Shitty First Drafts Ep. 7 With Katie Condon

Sundress Publications announces the seventh episode of the podcast, Shitty First Drafts. A podcast made for and by writers this show playfully investigates the creative processes of different artists to determine how a finished draft gets its polish.

In Episode 7, Katie Condon joins hosts Brynn Martin and Stephanie Phillips to discuss her poem “Origin”; drafted in 2015 during the first year of her PhD in English, it was published in The New Yorker a year ago this month. Condon talks about the experience of producing work for her first book, a process that has now spanned several years and states.

Though “Origin” was meant to be a break from her writing process, this rebel poem ended up opening her collection, Praying Naked, forthcoming from Ohio State University Press in Spring 2020. After showing us her best Teen Girl Squad impression, she responds to some of the interpretations of her poem, including one from Brynn, and says that the poems she gravitates to the most usually “have a really clear emotional core that then allows people to use the poem in their own lives for whatever they need to use it for.” Condon is currently the 2019–2021 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Listen to Episode 7 here!

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 THE JOURNAL / Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and forthcoming from Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press). Her recent poetry appears in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner. Katie is the 2019–2021 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee.