Two new contest winners are announced along with two great interviews of recent contest winners.

New York, New York, October 30, 2016, The PoetryNook.com was pleased to announce that they have added a Rhyming Dictionary to the site which will no doubt be a useful tool. They are also adding a Thesaurus in the near future. Congrats are in order for two recent contest winners. Ryan Stone takes first place honors for “Coal Town” in the 101st Weekly Poetry Contest. The 99th Weekly Poetry Contest was won by Miles T. Ranter. His winning submission was “Upheavel”. Be sure to check them out on the site. Following are excerpts from two interesting interviews of poets N. Muma Alain and Laura Lovic-Lindsay, presenting fascinating insights into their background and creative thought processes.

Frank Watson, Editor of the Poetry Nook, was able to sit down with Laura Lovic-Lindsay, who was the winner of Poetry Nook’s 96th Weekly Poetry Contest. Laura Lovic-Lindsay writes under the username “frithar” on Poetry Nook and has published many good poems that went on to win both the main prize and honorable mentions. She has also been featured in various literary publications, such as Loyalhanna Review, Young Ravens Literary Review, Time of Singing, Poppy Road Review, and others.

Frank began the interview by asking about her background. Laura explained that she took an English degree at Penn State, in 1993. But her focus was literary analysis, not creative writing. She was quite convinced that she couldn’t write. Laura stated that she gave a few half-hearted tries, but felt that she got nowhere. She started making lists of elements she loved seeing in stories. Lists and lists. It made her so happy just to read through those lists. Gradually, she began to imagine a young boy working with these images, conflicts. Laura began a novel. And she fell in love with writing. Next, Frank asked about the background of her winning poem, “Blue Moon River Walk”.

Laura made these comments: “I have a “thing” for the moon. When my children were very young, I took them on lantern walks at night–easily done because we home educated. No one had to get to sleep early for school. We walked miles at night, every chance we got. Spring, summer, autumn. We walked through cemeteries, lanterns swinging, telling stories. We walked to the river (we are lucky enough to live along the Allegheny River), up to the woods, through every neighborhood in our tiny town.”

Twenty-Five year old Cameroonian writer and poet, Ndonwie Muma Alain, who writes using the pen name N. Muma Alain, joined Frank for a chat. He has been writing since he was fourteen and sees writing as both a hobby and a profession. N. Muma also has a degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Frank asked: “When did you start reading and writing poetry?”

He responds: “I only started reading poetry when I was eleven, and only read it because we were studying it in school. I was never really attracted to it until my father passed away and we studied Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar” in school, a poem which has death as its theme. Apart from poetry, I write fiction and I am currently working on my debut collection of short stories, “Fables à-la-Kind”.”

Frank asks: “How do you decide on the form or shape of your poetry?”

N. Muma responds: “A poem is right when I feel emotionally spent after writing it. It is right when I come back to it after a few days or weeks and its form (line breaks, stanza breaks and all that…) helps me experience again to some extent what I was experiencing when I wrote it.” He goes on to say: “Poetry is one literary genre that should convey a whole lot of honesty on the writer’s part. I believe someone should be able to read my poem and say “oh, yes! This is exactly how I feel” or “this is exactly how I see it” things like that.”

Frank asks about the background of his recent winning entry, “Irony”.

N. Muma responds: “I wrote “Irony” at a time when I felt betrayed by my own life. I was looking at the people around me and was like “OK. Which one of you lied to me when I was young that things were going to be better when I grow up?” [chuckles]. I was bitter, bitter at all the broken promises in my life, promises made to me that were never kept, promises I myself had made and failed to keep.”

Lastly, Frank asks: “What advice do you have for beginning poets?”

He responds: “Read good poetry that you connect with and write honest poetry, poetry that looks and sounds and feels like you, regardless of how weird and different it seems compared to what’s already out there.”

For some great poems, don’t forget to check out the many beautiful poems among the honorable mentions. The PoetryNook.com platform offers over 230,000 English language poems, 90,000 Chinese language poems, and hundreds more in various other languages.

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