VISITING POET HONED NONFICTION SKILLS HERE

“From the Southland”

Thomas Lux

Marick Press; 218 pages; $14.95

Book–Thomas Lux, quot;From the Southland.quot;

Thomas Lux is an award-winning poet who teaches at Georgia Tech. “From the Southland” is a collection of feature stories — his first foray into nonfiction prose — written for the San Diego Reader starting in the mid-1990s.

He’ll be at San Diego State’s Scripps Cottage at 7 p.m. Monday as part of the “Living Writers” series, which is free and open to the public. He answered questions by email.

Q: What made you want to be a writer?

A: I always loved to read, and at some point I felt I wanted to try to write, too. I remember thinking, even as a child, if I saw or heard something: How would I write that? I think this is true for a lot of writers: Things don’t seem real until they have their attendant language.

Q: Why poetry?

A: I think I was drawn to poetry because of its compression, distillation, the metaphorical imagination, and the possibilities of the music, the cadences, the rhythms of our tongue, our rich and supple American English.

Q: What was the hardest part about moving from poetry to nonfiction?

A: I didn’t know how to write nonfiction! I’ve always been a prodigious reader of general nonfiction, history, biographies, novels, natural history, etc., but I had no idea how to write it. The San Diego Reader more or less let me learn on the job. I don’t know what they were thinking!

Q: What did you most enjoy about doing these stories?

A: I was allowed to enter a lot of different worlds and meet a lot of people I would never have met: cops and forensic people, hypnotists, fire eaters, exotic dancers (tough gig), weepers, taxidermists, insects and a man who photographs them, dairy farmers, etc. That’s what I enjoyed: the people. The writing was hard.

Q: You’ve never lived in San Diego, but sometimes you can see things more clearly as an outsider. Did that help you?

A: That probably wasn’t a big factor. I didn’t write about San Diego politics or history (though I wrote an article on the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge). I wrote about people, usually those with interesting and/or odd stories. Sometimes very odd.

I did it like this: came to San Diego for about a week (I lived in Boston and taught in New York, and then in Atlanta), hung out with the story and its people, interviewed, took notes, took pictures (for more accurate memory) and went home. The articles had to be at least (with a few exceptions) 6,000 words long. No deadlines. I usually took a month or two to write them.

What I learned: A good sentence, in prose or poetry, is a pleasurable, and earned, thing.

To read more of this interview online, go to utsandiego.com/news/books