When did you start writing?

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:

“You call this home?” she sneers
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.”

And in conclusion, cat!

Nef is grumpy, which is kind of her standard face these days since we brought QWERTY home.

Convention Wrap-Up and In Surreal Life

It's hard to believe it's only been a week since the Flights of Foundry convention - it feels simultaneously like it was forever ago and just yesterday. It was a marvelous convention, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a more literary-focused convention that's both international and online.

One of the biggest discoveries for me was the world of speculative poetry. The last few months, my writing has tended toward poetry, at least in part, and I have no idea why. If you had told me even five years ago that I would be regularly writing poetry, I would have thought you were nuts. High school and the need to analyze the bejeesus out of every word of every poem pretty well ruined any appreciation for poetry that I had for a long time, and it wasn't until I started realizing how much poetry is meant to be performed (thanks, Shakespeare, for a big part of that realization) that I started letting myself be interested again.

Speculative poetry is a space I hadn't really explored before, so when I saw that Flights of Foundry had a challenge to write a poem for each day of the convention, I figured I would give it a shot. I also managed to get into an intro to speculative poetry workshop run by Dawn Vogel, and a couple of co-working and open mic sessions (basically, everything on the poetry track of the convention). It was wonderful! Combining the speculative aspects of my fiction (sci fi, fantasy, etc.) with the lyrical language of poetry was a lot of fun and something I look forward to exploring further. Here's an example of what I came up with (be kind, it's a very first draft):

Light travels at speed, vanishing as quickly as it appears.
In a blink, the mystery of the dark drops away.
The unknown becomes known.

The flash reveals multitudes no one reckoned could exist.
What man thought was empty space was neither.
The abyss is strikingly full.

Millions of eyes (or eye-like structures) turn to the source of the light.
They had also assumed they were alone in the dark.
The sky now knows the others exist.

Since October 1st, I've been taking part in In Surreal Life, a poetry workshop/fellowship that has me working on a new poem every day, with a small group that I'm meeting with to go over critiques of a specific poem once a week. It is stretching my brain and my soul in ways I was NOT expecting, and putting me in a different kind of poetry community than I would have found on my own. I have no idea how I even found it, to be honest, but when I read up on the program and saw that there were scholarship spots available, I figured, "why not? Worst that can happen is I get rejected." Somehow, I got accepted! The mind, she boggles.

The community is wonderful, and I'm definitely learning a lot. I still hesitate to call myself a poet, but I've definitely written more poetry than prose over the last week and change, so there may be something to that. It isn't easy, and it's bringing up a lot of feelings that had been comfortably tucked away, so that's something to deal with. Still, I'm glad I'm doing it. (We'll see if I'm still saying that at the end of the month.)

In conclusion, the convention was wonderful, my presentation went over well, and I've finding a lot to love in poetry. Here, have a cat!