Marina Kraiskaya is a Ukrainian-American writer and editor of the journal Bicoastal Review.
In 2024, she won the Markham Prize for Poetry and The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction (Nov – Dec 2023), placed second in the Joy Bale Boone Prize, and was a finalist in the Mississippi Review and Driftwood poetry prizes.
Find her in Poetry International, The L.A. Review, Southeast Review, Zone 3, The Shore, EcoTheo, Deep Wild, Leavings, and more.
Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by The Letter Review Marina, we appreciate your time. If you were to begin writing today for the first time, would you do anything differently? Which would be your first steps?
Wow, it feels like every time I write, it’s for the first time. You really have to enjoy the cathartic process itself. And you have to read 5x more than you write. While writing IS a built skill, it doesn’t get all that easier or less vulnerable, at least for me.
The flow state is divine, and I would advise figuring out how you can get into it. Personally, I like going to the library with a coffee and having a singular mission of writing or reading. If I am anywhere else, I will be distracted by work and chores and games and people. In that way, I think of writing as both an act of self-love and a practical habit tied to a daily routine and a laptop, rather than a muse or lightning bolt from the sky.
P.S. If you write one poem, you can call yourself a poet. Don’t feel the imposter syndrome!
What do you find most inspiring?
I have been managing and editing the poetry, nonfiction, and art journal Bicoastal Review for over a year now, and I am magnificently inspired and in awe of the creativity and ambition I see from submitters and readers. The topics and styles of the poems I get to read are so varied, full of images and impressions of other people’s lives that I would never dream of myself. It’s like being entrusted with many a secret, and I try to hold on to that sense of wonder.
The hands-on engagement with other people’s writing has expanded how I think of image and color, formal devices, humor, political content, trends in modern poetry, and more, just as much as an MFA program did. It has made me more open-minded. Corresponding with the writers and artists I publish is a joy – most people (of all ages) that I have met in the literary world are so intelligent, kind, respectful, and thoughtfully willing to put in the effort to make a piece even better. I especially appreciate it when our contributors take the extra time to make an audio recording of their poems for the sake of accessibility. I like to think of them all as my digital community of friends. I hope that I also offer them the same openness and useful feedback.
Where are the best places to live / visit as a writer?
I don’t think there are any best places to physically be, excluding a need for some quiet or ambient place in which to sit, write, and think. It’s kind of like claiming that you can only get fit at the gym, when all you actually need is your body. You don’t need a fancy retreat in the south of France to write great work. People write incredible poetry, memoirs, and other works from hospitals, from prisons. Even when they don’t have paper, they memorize and recite.
Wild nature inspires me in a way nothing else can compare to, but the real key is being present to the inner world, and meeting yourself there, and caring about what experimentation and play can be had with language.
What is most important for an aspiring writer to read?
Anything except just their own writing, I’m sure. When it comes to poetry, I would say: keep a shelf of the books that resonate with you the most emotionally, especially when you’re a young writer. Art is meant to shake up, disrupt, disturb, enlighten, shift – change your life – and that intent is also what we hold on to as the years pass. There were books (Louise Gluck, Sharon Olds, Charlotte Bronte) that were once so intense for me that I had to put them down like hot coals. But that’s also why they changed me, and I assume I carry their threads in my poems. If nothing hits your heart like that, you might be in the wrong place.
Who have you learned the most from?
Limiting my answer to the people I know (rather than writers I read but have never met) I can’t miss an opportunity to shout out some incredibly brilliant, kind, and irreplaceable professors that taught me, and who have great books out in the world: Blas Falconer, Sandra Alcosser, Katie Peterson, Jessica Pressman, Diana Leong, Megan Marshall, April Wilder. And – Katie Farris, Forrest Gander, and Robert Hass. Other writers who held one-time classes that I loved include Matthew Zapruder, Brenda Hillman, Indigo Moor, Dana Gioia, Terrance Hayes, Victoria Chang, Grace Li … and more. I also learned a ton from attending the readings of many more writers and hearing the way their poems sound in their own voice.
Would you mind sharing a photograph of a part of your bookshelf (or your library) that is meaningful to you?
I have many bookshelves!