“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.
Read More6.11.20 | 7:30 pm EDT OFFICIAL LAUNCH Center for Fiction with Jacki Lyden* https://centerforfiction.org/event/online-event-rachel-eliza-griffiths-launches-seeing-the-body-with-jacki-lyden/
6.12.20 | 7 pm EDT The Strand with Natalie Diaz* https://www.strandbooks.com/events/event15
6.15.20 | 7:30 pm EDT Greenlight Books with Zoë Hitzig and Nick Flynn
6.17.20 | 7: 30 pm EDT This Wild & Precious Life with Dan Beachy Quirk, Dustin Pearson, & Meg Wade
6.20.20 | 7 pm EDT Books & Books with Edwidge Danticat
6.23.20 | 7:30 pm EDT Bloom Women Writers with Cheryl Boyce Taylor
6.26.20 | 2 pm EDT Furious Flower | FB Live
7.1.20 | 8 pm EDT A Reading Series with Kaveh Akbar*
*EVENT REQUIRES REGISTRATION
*PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR FREQUENT UPDATES TO THIS CALENDAR. THANKS!
Read Morehttps://www.bitchmedia.org/article/bitchreads-june-2020-book-selections
“Rachel Elizabeth Griffiths is one of the best poets and visual artists in the United States, with work that interrogates a number of issues, including aging, grief, trauma, and racial terror. Seeing the Body, a collection that offers both poetry and photos, continues Griffiths’s growing canon of work by exploring the ongoing impact of loss on our physical bodies and our psyche. Across a number of poems, Griffiths delves into her mother’s death, the never-ending mourning process, and how we face personal grief at a moment when the world itself is in chaos—from police brutality, climate change, and a pandemic, among other things. Seeing the Body asks questions that can never be answered but are always worth asking: Is it possible to live multiple lives in a single life? Is it possible to be reborn over and over again? Is it possible for loss to become a catalyst for inner transformation?” - Evette Dionne
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/bitchreads-june-2020-book-selections
Read Morehttps://centerforfiction.org/event/online-event-rachel-eliza-griffiths-launches-seeing-the-body-with-jacki-lyden/
Read MoreThe Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Harold Clurman Poetry Reading Series are pleased to announce that Rachel Eliza Griffiths will be the 2020 poet-in-residence. This year marks the sixth year of the program. Rachel Eliza Griffiths will join past residents Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Idra Novey, Gregory Pardlo and Grace Schulman in a public reading on Monday, March 9, 2020. More details coming soon!
https://stellaadler.com/2020/01/22/rachel-eliza-griffiths-named-new-poet-in-residence/
Read More“Whipping Tree” featured on The Slowdown! with Tracy K. Smith!
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