Faculty and Visiting Faculty
LB THompson
Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
LB Thompson was educated at the Oklahoma Arts Institute, Idyllwild School of Music
and the Arts (ISOMATA), Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU. Her poems, nonfiction, book
arts, installations, and collaborations across genres have been honored by The Rona
Jaffe Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and published in The New Yorker,
Fence, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere, but she prefers to make limited editions out
of reach of AI. The tools of poetry serve her work in the community, such as soliciting
poems from incarcerated poets for Object, America and advocating for peace through
theatrical resistance at SBU with Poems from Palestine. She serves on the board of
The Leah Ryan Fund, a nonprofit supporting women, trans, and nonbinary playwrights,
and offering an emergency fund for writers facing serious illness. She cofounded Sound
Justice Initiative, a nonprofit bringing Humanities courses to Suffolk County jails.
LB makes her home in Greenport.
FACULTY INTERVIEW:
What genre(s) do you write in?
I write poems. I also make book art, prints, and other collaborative work with visual artists and musicians.
What is the thing that excites you about the act of writing?
The thing that excites me about the act of writing is the moment when you first get something on the page and it feels like you have just started a little fire. That’s the phase where you’re like, I'm going to have to protect you!
Do you feel like your work is in conversation with other writers or work? If so,
who/what?
Absolutely. That's part of the pleasure of it. My work is in conversation with the poems that I have memorized over the course of my life. It is in conversation with my students' work and with my colleagues and friends' work. With artists and scientists and musicians.
What literary magazine would you recommend to your students?
I recommend a magazine called SWIMM out of Miami. They do a quality poem-a-day email. I also recommend Seventh Wave, which is a magazine and creative community organization that was started by two of my former students at The New School. It’s great, and I'm so proud of them for starting it. Community of Literary Magazines and Presses is a useful place to see job opportunities, submission opportunities, reading recommendations, and who has pieces or events coming up.
What is your writing process?
I would say I have a feminist writing process that has arisen from very old practices, like women pinning a notebook into the inside of their aprons, sneaking writing in because they always have their hands full. We do that now with our notes apps. And I always have different papers and notebooks on me. It's a kind of sneak-it-in-constantly approach on the one hand, but I also have realized I need dedicated time for whatever my creative pursuit is at the moment, so I have also ritualized creation into my routine every day.
How do you generate ideas?
I have too many ideas. Too many concepts. Too many loves. For me, it's less about generating and more about choosing what needs to be said, what needs to be heard, and trying to stick with it.
How do you manage when you get stuck?
I do a switcheroo. There are times I feel that I can't work with words anymore, like there are so many proper nouns that I would like to crunch with my teeth so that they disappear forever. If I get frustrated like that, I will switch to visual art. I will get an art catalog or an artist's diary. I will look at a photographer's work. I'll just change genres until somehow I have something to say about what I was just experiencing.
Inspiration or perspiration?
Yes! Also: observation, reflection, devotion, and solidarity with others who are expressing themselves in any way.
If you weren't a writer, what job would you have?
I would be an archivist.
Do you have a writing tip for emerging writers?
Work on sentences. Make external observations with sensory detail. Make friends and learn how to trust each other. Read more than you write. You have to have the hunger for books.