Kelli Deeth: How do stories and poems come to you?
Elisabeth Harvor: The music of certain lines comes to me—and keeps coming to me—like a line of a song or poem remembered, but it's a beat that isn't consciously from any song or poem I’ve ever read or heard. So this is how a story or poem begins. With poetry, the opening line can sometimes sound like a maxim with self-deprecation in it. Take the beginning of the poem called "I Am A Scientist" which begins with the words

Like all paranoids, I am a scientist
Dark Cause + x = Predestined Effect,

that is, if someone doesn't like someone, namely x
and if x = me, then I'm turned into a sleuth

in the name of survival...

I can't see these lines as the opening of a story, they are too rhythmic, too insistently declarative.
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