Ed Higgins

About Me

I live on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon an unrepentant holdovers from the early 70s west coast “back-to-the-land” movement. I raise a small menagerie of chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, pigs, Jersey cows, and a feral barn cats. I have an elderly but very fast male whippet. I'm retired from teaching writing and literature at George Fox University, a Quaker-founded institution, south of Portland, OR., USA.

My poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals such as Monkeybicycle, Ekphrastic Review, Triggerfish Critical Review,, Blue Print Review, Haibun Today, Ekphrastic Review, and Tigershark Magazine, among others.

Why do you write?

Things fueling my creativity: I read lots & lots of contemporary poetry in online & print journals as well as book-length volumes by recent authors; I read dozens of contemporary novels a year; I read magazines like the Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, Archaeology, Slate, The Onion, and several academic journals; I'm a Google news junky; life on the farm; life, generally.

I write because I hate the blank page. (So who doesn’t? Maybe a lucky few, but the rest of us hate you.) For me the wanna-be price of being a writer is initial, paralyzing terror of how am I ever going to fill that accusingly empty page with something that’s not going to make me want to throw-up all over my keyboard? I already want to throw-up all over my keyboard even before there’s a word, a sentence, and idea conjured up there. I’m the kind of writer who wants the finished writing before it’s even started. I want to gloat over my glowing genius of a polished piece, but I loath the painstaking, ego-slamming process of getting that final product.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Poets: Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Scott Cairns, Jeanne Murray Walker, Rita Dove, Carolyn Kizer, Wendell Berry, Walter McDonald, Sharon Old, Sandra Cisnero, Naomi Nye, to name a few.

Novelists: Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Gail Godwin, Richard Russo, China Mieville, Dave Eggers, Susanna Clarke, Zadie Smith, Carol Shields, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kent Haruf, Amy Tan, again, to name a few.

Favorite books (besides any of the above authors'): Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis, For The Time Being by Annie Dillard, The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Ultimate Visual Dictionary by DK Publishing, and tons more.