Michelle S. Lee talks with Red Bridge Press editor Seth Amos about pinhole camera poems, anti-influences, and how the Internet is helping poetry thrive. Her poem “The Myth of the Mother and Child” appears in Writing That Risks, the new anthology now available from Red Bridge Press.

Seth Amos: What was the moment or event that made you realize you wanted to be a writer? Was it a different one that made you want to write poetry?
Michelle S. Lee: I have been writing stories in one form or another since I was a kid. I still have the small, stapled pages that tell the tale of a lemon meringue pie who just wanted to be eaten. When I was a little older, I sent a query letter to a publisher of Beatrix Potter books, believing I also had, in a manuscript pecked out on a typewriter, captured the lively happenstances of mannerly and quite moral field animals.
Michelle S. Lee: I have been writing stories in one form or another since I was a kid. I still have the small, stapled pages that tell the tale of a lemon meringue pie who just wanted to be eaten. When I was a little older, I sent a query letter to a publisher of Beatrix Potter books, believing I also had, in a manuscript pecked out on a typewriter, captured the lively happenstances of mannerly and quite moral field animals.
[A poem] is a pinhole for the reader: he/she peeks through, squints,
into this tight space and sees an entire world that will only last a second.
into this tight space and sees an entire world that will only last a second.