We would bring our poems to the workshop, and he would look at them and point to a line or two and say, “That’s your poem. Cut out everything else!”

We all worked toward short and intense poems.

About ten years ago, I was writing a poem about my mom’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. She had been telling me all of these stories for the first time in her life, and I had pages of notes. I tried to get them all into one poem, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t get them there–not even one LONG poem.

That’s when I took the poem I had and choppped it up into 4 poems. It was a sort of mini-chapbook, and it worked.

I read the poem (My Mother Talks about the Slave Labor Camps) out loud at a reading and the way the poem built up really moved the audience. I never heard such nice things about my poems at a reading.

Since then, I’ve written 3 other long poetry sequences. The first two of these were nominated for Pushcarts, and the third was published as a chapbook and nominated by for a Pulitzer.

Now when I write, I get to the end of the poem, and I always ask myself, “What more can I say?”

I wanted to write longer stories, but I had a hard time articulating to others, let alone to myself, why I cared about an arbitrary standard like length, until I found an interview with Ron Carlson. It’s in the online features of the fabulous mag Quick Fiction (which I heartily recommend in its paper body as well) and in it he says “I also think that if you write stories for years, you do develop or sense a rhythm, and when I sensed that my stories were all rounding the corner at about four thousand words, I changed that rhythm.”

I didn’t want to write longer stories because I wasn’t proud of my short ones (which many of my friends and interlocutors assumed) or feared being judged against some imaginary standard of length or seriousness; I wanted to do it because it was a challenge, a way to stretch and develop my writing muscles. Because I’d have to have a different size of idea first.

And it is different; as different, almost, as the experience of writing those 4,000-worders was from my blythe little microfictions. As different as playing a concerto is from playing a little minuet. I feel stronger and bolder for having done it, and irrationally proud of my 28-page, 8,300-word story. I hope you find changing your rhythm and stretching your lines as rewarding as I did!