Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Sean Glatch of New York, NY

We recently had the chance to connect with Sean Glatch and have shared our conversation below.

Sean, we’re thrilled to have you with us today. Before we jump into your intro and the heart of the interview, let’s start with a bit of an ice breaker: What do you think is misunderstood about your business? 
I notice, especially with the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, that non-writers believe writing is a chore. And this makes sense when so many people’s lives are occupied with work that pays the bills, rather than work that makes life meaningful. If, in other industries, you can export the work of spreadsheets and coding to machines that portend to make life easier, why wouldn’t the work of writing be exported, too?

But writing is a deeply human phenomenon with deeply personal meaning. And the work is valuable whether it’s poetry or blog writing, Instagram captions or experimental novels. For those us still smitten by the written word, it makes no sense to export any aspect of the writing process to a machine—it would feel, without exaggeration, like sacrificing one’s own humanity.

So the work is the reward, and it’s not something I want to give up—I give into it willingly. Many days, writing is in fact a chore, but some people love to do laundry or wash the dishes. I love sentences.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Sean Glatch, I’m a writer and educator based in New York City. I run a few different writing-related initiatives, including:

Writers.com—Your Voice is a Gift. Share It. Since 1995 we’ve run classes in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, helping thousands of writers hone their craft and tell their stories. In addition to our multi-week writing courses, we’ve expanded our offerings to include a digital community for writers of all backgrounds, and a library of self-guided courses.

Speaking of self-guided courses, I just launched my own course, Toward Your Poetic Vision, to help poets craft successful poetry. It includes interviews with our phenomenal instructors, craft essays, and hundreds of prompts to write your best work. I guarantee it will help you advance on your poet’s journey. https://writers.com/course/toward-your-poetic-vision

Poemancer—A card game for poets! We are hard at work bringing this game to life. The game includes different card decks to write inspired poetry, to be combined in countless ways and conform to the poet’s creative outlook. We also have a newsletter with craft tips and prompts to keep poets writing. Poemancer.com

Poets Out Loud—a NYC-based community to read, write, and celebrate LGBTQ+ poetry. We meet twice a month in person to write and share our work with one another. Our work is supported by Poets House and the New York Public Library, and we have recently started hosting open mic nights to further build community.

I believe greatly in literature’s ability to connect people, build community, and celebrate our shared humanity. I have seen the ways that poetry in particular helps us transcend our differences and live more meaningful lives, and I’m grateful to be building a life that actively supports these projects of literature and life.

Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
The lesson of all successful literature is this: you and I are not so different.

Children know this; adults spend their lives relearning it. As we grow, we are taught over and over again what makes us different from the world, whether it be gender, race, sexuality, locality, religion, language, etc. And these things certainly do shape us into unique individuals—but not so unique that we don’t share our humanity with everyone else on this earth. Too often, what breaks the bonds between people is our differences—not irresolvable ones, but ones unwilling to be resolved.

What we often desire, especially into adulthood, is a meaningful sense of self. Categorization. And what literature says is that these categories we create—whether lived or imagined, concrete or ineffable, spiritual or secular—don’t change the fact that we feel similarly, we inhabit the same globe, the same species; we are better together.

Far too many forces in this world seek to divide us, and far too often, we submit to behaviors to divide ourselves from each other. To say I am X, you are Y, so there is no place in nature we can meet. What restores our bonds between people? The choice, over and over again, to say our differences are superficial; our shared humanity is sacred.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
I started my poetry group Poets Out Loud in May 2023. Today, I’ll tell anyone that it’s the best decision I ever made. But there was a time when I kept thinking of ending it.

I moved to NYC in 2021. It had been a childhood dream of mine, mostly because I grew up in Anytown, America and subscribed to the mythology that “New York is where dreams are made of”. More specifically, I figured out I wanted to be a writer in my teens, and New York was the city where you went and did that.

So I moved right after college. It was after the worst of COVID and I, like most people, had lost my social skills. I needed community, and I needed to find my purpose. But I kept encountering the worst aspect of NYC, particularly its writing communities: pretentious, self-important individuals more interested in performing their intelligence than opening their borders. Too often, it happened that I joined a writing group or community and felt that I wasn’t wanted.

Perhaps I’m overly-attuned to other people’s feelings and opinions. Certainly, writers are rarely warm and inviting people. But I was so discouraged and, above all, lonely that I didn’t know what else to do. If the community I needed didn’t exist, I had to start it myself.

It’s only been recently that I feel I’ve really achieved that goal. But a year after starting Poets Out Loud, I felt that I hadn’t achieved anything. No real friendships came from creating the space, and while I was writing poems, my poetry didn’t make me feel connected to the world I was building.

I had to change the way I see myself. I had created Poets Out Loud to make friends, and that wasn’t happening. I had to see myself not as someone who is here to make friends, but as someone who creates a space in which friendships can be made.

That sentence might be convoluted, but it was a really important mindset shift for me—it took the pressure off of chasing an extremely particular goal for the space, and, actually, made it easier for me to be a community organizer who makes friends in the process. Years later, I’m so glad I stuck with it. I’m confident no other community like mine exists.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What do you believe is true but cannot prove?
Anyone can write poetry!

To prove this, well, everyone would have to write a poem. Plenty of people don’t want to and never will, and that’s fine.

But I do genuinely believe this. I didn’t always: when I was younger I subscribed to a more elitist view of literature, disparaging the poetry people posted online as being “derivative” or “a sentence chopped into lines.” I no longer think these things, but I did, once—because I myself did not understand poetry.

A few things, I think, are true:

1. Most people (at least, most Americans) are not offered good poetry curricula in school.
2. Successful poetry requires an attention to language disincentivized in a world of convenience and hyper-connectivity.
3. We are all capable of forming unique relationships to language, which is the bedrock of any poem.

Why does anyone write poetry? Or, for that matter, read it? Poetry reminds us that language is neither linear nor transactional. Its success hinges on its capacity for nuance, multiplicity, and spirituality. Poetry is an attempt to find language for experiences that everyday language fails to describe, and the tools at the poet’s disposal are inquiries into finding the right language. Poetry is, above all, the search for capital-T Truth.

If you speak a language, if you read a language, you already have the foundation you need for poetry. No, writing it is not easy: it requires a different way of thinking, a way that many people are not used to. But I have seen in my work as an educator and administrator what happens when students slow down, look at language, and use words as implements of discovery. Craft tools like metaphors and symbolism can help poets write poems, and everyone will benefit from learning about them, but the work of the poet is work that anyone can rise to. You just have to want to do it.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What will you regret not doing? 
I’m 27. I’m too young to be at the stage of “things I will never have done in my life”—I’ll report back on this when I’m past my midlife crisis.

But I’m answering this particular question to say that I have not yet actually lived an artist’s life yet. Since high school, I’ve worked in some form of money-making capacity pretty much nonstop. I grew up with a decent education but knowing that I would have to support myself through college; I usually had some sort of writing job in addition to my college classes, and then I started working at Writers.com during my junior year. That was almost 6 years ago.

I also grew up in the Midwest, where the Protestant work ethic is even more culturally engrained than most of America. In other words, my entire adult life has been oriented around what’s next on my to-do list, which is informed by what will make money. What I want, soon, is the opportunity to wake up thinking not about what I will do, but what I will create.

I have a lot I want to write: novels, poetry collections, essays, satire. I want to live. I want to make. My work is immensely meaningful, but I will regret it if I never give myself at least a year to write freely and intensely and only.

Contact Info:

• Website: Poemancer.com; Writers.com; seanglatch.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/glatchkeykid
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-glatch-33676416b/