Drawn, Papered, and Taught
an interview with writer and teacher Beth Konkoski
by Gregory Luce
Beth Konkoski is a multi-genre writer and English teacher, born in St. Lawrence County, New York, an area near Canada, on the far side of the Adirondacks. She followed her husband to the D.C. area where she now resides. She is about to start her 34th year of teaching, 23 years of which she has taught writing in AP Language and Dual Enrollment at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, Virginia. She has published both poetry and prose widely, but up until now has mostly been known as a poet. With her 2023 Arcadia Prize-winning debut fiction collection A Drawn and Papered Heart published last year, we were interested to learn more about all her writing endeavors and how they work together with her teaching.
WU: How does teaching affect your writing and vice versa? Do you have students write poems and/or stories? Do you bring your own work into the classroom?
Trying to stay current and always looking for new ways to get my kids writing and thinking has certainly influenced my own work. Teaching and writing play off each other in interesting and unpredictable ways. Small pieces of my work find their way into my classroom, but mostly it is my thirty plus years of daily journaling that I bring to students as evidence of how to develop writing muscles. They write in an assignment I call a daybook—prompts from me when we have class and prompts on their own when we don’t. I love to see them develop as writers. Also, their stories sometimes open up ideas for me, help me think about what it is like to grow up at this time in the world.
WU: You published two chapbooks of poetry before your fiction collection A Drawn and Papered Heart. What caused you to turn to fiction? Have you been writing and publishing individual stories or is this a new direction for your writing?
I have been writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction throughout my writing life. Poems and flash fiction felt more accessible than longer projects when my kids were young, and I was trying to fit a writing life in with being a full-time mom and high school English teacher. All the stories in A Drawn & Papered Heart came from stories I worked on over the years, many of them published in journals but I wanted to see them together as a collection, so I started submitting it to contests and eventually, it won and was accepted for publication by Kallisto Gaia Press. The journey of this book has been exciting and fun but not what I consider a new direction, just another way of developing my voice. I like writing in all the forms, and it is exciting to see how a piece will end up. Much of what I write begins as a line, an image, a thought in my journal and then finds its form as I work on it. I don’t always know if something will be a story or a poem. For instance, this summer, a piece started as a poem in my journal but going back to look at it a few days later, I decided it was better suited to be a six-sentence story— a form Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine specializes in. Happily they accepted it and will feature it in their journal in September.
WU: What writers have influenced your poems and fiction? Have you had any teachers or mentors who were especially important to your artistic development?
I am completely addicted to craft books, anything focused on creativity and offering ways to look at how writing works. Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg were all early influences for me, and I return to their books over and over. But I have a library of craft and prompt books filling up the shelves in my office. This summer it is Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer and Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy that I am reading most often. My poetry writing was influenced by Moira Egan when I took classes from her at The Writer’s Center and more recently, I have been fortunate to attend retreats with Kathy Fish and Nancy Stohlman, both great teachers, amazing mentors, and friends.
WU: Please tell us about your writing process and practice. Are there differences between your poems and your fiction in terms of how you create and revise them?
As I mentioned above, my journal is my primary form of writing—pages everyday in black marble composition books. I am currently on volume 144 and have them dating back to 1992. When an idea feels ripe enough, I move it to a draft on my computer and begin playing around with what shape it wants to take. For poems I am always trying to challenge myself to try a new form, circle outward to capture images that surprise me. With fiction, it is more about how an idea moves from a scene or a vignette to a story. I ask myself different questions while revising poetry versus prose, but the process of working on the screen, chipping away and shaping is similar. And always I read things out loud, over and over and over to hear what is developing.
WU: What’s your next writing project?
Most of my writing time right now is dedicated to a novel I am working on. It is in the third draft, and I think close to the point where I can share it with beta readers. It is a mystery and a very different style than my previous fiction, a challenge, but an exciting one. I also have a chapbook of CNF and auto fiction that has been a finalist in a few contests. The pieces are centered around a father/daughter relationship and I hope it finds a home soon.
Buy A Drawn and Papered Heart.
And check out our previous interviews with writer-educators Daniel Brady and Regie Cabico.
A writer and high school English teacher, Beth Konkoski has lived in the D.C. area for more than twenty years. Her work has been published in many journals, including: The Potomac Review, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Mid-Atlantic Review. A piece of her micro fiction, “Armed” was published in Bending Genres and was nominated for The Best Micro Fiction of 2024 and made the Wigleaf Longlist of best flash. She has two chapbooks of poetry, and her.fiction collection, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Kallisto Gaia Press in 2024.
Gregory Luce is the co-founder and poetry editor of Washington Unbound. He has published six chapbooks. He lives in Arlington and serves as Poetry Editor of The Mid-Atlantic Review and writes a monthly column for the online arts journal Scene4.