Author Spotlight: Megan O’Keeffe

• a poet and student from New York!

Readers! Let’s give a good hearty welcome to Megan O’Keeffe.

Megan is a poet from New York. Aside from writing poetry, she studies anatomy. For fun, she enjoys taking her dog on hikes and exploring new restaurants and venues with her sisters and their boyfriends.

Megan, thanks for agreeing to be here today. Most interviews start off with bios and such, and while I’ll get to that as always, let’s start with the important stuff!

If you could have any pet (real/fantasy/no-allergies/no worries about feeding it) what would it be?

Well I have a dog and continuously imagine my future having 3 so the real answer is just more dogs. But if I had all the land in the world and could properly take care of them, I’d have a chinchilla, bear cub, and a tiger.

I hope your menagerie would get along!

What do you write and how did you get started?

I write poetry collections (and also blog articles). I got started when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I just remember writing a poem in my school planning and trying to hide it from other classmates at my table in math class. In high school, I had poems published in the school’s literary magazine. Then in 2016, I began my blog Debatably Dateable and started publishing poems there before feeling supported enough to publish my first collection Cracked Open in 2018.

You’re pretty brave to put your work out there.

What do you like to read?

I read a lot of romance novels — from fantasy to small town contemporary to military. That’s probably been my reading genre for over the last decade

People who don’t read romance usually don’t realize, there’s as much genre variety within ‘romance’ as there is outside it.

Name one commonly accepted piece of writing advice that doesn’t work for you.

Read other poets.

One piece of advice I’ve been told is to read a lot of other poetry to become a better poet and that just hasn’t held any value or truth for me. For one, I fear I’ll end up nearly plagiarizing another poet on a subconscious level. And secondly, I just end up judging their poems as a reader rather than drawing inspiration for it.

Definitely a tricky thing, especially with poetry. It’s hard to know what might inspire you.

Name one commonly accepted piece of writing advice that they can pry out of your cold, dead hands.

Do what works for you.

Ironically, I think the advice would be to not really listen to advice. What worked for them may not work for you and usually when you ask for advice, people are just giving advice to their younger selves and not really taking into account your situation and what you need. I’ve read through a whole thread on Twitter of bad writing advice and honestly everything in the book was listed for someone or another.

I agree. The one, true, universal rule for writers should be ‘do what works for you.’

Shameless Self-Promotion time!

I hope everyone might check out my new book: Where I Ache!

This collection is broken up into six chapters ranging from themes such as depression, jealousy, grief, and strength. These are delicate subjects to talk about and most people avoid them because of the uncomfortable vulnerability.

I’ve always written and shared my poetry with the hope that readers would relate and feel less alone. I hope you feel a sense of community to all of those connected throughout this collection.

You can read some of my poems on my blog : Debatably Dateable

Make sure to connect with me on Instagram, Twitter, and Goodreads.