How did you get the idea to write a book of poems on Vermeer's women?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: It didn't come to me as a book idea until after I'd written 10 or 12 of the poems. I started doing them as little exercises in contemplation. I loved what Vermeer was teaching me about how to see. Eventually a friend who read the poems and liked them suggested I do a book. At that point I had enough poems to make such an idea feasible, so I followed through. But I'm rather glad not to have started with a book in mind. I've published enough academic work to know that when there's a deadline looming, or even a definite goal, it tends to pressure and often change the nature of the process. I liked just dwelling with the paintings.

The title "In Quiet Light" is significant because of the way Vermeer used light in his paintings, but does it also have a second meaning evident in your poems?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: I like the synaesthesia implied in "quiet light." Certain qualities of light do induce certain states of mind and spirit: often people feel more inward-directed at dawn or twilight, for instance. The light in Vermeer's paintings, because it comes through windows and falls so specifically upon people quietly at work or in thought, seems like a "shaft of grace," and seems to bless the quiet in those rooms.

Which of Vermeer's paintings is your favorite? Why?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: I like the question because picking favorites often allows for useful self-reflection. But my favorite changes. Sometimes it's the Woman Pouring Milk because of her utter attention and the way she's surrounded with such abundance of texture. Sometimes it's the Girl with the Pearl Earring—she's so endlessly interpretable. But in fact, I think one of my enduring favorites isn't in the book, since it was decided it should just include the women: I love "The Geographer," and wrote a poem about him which perhaps will appear somewhere sometime. Vermeer only did two paintings of men—that and "The Astronomer." They're wonderful studies in deep engaged work, as so many of the paintings of women also are.

Your primary area of professional research and writing is medical humanities, which is a quite a bit different from writing poetry. How do you find a balance between writing prose and poetry?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: Prose comes easily and naturally to me and I enjoy it as play, as a skill, and as a craft that's pliable and rich with possibility. Poetry comes when it comes. I've written poems off and on most of my life, but never really considered myself a poet, as such, though I would answer to "writer." My husband's encouragement, inspiration, and keen reading have helped me take my poetic moments seriously and I've found them often restorative when I have other, more academic work to do--sometimes a delightful way of avoiding less pleasurable tasks! Also, poems seem to "come." Prose feels more like something I generate and compose, though a graceful sentence seems like a gift. But poems always seem like gifts. They come more or less unbidden, and I feel more grateful than self-satisfied when I read one over and see something lucid and true in it.

When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: I've always written, though I'm not one of those writers who has thirty-seven volumes of personal journals on her shelf. The first poem I remember writing I think I wrote when I was around six or seven--about a little boy trying on his dad's shoes, refusing to worry about people who said he was too small to wear them. There did come a blessed moment in adulthood when I threw out a lot of rather drippy juvenalia that I'm happy to have let go of. I value the process, but have learned to let go of what needed to be written more than it needs to be saved. I write to clarify things for myself and my students; I write because I have opinions and I want to see if I can get heard (as in my sometimes rather prickly opinion columns for Christianity Today). I write because I love "the joy of a graceful sentence." I write because I love language and I think English has taken a terrible battering in the service of commerce. I write because it slows me down and takes me to a place near the threshold of prayer.

What authors do you like to read? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: I grew up on Bible stories, Winnie-the-Pooh (a great typology of human character and model of tolerant, kind community), and Little Women. I fell in love with Thoreau in high school and am still thrilled to teach Walden; it always makes me want to get rid of my possessions and live in a small cabin. I love The Scarlet Letter for Hawthorne's deep, compassionate imagination, understanding of mercy, precision in language, and negative capability. I love Moby-Dick because of the flamboyant way Melville plays around with ways of getting at truth and living with mystery. I love Henry James for the sentences that imitate consciousness. I love T.S. Eliot for having written Four Quartets—because they've helped me believe that "what I thought I came for" is beyond my knowing and for purposes more intricate and deeper than I can fathom. I love Faulkner for making sentences that are corridors to history and to my own Southern family past. I love Flannery O'Connor for not suffering fools gladly. I love Annie Dillard for her agile mind and her capacity for surprise. I love Toni Morrison for having created Pilate and Sethe. I love Marilynne Robinson for writing Housekeeping and wish she'd write another novel. There's more. I'll stop.

What are you currently working on?

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: Sigh. I'm always currently working on multiple projects that lie around in various drawers. A journalist I once met at a party startled me with his accurate perception when he asked what I did and then nodded and said, "So...we're both in professions that are driven by guilt." I just finished a draft of a companion volume to the Vermeer book on Rembrandt's poems which Eerdmans is considering. I hope to entitle it "Out of Darkness." I'm working on editing a collection of essays by myself and other people to be called "Why Read Chaucer at a Time Like This?" I'm working on a chapter for a book on medicine in the media focused on representations of hospital bureaucracies as impediments to healing. I'm working on republishing and expanding a collection of little essays on individual words called "Word Tastings." And a colleague and I have a proposal out for an anthology of literature on medical themes and issues. I don't work all the time. I read aloud with my husband at night and walk on the beach and visit my daughters and try out various ways of being interestingly vegetarian. But there's a thin line between work and play in my life, and for that I'm very grateful. It's a particular gift in life to be able to work at what you'd do anyway because you love it.