Moonlight, Poetry, and Courage (Part 2 of 4)
Part 2: What it might mean to put writing in the foreground of my evolving canvas
October tree shadows swayed across cobblestones silvered with moonlight as people took their seats under a canopy in the Poe Museum’s back garden. Yes, that Poe. As I rose to read “If I Die First,” I could feel the line with moonlight in it approaching and smiled. That night—the moonlight, the audience’s laughter and quiet tears, and one person’s audible gasp—is among my most treasured moments as a poet.
In my last post, inspired by a student’s layered painting, I began a series about my life’s evolving canvas, contemplating colors I might wish to apply more of in my next chapter. As this post opens, picture a vibrant plum that represents writing. It peeks between almost every stroke and swirl on the canvas, and in a few spots, puddles atop the other colors like petals dropped from a child’s cupped hands.
Poetry caught me when I was still a kid in northern New Jersey, the way a salamander darting among wet leaves beckons to be followed. I don’t know if I wrote them outside, but I remember penciling poems about trees and birds in a small steno pad, its corners bent from being stuffed in my pocket. I suspect buttercups and lightning bugs drifted onto those pages too.
After a long lull for reasons I don’t recall and moving with my family to and across Virginia, I rediscovered writing in Ms. Hildebrand’s creative writing class. I stayed in that haven for three years. There and in AP English, she taught me to appreciate a vast range of literature, encouraged my stories sprinkled with cauldrons and faeries—and my poetry. She also let me teach a lesson about John Donne’s metaphysical poems to one of her Brit Lit classes.
Somehow, despite the refuge it provided in high school, creative writing slipped from me in college. I was a first-year English teacher at my old high school when I explored it again, this time as a creative writing teacher with Jeanne Hildebrand as my department chair. Yet even though the students’ openness inspired me, when I picked up my pen, the chorus of their voices in my head made it a struggle to hear my own.
Then, in the school library, in brown plastic video cases, I found The Language of Life by Bill Moyers (blessings to librarian Cathie Birdsong for purchasing it), filmed at the 1994 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo Village, New Jersey. I was mesmerized.
The recordings energized me and my students. I fell in love with poetry all over again, this time not for how it could capture what I felt or noticed, but for how its currents could carry someone else’s story and feelings into me, especially when it was shared aloud. I couldn’t believe such a spectacular event had been happening in my home state every even-numbered year since 1986 and I’d never heard of it. The next fall (1996), I attended.
Beneath tents scattered between winding streams and historic buildings, I heard Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, and many other poets, and even sat beside Lucille Clifton after an evening reading and chatted with her while sipping wine. I was hooked.
The three years that followed were an ocean crossing—my hands sometimes at the helm, other times splashing through the waves as I struggled toward a distant horizon. Amid the tumult, I came to understand and accept my sexuality, divorced my best-friend husband, shifted from classroom teaching to librarianship, and fell in love with a woman for the first time.
Poems bobbed like buoys. My writing (other than journaling) sputtered to a stop, but I kept reading poems and collaborating with teachers to engage students with poetry. And in the few autumns I could, I renewed my wonder for poetry at the Dodge Festival.
A decade passed. Ten years of not yet to writing. Then I met Annette.
Our first summer, we attended a workshop about the arts and social change with activist singer-songwriter Holly Near, her favorite. Maybe it was falling in love with a writer, maybe it was the glittering rocks I picked up on the mountaintop, or maybe something inside me had softened or settled since I’d last written, but this time when I started writing, it anchored deeper than before.
Setting out from that harbor, I felt emboldened to explore unfamiliar waters.
I discovered documentary poetry, a fusion of historical research and verse, in a panel at a DC writing conference. Soon, I immersed myself in reading documentary poems and researching Grace Evelyn Arents, a Progressive-era educator and philanthropist who made an impact on Richmond, and her “dear companion” Mary Garland Smith. I’d heard about Grace a few months before while visiting Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden (situated on land she donated).
I attended worship in the cathedral Grace funded, toured the school she founded, and ran my hand along the carved banister in Bloemendaal House, her last residence. I sat on a bench near her grave and wrote, and hiked up to Stony Man in the Blue Ridge Mountains to sit on a boulder where one of the few extant photos of her was taken.
I began to see myself as a writer. When Annette enrolled in the Solstice MFA program, I flirted with the idea of earning an MFA too. But this, this compulsion to get another degree like some sort of ticket to something new, was part of the unbecoming I needed to do (I’ll write more about this in a future post).
After learning what I could from books like The Poet’s Companion, I opted to work with a mentor for two years: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who I met while auditing classes at Solstice. Multilingual with a past in radio, she’s a gifted poet with a remarkable ear who helped me tune in to poetry’s music and gain more confidence reading my work.
My early attempts at documentary poems were dreadful. Laure-Anne would confirm this. But as those poems improved, several personal poems emerged too. Gradually, journals began accepting some of each.
I read my poems at libraries, bars, and bookstores, and at Grace-related sites. When I participated in a week-long workshop with feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy, she cautioned me about my fondness for commas and encouraged me to play with the sounds of words. She also inspired me to connect with the rage and sorrow coursing through me in the wake of the Pulse shooting the weekend before (you can read that poem here if you’d like).
I wrote in the company of other writers there and at places like Porches. Along with Dodge, I attended Split this Rock Poetry Festivals and James River Writers Conferences. Being in these communities, even for a weekend, stretched and motivated me. I taught workshops, moderated panels, and emceed poetry readings like that one under a full moon at the Poe Museum.
Two books took shape. I assembled Beautiful Machinery, a coming out and falling in love chapbook, from the personal poems. Though I’d started planning the Grace and Garland manuscript on the slanted ceiling of my study long before I put Beautiful Machinery together, two more years passed before I finished it (or at least let it rest for a spell—it’s still unpublished).
The pandemic capsized all that. Teaching on Zoom washed away boundaries between home and school, and my work life expanded. In free moments, I longed to build things or paddle a kayak—anything other than keeping my hands on a keyboard.
Remembrance poems were the only trickle that persisted. Based on interviews with someone whose loved one has died, these poems capture and carry that person’s memories of their loved one. I’d written a few before the pandemic for friends. Then, when the pandemic prevented people from gathering for funerals, I wrote one for another friend, and for a colleague and parent at school to help provide them with another kind of closure.
Other than remembrance poems and a poem that bubbled up on the second day back at school, Furrow and Fire is my first creative writing since things reopened. Before this, the only prose I’ve written since those witchy tales in high school are emails, lesson plans, church newsletters, articles for library journals, and cards to family and friends (I think of these posts a bit like them).
What if creative writing is what I emphasize in my next chapter? It’s not so much a list of projects that arises as the possibility of a different way of being.
I envision unhurried mornings immersed in writing while still in my pajamas, a half-finished mug of coffee growing cold beside me. I anticipate moving through my day with heightened attention to sights, sounds, smells, and sensations, and to the expressions and movements of people around me. I picture being still.
Once I have new work to share, I long to revel in the company of writers and readers and to discuss writing with Annette every day (or close). This time though, I want to be more intentional about being kind to other writers. Not long after I published my chapbook, there were a few moments when I got what my grandfather would have called “too big for my britches.”
I remember such an encounter with a writer, maybe in his twenties, who walked up to me after a Sunday reading. A few days before, I’d drafted a plan to monetize my writing and writing-related teaching. Monetizing is not a strength of mine. Anyway, he was beaming as he talked about poetry. Then he asked if I’d look at his poems. I told him I was available for mentoring—paid mentoring. His shoulders slumped. I don’t recall what either of us said next, but I felt queasy as he walked away. I don’t want to do that again.
If the persistent purple that represents writing is the color I place in the foreground of my evolving canvas, I want my way of being with writing in this next chapter to reflect my Unitarian Universalist values—for what I write to foster a more just, compassionate world, and for me to be generous with it and humble about it.
Laure-Anne once told me that my writing is good when I take risks, when I loosen my control (something else I’m fond of) and let it flow, including when I feel vulnerable. So, I also want to write with courage. Annette does. I’m learning.