I read a lot of both poetry and fiction when I’m feeling “dry” creatively, no matter what project I’m working on, because I find that poetry informs my fiction, and fiction also gives me images to play with in my poetry. In my new poetry collection, I’m writing a lot about fear and the end of the world lately and sometimes I see echoes of Paige Cooper’s absolutely brilliant post-apocalyptic worlds in Zolitude, where humans terra-form desolate planets, staring back at me. When I’m writing fiction, I actually like to start my writing sessions by reading the work of writers I feel that I’m in conversation with. I’ll re-read stories in Zolitude and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (I’m working on her memoir, In The Dream House, right now–if it can be called work). I love the way Machado’s work blurs the lines between genre fiction, like horror and erotica, and literary fiction, and invents its own forms (much like poetry), which is something I’m also trying to do with the collection of short fiction that I’m working on. Currently, I’m taking a deep dive into Karen Russell, and recently started her first short fiction collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves which made me appreciate all the more the way magic realism can turn on a series of images, working by emotion and the logic of half-remembered, archetypal stories.