Maja Lukic’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Narrative, A Public Space, Image, Bennington Review, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, Prelude, Salamander, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. Maja was born in Osijek, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. She has a BFA in Theater (Acting) from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, a JD from Cornell Law School, and an MFA in Poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. @majal1313
Where were you born and raised? How did it shape your view of the world and the kinds of stories you’re drawn to? I was born in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. We left that country when the civil war broke out, and I grew up in Canada, mostly, with a lot of subsequent moves from place to place. So very early in childhood, I was confronted with complex feelings I couldn’t describe yet, and I felt a deep inchoate sense of loss. I was coming from a country that no longer existed and speaking a language that, politically, no longer existed. It made me more solitary—I had a rich inner life and retreated to my imagination as a safe place, which is fantastic training ground for a writer’s life. At the same time, living in the immigrant community in Canada and meeting kids from other cultures and other languages, I understood something about the universality of human experience. Yes, it was painful to leave home because of a war, but others abandoned their homes, too.
What kind of reader were you as a child? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? I was an obsessive reader. I read anything I could get my hands on. I learned English by reading books and suffered for many years, knowing words I didn’t know how to pronounce or use correctly in conversation. I loved anything in series—mystery novels, especially, so I burned through all of Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew. Later, I read the C.S. Lewis Narnia books and more generic series like Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley (oh, how mortifying to admit I loved those books). I liked pattern and repetition, the predictable arcs of these stories, but also the space they created for something novel to occur.
When you're writing at your most productive, what does a typical day look like?
I’m at a writing residency this month and have the absolute luxury of time so this is atypical for my normal life. But it’s a beautiful dream schedule. As a morning person, I’m at my desk by 830 or 9 am, and almost without exception, I use mornings for generating new work (either based on a prompt or free writing). Afternoons, I might edit other poems or do some more free writing. I like to set a timer for 30 minutes and just write without stopping. Or I’ll take breaks to handle other tasks like answering these questions. Somewhere in there, lunch and a walk or a hike. I usually return to the writing studio after dinner and will end the day by reading a novel or chatting on the phone. It’s a full day of work but I’ve never been happier or more at peace.
As a poet, I don’t plan or outline anything. I try to let the work take me where it wants to go. It takes a very long time to figure out what a single poem is about and even longer to figure out what a collection of poems is about, the concerns and questions burning at its core. I have heard Jorie Graham describe writing as a two-headed process, and I agree. In the generative phase, I need to get to the end of a draft before I can even think about assessing, judging, or editing. There is such a rush to get it all down, judgment free, and then to suspend judgment for as long as I possibly can. I avoid thinking about whether the draft is good or bad. I simply become the brain that writes it down and follows intuitive decisions as they arise. I try not to get too attached to any line or idea. Afterward, it’s a different part of the brain, almost a different head, that must sit down and look at the draft and deepen it and figure out exactly what it is pointing to or trying to say.
Can you describe your process while working on a book?
I have a poetry manuscript I’m shopping around and submitting, so currently, I am writing new poems that are, ostensibly, for my next book, which is already developing toward ekphrastic poems and environmental poems and love poems. My current process is simply about designing a space where I can surprise myself. As I mention above, I find it freeing to write to a timer for any amount of time. Sometimes I assign myself prompts or use prompts from lectures and workshops. For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing poems after Anselm Kiefer paintings and sculptures and before that, I was in a film mode, chasing down Wim Wenders and Ingmar Bergman. I don’t know if this will all make it into my next manuscript or any manuscript but for now it feels incredibly exciting to let the work be boundless and unbidden.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? I keep both. I’ve always had a notebook to feed my poetic brain. This is where I save quotes, craft thoughts, lines and images, attempts at poems. I also have journals on my laptop. If you’ve read Plath’s journals, these are not the same. The entries are dull and tedious and full of petty drivel. Someone will delete them when I die.
How do you research and what role does research play in your writing? I tend to write from memory whether I’m dealing with personal history or scientific or historical fact and then leave any research or fact-checking for the revision stage. Occasionally when researching or digging deeper into a topic, I make intriguing poetic connections that I bring back to the work. But mostly, I work with my imprecise memory and try to confirm later.
If you could resurrect one writer for a meal and a chat, who would it be? Louise Glück. I suspect we had a similar verve and similar food tastes. Also Sylvia Plath—I could see myself having martinis and being utterly dramatic with her.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? Absolutely. I am a visual person so I engage with film and visual art quite often. Anselm Kiefer, as I mentioned, but I’ve also contemplated Max Beckmann, Cy Twombly, and Edvard Munch. I write toward or in conversation with other poets and novelists quite often—everyone from Czesław Miłosz to Danilo Kiš to Karl Ove Knausgaard.
AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. What can human writers offer that technology, no matter how advanced, can’t replicate? It feels as if everything is speeding up and there is an increasing strain on our attention, and so I think that alone is shifting how we absorb and respond to literature and even the kinds of formal literary products that are likely to be read, shared, disseminated. I don’t know what the future looks like from here. I am not ready to sign my imagination over to AI. Creating art is one of the most pleasurable and meaning-making possibilities of being alive. I am sort of baffled by AI art, both its sterile dead quality and the titillating interest in seeing what art AI can produce at all. I’m genuinely uninterested. Don’t we want the flawed, the idiosyncratic, the soulful art created by humans?
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. I’ve been reading a lot of Jorie Graham. I’ve always admired her but I had to arrive at this exact midlife moment and this deepening time in my writing life to really appreciate and understand her vast genius, particularly for ekphrastic work. I’ve been reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos before bed this week and I’m obsessed. For anyone who knows me, this is a hilariously predictable list of favorite writers, poets, and playwrights: Larry Levis, Tomas Tranströmer, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan, Marcel Proust, Adam Zagajewski, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Robert Hass, Inger Christensen, Sandra Lim, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sam Shepard, Henrik Ibsen. Closer to my generation, I love Richie Hofmann and Maya C. Popa.
Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to… the extraordinary mystery and wonder of being alive.
