A short interview wherein one of my favorite authors answers three questions about the writing life.
Question 1
What’s your Go-To source when you need inspiration?
To gain inspiration, I binge-watch subtitled foreign movies and TV series in a variety of genres. Seeing how people of other cultures deal with universal human problems and emotions gives me a larger toolbox for developing characters, settings, plots, and themes.
Question 2
What was the greatest challenge you faced when writing the book?
For “Deep Roots in a Dry Place,” I went down the rabbithole of AI, learning how to phrase queries for ChatGPT and various image-generating AIs. Hours would fly by before I realized, yielding only a few lines or a single picture suitable for the book. The process often proved hypnotic, leading me off track as one query-prompt chained into another.
How did you get through it?
Focus. The project began as a vague “Maybe I could have paired poems, with the ones I wrote on one page and ones written by ChatGPT on the facing page.” It quickly broadened into “Ooh, I would like to include illustrations too.” While that led me to experiment with image-generating AIs in addition to ChatGPT, it actually limited the subject to plants, which I’ve snapped many photographs of (and collected identification books for) over the decades. Given the concerns about AI infringing on copyright, I needed to choose a geographical area and topic that did not have many poems written about it. A poetic natural history of Sonoran Desert plants satisfied all these parameters.
Question 3
In what genres have you written, and which one of them gives you the
most satisfaction?
I’ve tried writing in a lot of different genres. So far I’ve been most successful with poetry, short stories, contemporary and historical novels, nonfiction articles, and book reviews, all of which I’ve had published. My series of Watermaster novels is the most satisfying. This trilogy is a fictionalization of an actual pre-Columbian civilization, the Hohokam, who farmed the Arizona desert for a thousand years . . . and then vanished. Worldbuilding is essential for this story of a people who lived in a faraway time and exotic place, which I use to grapple with modern-day issues such as sexuality, religious conflict, and political machinations from a distance, without causing kneejerk reactions in readers who might otherwise choose a side based on their own prejudices.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951303156
Deep Roots in a Dry Place presents plants of the Sonoran Desert of Arizona through poetry and images created in a dynamic human-AI conversation.
Join poet Sally Bennett Boyington on an intriguing journey through the desert accompanied by ChatGPT and image-generating AIs. Each of the illustrated pages that resulted from this curiosity-driven adventure contains a poem written by either the author or ChatGPT, set opposite each other for comparison. Photographs accompany the author’s poems, while AI-generated images in various styles are juxtaposed with the ChatGPT poems.
The fusion of technology and human creativity in these pages showcases how far AI has come in recent years, as well as revealing the nuances that continue to distinguish human expression from machine learning. Deep Roots in a Dry Place offers readers a fascinating holistic experience where art, poetry, and science intertwine.
Purchase at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951303156
About the Author

Sally Boyington made her poetry debut at the age of seven with a Halloween poem in the Wisconsin State Journal. Since then she has published other poems, nonfiction articles, book reviews, and historical and contemporary novels. A lifelong musician and reader, she approaches poetry as a way of weaving together the music and meaning of words. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her husband and four-footed friends.