Naomi Shihab Nye has been one of my favorite poets for as long as I can remember. My first acquaintance with her came when I was a child, enrolled in a poetry class that she was teaching; she was exciting, invigorating, encouraging. My second acquaintance with her came through her poems, once I reached adulthood and started reading and writing poetry myself. If you read my review of FUEL (Pif - January, 1999), her most recent book of poems, you know how fabulous I think she is; if not, I can recap it in one sentence: FUEL is an amazing, strong, surprising, fantastic book of poems – and Nye is an amazing, strong, surprising, fantastic poet.

I have had the recent pleasure of interviewing Nye about her writing. And here is what she said:

Rachel Barenblat: When did you start writing? Were you writing poems from the start?

Naomi Shihab Nye: I started writing when I was 6, immediately after learning HOW to write. Yes, I was writing poems from the start. Somehow – from hearing my mother read to me? from looking at books? from watching Carl Sandburg on 1950's black and white TV? – I knew what a poem was. I liked the portable, comfortable shape of poems. I liked the space around them and the way you could hold your words at arm's length and look at them. And especially the way they took you to a deeper, quieter place, almost immediately.

RB: What did you write about, in the beginning? What provided your first inspiration?

NSN: I wrote about all the little stuff a kid would write about: amazement over things, cats, wounded squirrels found in the street, my friend who moved away, trees, teachers, my funny grandma. At that time I wrote about my German grandma – I wouldn't meet my Palestinian grandma till I was 14.

RB: How did you first get published? I'm curious about the "nuts and bolts" of becoming published for you.

NSN: "Nuts and bolts of becoming published" – well, I have this theory. You start anywhere you can, anyplace that seems inviting or possible to you. For me, it was magazines for kids, since I read them at the library and subscribed to a few. They often had pages that invited their readers to send work. So, I sent it. I had no delusion that everything I wrote would or should get published. This has served me well. There was never any great "mystique" about publishing to me, since I started when I was 7.

As a teenager I published in places like Seventeen. As a college student, I started reading literary journals, publishing in places like Modern Poetry Studies and Ironwood. One little thing always led to another. No way around that. All of my books since have been invited by various publishers or editors. I never have had an agent to this day. To publish, one needs to read widely, and find what's out there, then send one's own work to places you feel particular links with – that is my philosophy of publishing.