Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Leonore Hildebrandt. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Leonore, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

How did you learn to do what you do?

A blend of formal and informal learning works best for me. I fell in love with a man who’d get up early to write on a novel before going to work as an English professor. English is my second language. So naturally there was a lot of conversation about language and writing at our home. Later I went back to school, got a graduate degree in English from the University of Maine, and worked as a writing instructor.

Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process?

I wish I had started to write earlier, before having children and all that. There seemed to never be enough time? Good writing comes down to self-discipline, to perseverance, to maturity.

What skills do you think were most essential?

Know the craft––the nut and bolts. Ask what makes a sentence hold together, what makes it shine. And balance that with an awareness of your audience, whom you would like to draw into your orbit. To me, the work is not about trying to impress, but about building community.

What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I was initially nervous about showing my writing to others. But the written word wants to be shared. And being afraid of honest and thoughtful feedback holds you back.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a poet and singer-songwriter who loves performing. Originally from Germany, I live in hard-scrabble Washington County, Maine, and spend the winter in Silver City, New Mexico. Both are beautiful places with a low-key atmosphere––they attract creative people who are interested in good relations, and I owe a lot to the talent and generosity of the folks around me. My husband and I practice a back-to-the-land lifestyle, live in a solar-powered house that we built ourselves, and grow our own food. In fact, I have gardened on the same patch of land now for over thirty years!

In terms of writing, I’m the author of the poetry collections The Work at Hand, The Next Unknown, and Where You Happen to Be. My poems and translations have appeared in the Cafe Review, Cerise Press, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, The Main Street Rag, New Letters, Poetry Salzburg Review, Rhino, and Sugar House Review, among other journals. My new poetry collection Somewhere the Day Begins will be coming out with Deerbrock Editions in 2025.

My work has received some recognition: winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission, several nominations for a Pushcart Prize, finalist for the Maine Writers and Publishers Award in Poetry in 2024. And last but not least, Upward Spiral, an anthology of poems by four Silver City women (Shelly Barnett, Leonore Hildebrandt, Pamela Warren Williams, and Lynne Zotalis) has been selected as a finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards for 2024.

As for music, I write songs and perform with various musicians, most recently the Summertime Trio, in which I do vocals, percussion, and guitar. We play original music and jazz standards, and while we like paying gigs, we also enjoy offering our music at benefit concerts for the local community.

I’m afraid none of these things solve any of our problems. And yet art is something precious: as it asks questions, it opens possibilities. As for me, I write poems and songs from a place of curiosity, of not-knowing, and then discover my thoughts by forging ahead. My rural settings, my political viewpoints, and my dedication to sustainable living tend to assert themselves no matter what, so I invite playfulness into my work. My hope is that readers and listeners will participate in these attempts to change the mind, to see things with fresh eyes.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Early in my teaching career as a poet, a colleague of higher seniority submitted a bad evaluation of my teaching. It was mostly based on the testimony of one disgruntled student who had not been prepared for college writing and who had taken their complaints straight to the upper administration. The evaluation was condescending in tone, and I felt angry and humiliated. To fight back, I obtained a letter of support from an outside source to be added to my personnel file, and I talked to the vice president of academic affairs, who was pleasant but ineffectual. It was hard for me then to move on emotionally, and every time I ran into this colleague, I felt anxious. I’d duck into my office and vent at home. So I enlisted the help of a professional counselor, and just a few sessions of conversation were so helpful. The revelation may seem obvious: I gave my nemesis way too much space. I treated the relationship as if it was a friendship, as if we needed to make peace and find closure. Instead, I was free to move on! And I did, both emotionally and professionally. I got a better job elsewhere––more interesting, more prestigious, and better paid. It turned out that my former colleague had wanted to teach creative writing himself, and lacking all credentials, he sought to get rid of me. So in a way, he succeeded. But what a small man! One could almost feel sorry for him.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I believe that all of us are creative. But people who identify as non-creatives might find the journey of creatives as lacking in decisiveness. We come up with new ideas, new preferences, new rules, and that can be unsettling for others. To understand the benefits of this mental flexibility, it may help to look at the creative process itself. (Creativity is a field of scientific study, after all.) Granted, sometimes one just needs to follow through with a plan. If a simple job is due, and it’s clear what needs to be done to finish, one does not need fundamentally new ideas. But if the task is open-ended, it calls for creative solutions. Then it’s helpful to remember that brain-storming does not entail criticism. There will be time for that later. This is true for group sessions and for solitary brain-storming. Let the ideas come out without evaluating them. Let the internal critic rest. Rather than saying “no, but…” say, “yes, and…” At some point, these ideas need to be evaluated, sorted, dismissed, prioritized, implemented. But if one keeps the generative stage of creativity open longer, one will get better solutions to choose from. Decisiveness is good, but it comes later.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://leonorehildebrandt.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leonore.hildebrandt/