ambush myself before I even begin because I think I have to know the entire life of a story and that it must be a single breath. But that’s not how we breathe. “
FULL LINK HERE: https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_rachel_eliza_griffiths#:~:text=Rachel%20Eliza%20Griffiths%20is%20a,2016%20Phillis%20Wheatley%20Book%20Award.