The alchemy of writing
I looked over the poetry manuscript, hand over my mouth, my eyes prickling with joy.
Somehow, all the poems I wrote at different times, for different reasons, speaking to different people, have come together as if they were written with this one specific theme already in mind, as if the common thread was always there and I was just writing the poems spontaneously, as they came to me, the order and evolution now clear.
But the common thread, I realized (and thus the happy tears) was always there.
It’s me. I’m the common thread. Of course it makes sense.
For all my talk of good writing being the product of effort, discipline and stubborn determination, sometimes I am just blown away by how ineffable it is. I read Big Magic, I believe in the “mysterious nature of inspiration” she refers to, but the moments when the veil gets thin and you get a glimpse of the inner workings are rare.
I am aware of the different patterns that my brain actively follows when consuming words, images and sounds—and how those patterns reappear in my writing. But when I completed the first full draft of the manuscript, I could clearly see how my brain had drawn it all together into a harmonious whole.
I have never been so impressed with myself 😂
All twenty-seven poems in the three-part collection were written between 2019-2024. Many have appeared on my Instagram poetry project, but many have never been read by anyone but me. A few that I wrote at the beginning of this period feature near the end of the collection, while the most recent have found their logical home in the middle.
Some are about my relationship with a specific person. Some speak to the shadow work I faced after being terminated from my last job. Most of them take place in Montréal, many are out of time entirely, but the second section happens in Greece. So much water imagery. A sprinkling about karmic ties. And since I’ve had an ongoing dialogue with the figure of Circe since I read Madeline Miller’s excellent second novel, the witch/goddess appears more than once.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem as if all that can make sense in one book, but do all the disparate parts of your life, if looked at individually, always make sense? Of course not. You are attracted to certain ideas and images because they feed your sense of self, they nourish the parts of yourself that you’re trying to heal. What makes it all meaningful is how you frame it.
“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
And isn’t that the same work involved in writing a poetry collection? I thought immediately of Nelly Desmarais’ Marche à voix basse, which is about her moving to a new neighbourhood, but it’s also about the sexual violence she survived. Two things happening in her life at the same time. On the surface, unrelated. But all of our life experiences generate data that converge in the brain, like little clues helping us find a path forward, old selves being shed as we try on new ways of being.
We don’t process one problem at a time either. All of our traumas, hopes, dreams and challenges are held simultaneously in our bodies, some advancing while some regress, one leapfrogging over the other, dormant pains suddenly reawakened on the tail end of new joys.
The purpose of the writer is to draw a portrait of that jumbled-up existence, showing its weaknesses, but also it’s strengths. The beauty not coming from perfection, but from a balanced view of the whole.
This poetry collection tells the story of my transformation between 2019 and 2024, it describes the process of “finding freedom for yourself in a world that denies it to you.” My feelings ebb and flow from one page to the next. In one poem, I am killing my ego. In the one that follows, I am taking a tentative step back into the world, trembling but hopeful. Everything I encountered in this period was held up to the light and examined, in case it could be useful to me. But the lens remains mine throughout.
So yeah… of course it makes sense.
Now I just have to edit so that it all makes sense to you too.