This is great and rings so true. I resisted/hid from the fact that I was writing poems about motherhood because I worried that subject would be considered sentimental and not serious/literary (barf), but then when I finally put them all in a chapbook, it worked and made sense. And then I wrote a novel that is pretty weird, and I tried to un-weird it, and it just didn’t work, so I let it be what it is--and it was accepted for publication! Why do we resist ourselves like this??
Kristen, I did the same thing after I had my first child—hid the poems about motherhood, then put them in a chapbook and realized it was far better than the other poems I was writing. Thank you for this. And, Heather, thank you for sharing your own journey with this in such an incisive, insightful way. I needed to read exactly this right now. This post is my own way of getting out of the trapdoor I didn't realize I was in.
Also, so many incredible lines here, so I'll just quote this: "Alas, I suspect every writer is prone, at one time or another, to the new shapes this trapdoor takes, the surprising ways it can appear in the house of our psyches." and ok, this: "I like to think all our good ideas come from our inner wisdom—that faithful compass inside each of us." THANK YOU.
This is great and rings so true. I resisted/hid from the fact that I was writing poems about motherhood because I worried that subject would be considered sentimental and not serious/literary (barf), but then when I finally put them all in a chapbook, it worked and made sense. And then I wrote a novel that is pretty weird, and I tried to un-weird it, and it just didn’t work, so I let it be what it is--and it was accepted for publication! Why do we resist ourselves like this??
Kristen, I did the same thing after I had my first child—hid the poems about motherhood, then put them in a chapbook and realized it was far better than the other poems I was writing. Thank you for this. And, Heather, thank you for sharing your own journey with this in such an incisive, insightful way. I needed to read exactly this right now. This post is my own way of getting out of the trapdoor I didn't realize I was in.
Also, so many incredible lines here, so I'll just quote this: "Alas, I suspect every writer is prone, at one time or another, to the new shapes this trapdoor takes, the surprising ways it can appear in the house of our psyches." and ok, this: "I like to think all our good ideas come from our inner wisdom—that faithful compass inside each of us." THANK YOU.
This is so awesome to hear, Emily!