Sally Ball, a poet who chairs ASU’s MFA in creative writing program recently shared with us her answers to four questions about her writing process and practice. Ball will be appearing on February 15 in a reading at Piper Writer House with legendary poet and teacher Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Q: Favorite guilty reading pleasure? 

A: Audiobooks read by the author: most recently Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren and Actress. Her Irish accent! And also the subtleties of her voice, so many layers of emotion and also of humor—totally delightful. I listened to them at least twice or three times in total, b/c I’m so often going back to hear things again.

Q: What is the last piece of writing that deeply moved you? 

A: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective, which I read when it first came out, and as I went, I thought, Oh, yes, interesting, good… as if I were … I don’t know—thoughtful and fine and ‘engaged,’ as we like to say… and then, when I got to the end of the second-to-last poem, I erupted into tears—unexpectedly but completely undone. It was like poetry jujitsu: everything converged and shattered me. Rereading it after her death (in the middle of the night, that first October weekend, and then a couple of times since) … it’s both prescient and … its own self, apart from her. It’s ravishing.

Q: Your preferred way to spend a Sunday afternoon? 

A: There will be some tennis, and also cooking. I have started to make my own versions of lost beloved staples: for example, Mediterra Bakery closed, so now I make spelt bread with many seeds, and Nabisco discontinued the chocolate wafer, so I make my own of those too. Cooking out of loss (or fury!) into happiness—!

Q: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? 

A: Well, the most richly aphoristic is from an Anne Carson interview in the NYT in 2013, “Every accuracy has to be invented,” which seems revelatory and valuable when you are writing in any way at all out of what really happened. I’ll save Ellen’s advice for our conversation on the 15th—for which I’m rereading her letters to me from the 1990s and early aughts: Ellen the most bracingly attentive reader any poet could possibly hope for—

Sally Ball is the author of three books: Hold Sway, Wreck Me, and Annus Mirabilis, which was selected by Ellen Bryant Voigt for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize (NY: Barrow Street, 2005). In addition to teaching at ASU, Ball is the associate director of Four Way Books, an independent press based in New York City.