3 Questions with Peter Money

We are very excited to present this week’s “3 Questions” with the poet Peter Money. Mr. Money earned his BA from Oberlin, a MLS from San Jose State University, and a MFA from Brooklyn College.  He has published a number of books of poetry, including American Drone as well as the novella Che. He is the Director of Harbor Mountain Press, a not-for-profit publisher of poetry from near and far. Mr. Money lives in Vermont with his family. We are proud and honored to  call him a friend.

An event celebrating Mr. Money's latest novel, Oh When the Saints, begins at 6 pm on Thursday, May 2nd and will be held at Salt Hill Pub in Lebanon. Oh When the Saints, is a coming of age story exploring the friends and memories you make when a student abroad. Rumor has it live Irish music will accompany his reading of passages from his novel during this event. The Norwich Bookstore will be there with copies of his collection for you to purchase and for him to sign for you. You can find Salt Hill Pub at 2 West Park, in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

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1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Justine by Lawrence Durrell (for prose that can be like poetry--organic and animal--and for Durrell's keen attention to sense of place, specific setting, elaboration of individual character).

HOWL and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (for the example of outrage and tenderness, both made indelible in the ongoing balance of perception; by varying the line and angle of attention in a single volume; by insisting that individual candor is part of a collective universal human experience and that the most local interactions can be no less musical, logical and original: the naming of particulars, towards a lifetime of compassionate understanding).

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (for making prose a place where grief can settle, stir, and live again--yet in a narrative that is composed of understandably, profoundly, alternating attentions: providing for me one of the most visceral ways text has ever delivered the dynamic of being human. Through layers of goings-on in the author's daily life, like a Mrs Dalloway, the narrative is unpacked in sometimes untidy ways that reveal mortality, frustrations, joy, as if in real time--even though the tenses and subjects change. Sometimes curiously analytical [although not for a scientist], sometimes as personal as correspondence urged by persistent journaling, it is as much a book about uncertainty). 

2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
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Virginia Woolf. I'd want to know why she didn't take the stones out. I'd want to praise her for every nuance, her particular phrasing, her joy in doing so. I see that joy, with the intensity; I know that writing is a physical-emotional-psychological-ontological approach--to living. I'd want to experience our conversation--as light as stones thrown into water that would move them again, and as heavy as the feeling of weight in the hand, like the writer waiting, or as anyone's actual heart must be.

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3.What books are currently on your bedside table?

So, firstly, the table is the floor (since the table is covered with papers) and the books that are in a stack and not in a sprawl are the following:

My journal and:
Heinrich Boll's Irish Journal
Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects
Maggie Nelson's Something Bright, Then Holes
Peter Orner's Am I Alone Here
Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures
Ronald Johnson's The Book of the Green Man
Michael D. Higgins' (the President of Ireland) New and Selected Poems
Stanley Kunitz's Passing Through (inherited recently from my father's pile)
Wendy Guerra's Revolution Sunday
Hugh Kenner's A Homemade World
Nuala O'Connor's Joyride To Jupiter
William Carlos Williams' Selected Poems (always here!)
Pablo Neruda's Memoirs
John Cowper Powys' The Meaning of Culture

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NOTE: As part of our mission to promote authors, the joy of reading, and to better understand the craft of writing, The Book Jam has paired with the The Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vermont to present an ongoing series entitled “3 Questions”. In it, we pose three questions to authors with upcoming visits to the bookstore. Their responses are posted on The Book Jam during the days leading up to their engagement. Our hope is that this exchange will offer insight into their work and will encourage readers to attend these special author events and read their books.