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But when I got pregnant, poetry left me. I couldn’t write it or read it, couldn’t go listen to a performance of it because I couldn’t focus for long enough. It just didn’t make sense. Because so much of my life had revolved around it, this was a big loss. I have been experiencing other losses lately: my marriage, my trust, and soon we’ll sell our house. So, I’m taking the poetry back. I need it. Last November, I used prompts from Poetic Asides and wrote 29 poems in 30 days. The first day, I brought my journal to the computer to type in the poem so I could edit it later. Immediately, this struck me as a bad plan. I was too tempted to edit it at the moment and knew that this could derail my month of poems. It would be so easy to get the critical editor voice in my head and have that voice interfere with the creative process. I decided to write all of the poems in the journal and not look back at them until the month was done.. Then I could type and edit them. Committing to writing a poem a day and actually writing them got my poetry muscles working again. It was similar to the experience I had as a college freshman when I felt like I’d put on a Shakespeare decoder ring and all of a sudden I could understand Shakespeare. The veil had lifted. In November, as I made time to write poetry each day, I began to think in images again, noticed nuances of language in lyrics and novels. I once again had books of poetry for bedtime reading. A part of me that I loved and had dedicated so much of my life to was back. Well, April is National Poetry Month and I’m going to write 30 poems in 30 days using prompts from Read Write Poem. Beside signing the Read Write Poem pledge, I just updated my Publications page with eight poems that have just been published or are forthcoming. What a wonderful way to get ready for NaPoWriMo. If you write poetry, maybe you’d like to join me in writing 30 poems in 30 days. I won’t be posting them here because my internal editor comes with seeing the typed work, but I’ll write about my process throughout the month. Please let me know if you’re writing too and how it’s going.
In the first pass, you looked for surface level issues and easier fixes (at least to spot, if not to execute):
So once you’ve taken that first inventory, seen again what you have written, what can you look for next?
Get my feed by email/RSS for more writing, editing, and publishing tips. And please share your strategies with me. What does a deep revision look like for you? Photo by Silent Tomrrow
From the back cover: “This unique collection includes over fifty articles by more than thirty-five diverse American women who revisit, celebrate, and share defining moments in their lives. Readers will see the universal in milestones of body, mind, family, career, and personal empowerment—whether joyous or difficult, chosen or unexpected, common or rare. These are poignant passages of women, told by talented and award winning writers: intimate glimpses into the lives of our sisters, friends, aunts, mentors, wives, grandmothers, partners, mothers, daughters—ourselves.” This week’s guest post in the Writing After Kids Series is by Andre Jackson, the father of four very intelligent children. He is also a twenty-year Active Duty Navy Veteran and finally a reader that loves to write and occasionally perform. He and I worked together for the 2007 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. He was tireless, cheerful, and absolutely dedicated to providing support for the writers, performers, and organizers in our extended slam family. Go Fish
I love writing but most importantly I love to perform using what I’ve written. The stage is out of the question nowadays. Logistically it’s kind of hard to perform during the week when I’m working. On the weekends I could perform but my wife, children and professors would probably all divorce me at the same time and that might make for a big mess outside of the blender. So what is a guy to do when there’s not enough room in the blender? I go fishing: 1. Writing makes me feel like I am fishing. Fishing makes me feel like ‘what if’ and if I do hook a fish what kind will it be? How big will it be? What kind of bait did I use? 2. Sometimes what I write allows others a good day on the lake, because they get lost in the ‘what if’ with me. 3. Finally presentation is so important when setting up a rig. It’s like painting a picture. Sometimes it’s sloppy but other times it’s hook, line and sinker neat. Granted you’ll never see me on television with the biggest fish or the most poundage caught in a day, but I keep coming back for more just because of the ‘what if’ feeling. Since I’m only going for the feeling associated with fishing I don’t need the flashy bass boat, nor the commercial endorsements. I fish most often on my school discussion board. I’ve become something of the fisherman on that lake. I Carolina Rig essay’s for school as well. Nothing like catching an ‘A’ with 10 pound line and a deep yellow gold flaked rubber worm. I fish with fresh bait on my iPhone. There are book outlines there as well as poems, and maybe one day I might actually finish my own design for a man made lake fully stocked with an assortment of fish that I chose. I know I’m not complicated, I don’t even think my vocabulary is that dense, but I’m still learning the topography of the lake most often with no navigational device and that’s a good feeling. I make time for fishing because I love fried rainbow trout with buttered white rice especially with a glass of blended Nopalitos and honey nectar. This is all part of a healthy diet, I suppose. It definitely keeps my blood pressure at par, and helps to lower my stress level when coping with the fact that I’m just a guy who will probably will never meet all his expectations but both Olga Silverstein and Peggy Papp would agree that this too is o.k. as long as I enjoy each moment within the moment and realize that even on those days when I go fishless, I can still consider myself at least healthy. Photo Blender Fish by Nic Anzal So you’ve got a lot of poems to edit and you don’t even know where to begin? I can help. Whether you’ve composed many poems in a short period, like I just did for the Nov PAD Chapbook Challenge, or you’ve got a stack of poems that you’ve been writing for years but never get around to revising, you can edit your poems using these strategies.
This is the first editing pass. The function of the above steps is to get you to a point where you can start really crafting your poem and get past the first draft. Once you’ve gone through these, put the poem down for a week (at least) so you can come back to it with fresh eyes. Get my feed by email/RSS for more writing, editing, and publishing tips. I’d love to hear what your tried and true editing strategies are. How do you work with your poems to make them better? Photo Writing the Story
Have I Said Too Much?Every other Tuesday night, three or four women sit in my living room and free-write. Tonight, the prompt is, “My lover’s penis.” When we finish writing, I start to read what I’ve written: I picture L.’s dick, shrunken and nestled inside his man-fro, protected like a freshly laid egg in a nest. As I hear the words come out of my mouth, I stop. “Is he gone?” I ask. “He went running, right?” My 25-year-old son recently moved back home from Chicago after finding himself still unemployed one year after his college graduation. Is he within earshot of what I’m reading about the man I just divorced? My writing makes him cringe. “I think he left,” says Annette, “I heard the front door slam.” I charge down the hallway to make sure he’s gone. His bedroom is empty, the computer room is dark. I continue reading: I can’t write about my lover’s penis. I couldn’t rightfully call him my lover if the word “lover” implies sex. I’ll write about his belly – a shelf on which he placed Frito pies covered with handfuls of grated cheese. As long as my son is out running, I can “go for the jugular,” as Natalie Goldberg instructs. I can write, and read aloud, whatever I want. Over the weeks, I write about the demise of my second marriage, about how I visited my son in Chicago when he was in school to help him climb out of crippling depressions. I write about how he would stop taking the medication that kept him functional, certain that all he needed to get well was to understand his father’s violence and my emotional absence. During our weekly phone conversations while he was in school, he’d demand to know, over and over again through tears, why I’d been a cold and neglectful mother, why I’d stayed married so long to his father, and why I’d married L. But most of all, he wanted to know why I’d written about him. When he was a young teenager, I’d divorced his father and started taking creative writing classes. My writing was about my life, our lives – my son’s depression, his father’s rage, my depression, sex after years in a sexless marriage. I published a book of poetry and performed in poetry slams. My son didn’t care that I’d changed the names. My writing made him feel exposed, angry. He didn’t speak to me for two years. For a while, in an effort to regain his trust, I’d vacillate between not writing at all and writing fiction. I won a short story contest. At the public reading, I looked up in the audience and saw my other son weeping. I thought I was reading about a nameless woman who was trying to leave her marriage to a man who punched holes in walls. My son knew I was reading about his father. My writing, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, closure, and connection, hurt my sons. I started attending classes in Vancouver to complete a Masters degree. I had to keep writing, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t traumatize my sons. I’d stopped performing and submitting for publication. In this cocoon, I started to feel safe enough to write poems about my life again. After all, my sons were far away at college. In one poem, I projected my worst fears about my loved ones. I wrote: My twenty-three-year-old jumps in front of train 324, Red Line, Chicago Transit Authority. The driver requires years of therapy. In that same poem, I also exposed my then-husband’s alcoholism. I remember telling my classmates who workshopped the poem that they must never tell my husband, who was in Vancouver with me, that I’d written about his drinking. “He’d divorce me if he knew,” I said. I changed the lines to make him a knitter rather than a drinker. And though my son was far away at school, the thought of him reading this poem made me worry about hurting him again. I altered the line about the suicide to make it about my brother. But then, certain my words could influence the future, I took the line out altogether. As I hacked at the poem until it bore no resemblance to its original truth – that my son struggles with mental illness and that my husband was a drunk – I realized that my writing hadn’t driven my son away. The truth behind my writing had. I still want to tell the truth as I know it. And I want to protect the feelings of my sons. I thought if I waited long enough, I could find that sweet spot where I could write honestly without hurting or embarrassing my sons. It doesn’t exist. Knowing that this piece will be posted online, I consider using a pseudonym to staunch the damage. Instead, I don’t mention my sons’ names and I refer to my ex as “L” – all very cryptic but probably pointless. Writing is risky. I could stop. But that silence constitutes a different sort of risk – the denial of self, the illusion that if I just don’t speak about it, the grit of my life and my sons’ lives never happened. That risk is one that I must also consider in this equation that doesn’t solve. So what now? Each time I write, I weigh the risks. Some days I feel braver than others. Today I nervously choose to post this piece under my real name. But on other days, like free-write Tuesdays, I wait for the front door to slam, until my son has vanished down the street and around the corner to the trail next to the railroad tracks, off for his three-mile run. That’s just enough time for me to write a thousand words or so about him. But for now, when I read aloud, I read about my ex-husband: His biological mother abandoned him. His adoptive mother beat him. His penis hid, shyer than a crocus in early spring. It’s as if by reading aloud only about L., I’ve successfully bargained with the devil of writing. I earned my MFA in poetry in December of 2002. Then I commuted between three teaching gigs, got married, ran a corporate learning center, and had a baby. The first year out of school, I submitted my thesis as a manuscript to a bunch of first book contests. I got some nice notes, encouragement, and even a couple of almosts, but my book wasn’t published. I knew all along that I needed to be sending out the individual poems, wracking up some more publishing credits, and doing the editing that comes with rejection (or publication, I find that once a poem is in print, I suddenly see revisions). But I sent out the book, not the poems. And then I just stopped making time to send out the work. Next, I went back to the poetry slam. I stopped competing and performing while I was in grad school. It was enough to walk into just about every workshop and have the other poets ask if what I was putting up for discussion was a slam poem or a page poem. I had to debate whether poetry was written for an audience, if it should be, if slam poems were poems. I didn’t have the energy to slam. Once I got out of school, I was thrilled to be back at the slam. I wrote new poems, memorized, rehearsed, revised, and competed. By the time I got pregnant in 2006, I had hadn’t been writing or performing much for two years. Though all the books talk about pregnancy brain, no one mentioned I would stop being able to write. As soon as I got pregnant, my brain wouldn’t work for poetry. I couldn’t even read it. I tried lyric, narrative, my favorite poets, reading out loud, typing other people’s poems. My brain refused to connect. It was the reverse of my experience as an English undergrad when I suddenly could understand Shakespeare. It was like I’d put on a Shakespeare decoder ring and everything made sense all of a sudden. Pregnancy was my anti-decoder ring for poetry. Nothing I did made me able to speak or read or write that language. I’ve tried repeatedly, both during the pregnancy and since my now three-year-old son was born. Everything I wrote felt juvenile, forced, empty. I gave up. And then my friend Pamela told me about this challenge. She did the April Challenge and was gearing up for November. On November 2nd, I decided I would do it too. So what if I wrote a poem a day and it was horrible? I’d at least be writing again. Maybe I could use some of Natalie Goldberg’s advice and finally get the editor back out of the writing process. Now, I’m on the last day of the challenge. I have more than 30 poems, some of them good, most of them in need of great revision, but I have something to work with. Over the course of the last month, I have begun to see line breaks, hear language, and create again. While some (I don’t have any idea what percentage) people participating in the challenge posted their poems in the comments section of the blog and/or on their own blogs, I was happy to keep to myself. I chose not to participate in the community of people communicating about the challenge and what they were doing as it happened. I didn’t want to read other people’s poems and start psyching myself out. I didn’t want to see my own poems in print outside of my notebook. I just wanted to write. It felt great. And after the challenge is over, I’ll start editing to see if I can put a chapbook together for the challenge deadline on January 2. What did it take to get me writing poetry again? Just deciding to do it, committing to it, and separating the still small voice inside me from all the critics chiming in. What does it take for you to get yourself going after too long a break from your work? Photo by After the Party The following article is a guest post on Writing After Kids is from my longtime friend, Estelle Marchasin. She is a stay-at-home mother of two, and wife to one. She is developing her novel, The Lost Angels, with the help of published author and poet, Sharon Darrow. She currently lives in New Jersey, but Taos, New Mexico will always be home. Writing After BabiesI have never identified myself as a writer, though if I think about it, I have been writing all my life. When I was a little girl I used to write fantasy stories called “The Happy Family.” I filled notebooks with them and then destroyed them because I thought, even at eight, that they were terrible. A friend of mine reminded me recently that I used to do people’s English papers in high school. This was certainly not due to any superior literacy, but rather in response to a burning need to be liked in combination with the deep lethargy of a few of my friends. Whatever the reason, it hardly seemed a burden. Later I put forth a number of melodramatic poems, a few erotic stories (mostly because the ones I found failed to get me off), and finally an aborted novel that didn’t have all that much to it. I was always distracted, mostly by boys. All I wanted was a beautiful romance, a man who would die for me, and lots and lots of sweaty, forget-the-world sex. I met the man, had the sex, the wedding, and finally the babies. Time sped up. Now when I think about those years, I hear that zip-zippy fast forward sound. I hardly remember any of it. All I know is that I was planning a wedding, saying vows and then pregnant or lactating for five years. Then one day, sleep deprived, shell shocked and scarred, I landed back in my body. Writing had faded out completely, along with showers, shaving, exercise and what little self esteem I had, which, you know, wasn’t so much to begin with. Being a generally proactive person, I tried to shake myself out of the depressive daze I was in. It took so much effort just to give my kids what they needed that everything else felt like marrow suckage, like walking through concrete, like suffocation. In an effort to improve myself, I bought a book called All About Me I agonized. I had to do something to shock myself out of my paralysis. What would I do? What could I do? Maybe I should be an acupuncturist, a florist, or perhaps being a stay at home mom was my lot and I should be happy with that. Okay. I could be a mommy who really sucked at housework. Why not?
A month later I started to write. My son went down for his nap every day and I wrote; tired, no exhausted, sleep deprived, crazy, desperate, whatever. I had to do it. It felt like a gift and I was afraid if I squandered it, it would go away. Everything got bigger. Magical things started to happen. I met writers, and talked to new people on the phone. I had insane, synchronistic accidents take me down unfamiliar and unexpected paths. I unfolded and expanded. I had ideas. I had become so small, so faded, and once the writing started, I felt myself unfurling into my own shadowy corners. I would say it’s because of my kids that all of this has happened. I lost myself when I got married and had children. They took everything. They gave everything, too, but I had to start over. I had a clean slate, a chance to be different and better and wiser at things, including writing. Thanks to the responsibilities of running my family, my days are divided, hour by hour, minute by minute. My life is disciplined in a whole new way (breakfast, brush teeth, clothes on, bath, tantrum, art projects, park, so many kisses, and on and on), and begins at an hour I could never have conceived of before kids. Writing is a blessed relief. It is the only place that my kids and my husband can’t touch, and after the daily six hour breast exam administered by my two year old, sometimes I just don’t want to be touched, at all. And after my daughter has been talking for nine hours in a row, a moment spent in the company of the friends living in my head is a sweet reward. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not infinitely grateful for my life. I am. My babies and my man are my soul, my light, my life. It just wouldn’t be right to paint a false picture. It has all been extremely trying, the best and most difficult years so far. But now, no matter what, there’s more than a mommy in me. There’s the story too, and that belongs to me alone. I don’t knit, or climb mountains, or paint. I write. The characters of my own creation are the best and most exciting companions I have when I need to get away. Without my babies, there is no doubt I would still be tooling around, wasting my days pondering my own bullshit. Who would stop me? Who would need so much from me that a whole new sub-me had to invent itself? Thanks to them, if I can eke out some time for myself, it is spent visiting that internal life that has become so true, and so necessary. They are the catalysts for my mandatory illumination. My head isn’t going in the oven, you know? Thanks to them, this time I am on the third re-write of my novel, and I think it might be okay. They gave me that, for sure. But thanks to writing, I also shower, shave, and run once more. Photo “Angel” by nagsoto.
The subtitle implies that this book will offer ways to conquer what I expected to be writer’s/artist’s block. Rather than a lack of inspiration though, Pressfield defines “Resistance” as anything that keeps one from doing her work, as in what you were put on earth to do, what the still small voice inside of you knows is your life purpose. “Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.” This book is part pep talk, part kick in the ass. Most of us don’t have massage therapists to rub out the knots in our egos or coaches to push us to work harder, move faster, do more. Pressfield offers something better, in short chapters, direct and well-written prose, with the humor and insight of someone who has been there and already knows which excuse you’ll offer next. If you’re not writing, not writing enough, or in any other way having trouble doing your work, your real work–not necessarily what you’re being paid for– read this book. I’ve got a lot of friends doing NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month. I’ll join them next year. This year, I’m going for the poetry. My friend Pamela wrote about her Challenge Prep for the November PAD Chapbook Challenge and I figure I need to get back on the poetry horse sometime. Why not November? Maybe I can’t commit to writing a novel, but a first draft of a poem each day seems within my current reach. I wrote recently about How to Focus Your Writing Time. Writing challenges offer the external structure that a creative writer normally lacks. And when you get a structure, it will help you learn more about yourself as a writer. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
So whether you want to participate in NaNoWriMo, the Nov PAD Chapbook Challenge, or create a challenge for yourself (like blogging every day in November), what will you do this month to give yourself a little structure? |
 This work by Sonya Feher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.  |
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Copyright © 2012 Sonya Fehér: In My Wrong Mind - All Rights Reserved |
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, “If there are areas in your work where there is a blur or vagueness, you can simply see the picture again and add the details” (165).
, 195). Now, add them bac with a specific tone in min—or maybe you’ll find that they were unnecessary and that by using concrete nouns and vivid verbs, the modifiers are unnecessary.
. This book is a must-have for beginning poets and a good return to fundamentals for more seasoned writers.
. It was filled with questions such as, “How do you like your eggs?” and, “What country do you most want to visit?” I remember so clearly sitting in sweat pants as my daughter, then a baby, took her nap. I stared at page after page of questions. Beyond my name and my incomplete family tree, I couldn’t answer a single one. I wondered if I had ever known who I was, or anything about myself, for that matter. I was so disturbed that I filled in all the blanks, and now when I look at it, I know I faked every answer, and almost none of it rings true. That was how far away from myself I got. I had nothing.
