Kamila Kinyon: Its fascinating how spontaneous your open mic readings are. I was interested in how you keep a notebook and then read an entry on a letter picked at random by the audience.
Dee Galloway: This last time at the open mic, I thought Id try that to see if I could give up control to that extent. It turned out to be really easy and fun, and I think Ill do it again next time.

Could you talk about your writing process?
I keep a notebook with phrases that catch my ear or concepts, and Ill just write them down--sometimes on the back side of pages of notes taken during the many insufferable meetings I attend. All these random thoughts are not as random as we might think. And given enough space and time, I can eventually recognize a thread running through them. A lot of my poems are born that way.

What genre do you primarily work in?
I see myself primarily as a poet, although I think Im a good writer in any form. Im not much attracted to writing fiction, though.

What poetic forms do you work in?
I love form! Both the formal forms and the informal. Im especially drawn to repetitive forms like the pantoum or the sestina or the villanelle. I find form unbelievably freeing because every form lends itself to a particular topic. When I can find a form that fits a topic, the poem almost writes itself. The form helps me to restrict my ideas. I start with an image or idea, and then I look for an alternate way of expressing it. Suppose I want to talk about Kleenexes in terms of the pages of a book. I let that cook in my head while researching the qualities of Kleenex and reviewing various forms, until suddenly I find a form that slams right into the Kleenex. Then Im free to focus on the content. If a sonnet is the form that slams into Kleenex being like the pages of the book, then I know I have those 14 lines to express something universally human about books and Kleenex. The form frees me to focus on the content.

Id like to ask you about something you mentioned to me at the last open mic night. Could you discuss how you work with images of mental illness?
Thats THE GREAT POETIC PROJECT that Ive been working on for years now. I have a friend whos a retired psychotherapist, and he shared a book of paintings created by a former client. It was just amazing! She painted in these blank books--with acrylics, I thinkand covered the entire page with the painting; there was no part of the page beneath that you could see, which was a clue as to what was going on for her. She was clearly the victim of childhood sexual abuse, and it was her sense that it was ritualistic sexual abuse. And her images were expressions of her multiple personality disorder. She had five personalities, and at first you dont notice that everything in the paintings divides into five: five eggs on the ground, five faces, five concentric circles, five doorways. I borrowed the book from my friend, and I walked around with these images (some of them are quite horrific) and a desire to write about them for almost a year. The way she used color was amazing to me, and I wanted to try to take the images off the page and express them poetically. If I ever finish this project and publish it, I dont think Id be comfortable including the paintings.

Are there instances when you work with texts?
As a result of my Great Project, I started researching psychotherapy, and I take descriptions of therapeutic techniques and express them poetically. I think Ive been pretty successful with this. My research into psychotherapy led me to discover a whole genre of writing and visual art known as outsider art.

Have you read out loud or published these pieces, or do you find that these are too private?
Ive never read any of them publicly, but I might at the next open mic. A couple of years ago, I tried to render the client and the therapist coming together, alternately writing in the voice of each. The therapist senses a dark place in this new client and tries to find out whats going on. I made a webpage for it at www.serendipityspirit.org, which gave me another way of looking at it objectively. Then my life changed, and I stopped working on it, although I revisit it regularly to see what else I could do with it. But you can only wallow in that kind of stuff for a while. I have too joyful a life to hang out in that dark place too long.

What are some of the joyful topics that you write about?
The most exciting and joyful thing Ive worked on lately started back in 2006 when The Spirituals Project, an organization thats housed on the DU campus in Sturm Hall, commissioned me to write a poem for them. The mission of The Spirituals Project is to preserve and proliferate the songs known as Negro spirituals, that were created and first sung by enslaved Africans and their descendants in early America. Because they were forged in the crucible of American slavery for the express purpose of helping an entire people survive horrific circumstances, the words and the music of the spirituals are very, very special, I think. This makes them still relevant today because there is still a need for people to survive horrific circumstances. I wrote an epic poem that traces the evolving use of the spirituals as the American consciousness evolved. The poem is called They Slice the Air, and Im really, really proud of this poem. Here are a few lines:

They slice the air!
Songs of Sorrow, songs of Faith and Hope and Love
They slice the air and in their wake
Sorrow is witnessed, Faith renewed, Hope restored,
All are Love-lifted because these songs slice the air
and in their wake is healing!

Now Im not a particularly metaphysical person, but I honestly believe that this poem was given to me by my ancestors to give away to the world. And the really cool thing about this is that The Spirituals Project made this poem the central focus of their latest CD, just released this month. The CD is called They Slice the Air, and it is one of the most beautiful things Ive ever heard, from the opening note of the first song to the final silence at the end of my poem. Its just beautiful! The CD is available through CD Baby and I-Tunes, and now its out there, available to the world. I mean, somebody in India could be listening to my poem right now for all I know. How cool is that!

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