by Sarah Smith
The audience stilled as each poet turned author read an excerpt from their novel; a type of music filled the air as the cadence of the writer’s voice and inflections made each work come to life and jump off the page into a type of spiritual experience for the ears.
This was the pleasure of listening to Kaveh Akbar, Patricia Lockwood, and Forrest Gander’s self-moderated discussion on what it means to cross the boundaries of mediums and bring a poet’s mind into the long form.
Akbar discussed how as he set off to write his groundbreaking debut novel Martyr! he underwent a “narrative diet,” reading voraciously to get a sense of how to create a beginning, middle, and end to his work. This is something that writing poetry doesn’t call for. Lockwood discussed how she built a narrative around dramatizing her consciousness, exploring “every fragment of her mind” during a challenging season of her life.
As if to illustrate her point, Akbar quickly reflected on his own reading of her novel: He handed off the book to his partner in a moment of sheer joy and laughter after reading the first fifty pages. Later, when he returned to the book and finished it, he was utterly shattered by the tragedy, saying “where do you get off doing that!”
Gander reflected on how his background as a geologist led him to counterpoints in life and his writing, knowing that you don’t really understand something large scale until you are able to look at the minute details.
Together the authors reflected on how poetry is like fitting a mansion of an idea into a dollhouse, while writing a novel required them to do the opposite.
Moving from verse to the long form challenged them to learn “what they could do.” All claimed that they “don’t have imaginations” but are meticulous observers of human nature, capturing the nuances of the human experience in their notebooks and later integrating them into their writing.
It is exactly that skill, in my opinion, that has led each of them to write literature that moves the human spirit and changes a reader’s life. Akbar states that by making a large experience such as the tragic flight of Iran Air Flight 655 into a narrative, creating fiction out of reality builds fidelity to the human experience; the act of reading about this incident makes what is an unfathomable event real for the audience. It is this “realness” that is the true power of literature; words that cause us to stop and truly pay attention.
Sarah Smith is a 2026 KWLS Teacher & Librarian Scholarship Recipient. She is an English and Art History teacher in Miami. She strives to increase long-form literacy in her classroom by engaging students in reading novels, poetry, and short stories while challenging them to think critically about each work and to engage their creative and empathetic minds to fully explore the meanings of the texts.
