“As a little girl, I always wanted to know, ‘Why?’ and I didn’t go for all the theoretical answers. Eventually, you learn that you have to come to grips with life rather than understand it. The way I did is by becoming a creator. As an artist, you try to explain things. I’m very much the philosopher-thinker type.”

-- Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Quoted in The Times, August 29, 1985

“I would advise the beginning poet to read, read, read poetry of every age, but especially that of contemporary writers.  Exhaust the array of American poetry first to derive a clear sense of what’s happening here in the states.  Then read Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Wole Soyinka—all the greats from other countries to learn what’s happening abroad.  Never stop reading as you’re writing.  Too many American poets, especially the young ones I teach, feel as if they have all the answers about what poetry should be from having studied Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in high school.  That’s a good start, but it’s not enough.  We learn how to write by examining the words of a variety of writers, how those words fit together in sentences that carry us along, how they move the heart strings to cause us to laugh, cry, or pause for reflection.  We can’t learn those things about craft from television or a movie.  We sometimes discover what we want to write about—our content—from engaging in those activities; we learn how to express that content from reading and examining the way others write.”

-- Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Quoted in an interview with Doris Gwaltney, Voyager, Vol. II, No. 3, September 1989.

“There is nothing quite like the feeling of seeing the words turn out well—whether they are your own or someone else’s. Getting students to share that feeling is a small step toward a more literate society.”
-- From: Chuck Cascio, “How to Make Words Work,” The Connection, May 22, 1986.

“When a publisher rejects a poem, I don’t let it bother me. It’s like sports. If you lose a game, you still have the next match.”
-- From: Georgia Hammack, “Miscellaneous,” The South Hill Enterprise, p. 15B.