Magdalena Ball Ball has an English Literature honors degree from the City University of New York, studied at Oxford, and has business and marketing degrees. Her editorials, short stories, poetry, articles, and reviews, have appeared in many journals and anthologies, winning several awards. Her poetry books include Unmaking Atoms, Repulsion Thrust, and Quark Soup; her novels include Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening. (The Art of Assessment is nonfiction.) She collaborated with Carolyn Howard-Johnson in several poetry books and has a radio show and a review site. Finally, Magdalena is a research support lead for a multinational company.

 

Tell us about your highly successful review site, Compulsive Reader: 

I started Compulsive Reader nearly 20 years ago (!), after a website I’d been writing reviews for folded.  I really only intended it as a kind of personal blog—a place where I could put up reviews that I’d written as I was enjoying the review process very much, but it kept growing!  I started a monthly newsletter, the reviews flowed in from others, the subscriber base began to grow, and I’m still at it. 

How do you time manage so many interests?

Time management is always an issue for me—I’m chronically behind on everything, but I do try to be fully present on whatever I’m actually focusing on.  Balance is very important for me, so I’ll swap (rather than multi-task) to a book review if I’ve just finished writing an intense poem or reading something heavy. If I’m tired, I’ll put up a review or two.  I just keep at it.

When did your interest in writing and books first materialize?

I really cannot remember a time when I didn’t love books. It was a pretty natural slide for me from being read to reading myself to writing. These seemed like connected activities that I loved from the start, from before I could articulate what I was experiencing in terms of the joy of language, of story, of finding myself in a simultaneously recognizable and strange world. I still don’t see a dramatic distinction between reading, writing (or writing about reading), and being read to (or reading to others).  I suppose it can all be traced to being read to at night. I can still remember the joy of listening to books like Where the Wild Things Are or Little Bear (I loved Sendak and still do) and wanting to fly to the moon, make birthday soup, or disappear into that place where you could be king of the wild things. 

When did you recognize that writers have a difficult time getting reviews of their work out?

We live in a world where busyness is the norm and time for attention and contemplation continues to shrink. I didn’t start  Compulsive Reader as a ‘service’ to authors because I knew it was needed, though the need for detailed reviews is more necessary than ever. I started it because I actually really enjoyed doing a close reading and I wanted a space to share and capture that, and also to effectively commit myself to taking that time to really read deeply and then organize my thoughts into a coherent analysis. But it soon became apparent—literally within a week of my starting the site– that this was needed because the queries began to flood in.  I probably get about 10 queries a day, and unfortunately, we can only take a mall number of those. 

You offer readers of the Compulsive Reader a free monthly newsletter. Please tell us about it:

The newsletter is a summary of what has been on the site. I try to keep a pretty standard structure and stick to sending out on the first of each month.  It’s ten new reviews or interviews, a roundup of literary news, our regular competitions, and a brief preview of what’s coming.  The newsletter is available in our public archive here for anyone who wants to check it out. It’s free, and all subscribers get entered in my monthly giveaways (I love giving away books!)

Please tell us about your blog and website.

I’m afraid that I don’t blog very often. At the moment, I mostly just put up a promo for the monthly newsletter, but if I’m doing something interesting in a literary sense like hosting sessions at a festival (I’ve been heavily involved, for example, in the Newcastle Writers Festival each year since the start), visiting a festival, or taking an interesting course, I will often blog about it.  The website is a compendium of my work.  It lists all of my books and how to get them and I like to put up details of any new publications there.  It’s a good place to get an overview of my work and some of my other activities. 

What is your favorite quotation?

My favorite quotations, like favorite authors, changes all the time, but I’m actually reading The Art of Happiness at the moment, and I will say that the Dalai Lama has a lot of excellent quotations—simple and profound at the same time.  For example, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” 

Please share with readers your latest poetry book, Unmaking Atoms.

I’ve been lucky to have many wonderful reviews, but Ivy Ireland summed it up perfectly for me in her Cordite review: “The poems of Unmaking Atoms, while on the surface exploring a penchant for the endless bifurcations of astrophysics, Buddhist spirituality and contemporary psychology, more aptly grapple with what it is to be human in a world dealing with its own extinctions and loss of foreseeable futures. In this collection, grief, both horribly personal yet also global, is coupled with a sense of wonder at the endless continuation that occurs in the aftermath of devastation.”

Would you like a sample poem?  Here’s one you’re welcome to print:

Redhead Beach

Arriving, never fully
at this beach
closed due to rough surf
snuck in, an interloper
sand from another time
between these toes

not one molecule
other than the enamel
on my teeth
the cartilage in my bones
remains
from that person
on that beach
but here again
memory finding itself
the water hitting the shore
in patterns fully familiar
the rocky outcrops
shark tower

blue on blue
like heartbreak
your eyes against the ocean
the ocean against the sky

a seagull nods
as if to say
yes, me too
refreshed but not renewed

a network of cellular
connections between neurons
a conduit that survives
even the startling indigo
of that light

alone, always
but never quite
without you.

What is some advice for struggling writers and poets?

Everyone struggles!  It’s part of the process.  I think, like anything, that writing is, and must remain, a practice.  Your job as an author is not to achieve publication, fame, lots of sales, win awards or snag an agent.  It’s to show up, every single day, and do the work. The rest must be worked towards, but it’s not the main game.  As long as you’re working, you’re succeeding.  The struggle is all part of that.  So just keep at it.  You’ll continue to get closer to what you want to do. 

– Carol Smallwood