Last week, during a community call with the In Surreal Life crew (that's the poetry fellowship I've been taking part in all month), I was asked the question "When did you start writing (or other art form if you primarily do that as your creative outlet)? What got you excited about it?" I'm actually pretty pleased with my answer to the question, and since the call was recorded, I was able to transcribe the answer here:
So, I don't remember learning how to read. As far as I can tell, there were just always books in the house, and they were all mine. I mean, technically they were my mom's and my dad's and my brother's, but they were mine. And I just always had them, and they just were always there. And we'd go to the library and there were books there, and we'd go to the bookstore, and there were books there and I had no idea where they came from, they were just there. And at some point, I don't remember exactly when, I was pretty little, I know I must have asked my father where the books came from. And my father was like the dad in Calvin and Hobbes so his response was, "It was magic." Which, totally, small kid brain, totally tracked. At some point, I realized that the magic was that a human being put words on a page, and those words turned into the books that eventually showed up in the libraries and the bookstores. And once my mind got over being blown by this fact, that people were what made books, and then I realized that it was any people, that anybody could be the person who put the words on the page that made the books, well then that was it, I was done, that was gonna be what I was gonna do. And so I couldn't have been much more than about six or seven, I think. I think that's about when I wrote my first stories, and it kinda hasn't stopped since then. I didn't start getting into poetry seriously until just the last year, when poetry started kinda falling off my pen whether I meant it to or not. But yeah, once I realized that books came from people, and I could be one of the people books could come from, I was done.
The poetry fellowship has been fantastic, and it has been a LOT. Turns out that writing a poem a day can bring up a lot of emotions for a person, and certain prompts can make it obvious that there might be somethings I need to work through. Still, I've loved getting my brain to visit poetry land, and thinking about language and writing in a different way than I do when writing fiction. It does mean that I've been spending more time trying to find just the right word, but now it's not just the word that means exactly what I want it to say, but also that it sounds/reads the way that I want it to. I'm making the words do a lot more work these days, I tell you.
Here, have a draft of a poem:
As she steps into my softest space.
“Doesn’t look like much. You should have
Done more with the place by now.”
Not a hair out of place, dressed to the nines,
She looks like the me of what-if,
The me on the other side of the flipped coin.
She’s all the potential I used to have.
She has the career, few details but many dollars;
Her name is know, respected, in specific circles.
Ma never worries if she can pay her bills -
Mirror Me has everything under control.
There’s nothing soft about her, no curves, only edges.
Her sharp eyes sweep over the controlled chaos of my mind.
Her mask is a hardened shell, the cracks ignored
In favor of “keeping it together.”
I lead her to the good chair, let her release the burden
Of being upright and at attention for a moment.
I sense the pain in her spine as it slowly releases
The tension the muscles constantly strain under.
“This is home,” I reply.
“It’s not much, but it’s everything.”
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