I grew up a few hours’ drive from cozy PEI, the crags and cliffs of Newfoundland, and the bustle and hustle of Halifax, Nova Scotia. People from this part of the world pride themselves on their practicality, their resourcefulness, and their ability to endure harsh weather extremes. And for good reason. Grappling with freezing temperatures and snow storms are not for the faint of heart. The highest compliment you could get from my neck of the woods is to be called practical. You didn’t want to be labeled ‘creative.’ With the label ‘creative’ came the associations of ‘flighty,’ ‘careless,’ ‘wishy-washy,’ and, of course, ‘poor as dirt.’

There are ancient and modern reasons for this attitude – and I won’t rabbit-hole you down those reasons. Suffice to say – being practical could save your life, and being forgetful or unfocused could spell danger if not mortal disaster. You can’t forget to fill the car with gas or to buy a winter jacket when frostbite can steal your nose and your toes.

Unlearning Being Practical

So.

In order to fully embrace my own creative side, I have spent the second half of my life unlearning biases and unsticking the digging fingers of criticism and logic that have formed my very soul. It is hard work. It’s a lot of ‘I made so much progress!’ and then realizing I am still dampening my art with the diminishing lens of ‘what profit will this net me?’  Or, ‘What is the practical end of this creative thing I am doing?’

I tried making pottery a couple of weeks ago and a funny thing happened. I imagined what the clay might tell me, what shape it wanted to be, if it could talk to me. And I didn’t even chide myself for being ridiculous and insane for imagining it. Progress! The theme of this last part of 2023 is bringing all different types of creativity into my life, not just the written word. Opening myself to aspects of creativity I don’t normally think of. 

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a course (Infinite Imagination) with artist and poet Holly Spaulding that is bringing more art into my life. “Art wrapped up into life,” she would say, or, “catalyzing unexpected outcomes.” Doesn’t that give your little heart a thrill? I want more catalyzed unexpected outcomes!

Meander. Explore. Be flighty.

If you’re a word witch like me, throwing some paint on a canvas, molding a bowl of clay, or sewing a patch of yarn with bright colors, it can crack you open and it only feeds into your other creative endeavors. It’s an opportunity to do something badly. To meander, to wander, to try new mediums and to fail to execute my vision, and to flit off to a different medium. I understand there are loads of people shouting ‘how to focus’ from the rafters. Screaming at us to narrow our goals and execute. Be productive. Be profitable. Be useful. Respectfully, screw that. Screw them. Don’t throttle your creativity with demands.

Listening to Holly talk about growing up in a house of artists, with her mother painting and her father working with wood and making mountains for her with his own paint, my heart contracted with longing. The image of little Ange surrounded by written and visual art. Maybe a row of misshapen pottery bowls on a sunny window sill. An open, loose childhood that could have nurtured my creativity. And then, how can I give that to myself (and my own children) now? In between working and dentist appointments, making healthy dinners and doing the mundane tasks that need to be done, how can I pull in more magic? I want more of the beauty and flow and frustration and glee and freedom that comes with giving myself permission to be creative, somehow, every day. I want permission to be impractically creative. Just creating for the sake of creating.

The question I want you to ask yourself is, how can I bring more art into my life? Can I take a walk in the woods and sketch the falling light? Take a photo of a bright red raspberry in a field of yellowing vines? How do I carve out time to sit still and make art for the purpose of thrilling my own soul?

I want you to ask yourself, how can I intertwine art into life? Are you already doing this well? Please tell us all about it!

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post Permission for the Dismissed Creative appeared first on DIY MFA.

So, I’ve had a life change—another one. (Thanks, life!) I recently started teaching in my community, and last Friday, I had the chance to teach my two favorite subjects: reading and writing. Let me set the scene. Picture it. Cicely, 1922. Oops, that’s The Golden Girls. Picture it. Texas. 2023. 

The Room Where It Happened

I will admit these kids between nine and ten shared excitement and reluctance when faced with an afternoon of reading and writing with me, a near-perfect stranger. I was equally wary and a little nervous. Would they eat me alive? I’m just a lowly bookworm with visions of grandeur like all writers are. Like many creatives, I just want a career that pays the bills in an enjoyable way while giving me time to write.

The magical scene unfolded thusly: one of the boys finished early and was like…what next? And I said…have you ever written a Haiku? And I grinned because he said, ‘What’s a Haiku?’ SQUEEEEEE. I got to tell someone new about HAIKU!! Because Haiku poems are brilliant and challenging, and everyone must write one before they die. We all know this.

And you know what? He did. He wrote one. I gave him a high-five on his first Haiku, and I felt something slide into place in my heart. It dawned on me not like a thunderbolt out of the sky but like the fog lifting as the sun rises. This is what I am meant to be doing. Sharing what I know, and maybe, if I’m lucky, pass on my enthusiasm for the written word to someone young enough, or young enough at heart, to let that fire grow inside them.

I am not a teacher, but an awakener

Robert Frost

I have awakened to what I am supposed to be doing. I knew I was a writer. I knew I loved poetry (although I can’t quite call myself a poet). I knew I was a reader and a learner. But now I know, no matter what happens, that I am meant to share this love of literature with others. It makes my heart go flippidty-flop and gives me a sense of awe and wonder again at the universe where I thought I would never figure things out.

Living a Fulfilled Creative Life

I have cracked my own code, finally. This is how I want to spend the rest of my life. Writing, reading, and sharing this passion for the absolute magic of the written word to others. Who gives two flying, ahem, geese, if I ever get to use the money I make as a writer to put a downpayment on a house with a pool and a secret passageway to a hidden library? Not me. I’m perfectly happy to use the bank robbery money for that. Meanwhile, what an amazing life I have laid out before me. I took so many wrong turns and false starts to get here, but here I am. How lucky and privileged that is. And what kind of a jerk is out there telling me I can’t call myself a writer because people outside my own community don’t know my name? That’s just silliness. 

This is a love letter to teachers from kindergarten to English Essay Writing 101. But, it’s also a call to having more than one calling. A lot of times writers have this mistaken impression that if they’re not writing full time, or making the rounds of a New York book signing tour that their writing isn’t good, or meaningful, or necessary. That’s erroneous. That is only one path, only one in an endless array of beautiful, fulfilling paths that your love of writing will take you. What is yours will come to you. What is not was never yours. Seek out your own path with an expectation of awe. And don’t give up until you feel it. Feel all the ways a creative life will amaze and delight you, I dare you.

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post To all the Awakeners appeared first on DIY MFA.

Spoiler alert—it isn’t because we’re lazy, unfocused child-adults with no willpower.

Shame and the Shadow

Let me introduce you to…Carl Jung. The trailblazer. The rebel. The scamp. The shadow work pioneer. 

Jung believed that our shadow selves contain our repressed emotions, thoughts, desires, insecurities, and fears. We repress these things because we’ve been conditioned to associate these feelings or thoughts with something embarrassing or shameful. We don’t want to be judged or rejected by others.  

Most of us have been conditioned to “be positive” and “look on the bright side.” I internalized those concepts so well that I stayed in not one but two toxic relationships as an adult, much longer than I should have. (Do I get the third one free?) 

I can assure you that looking only on the bright side doesn’t keep the bad stuff from happening. I’ve learned what I don’t know about myself can still kick me in the ass.

A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps…living below his own level.

Carl Jung

Jung believed if we are consistently finding ourselves stuck, or ending up in similar unhealthy situations (or relationships) again and again, we have shadow work to do. And, of course, all of this is a goldmine for the writer. The darker, the better, really, isn’t it? Everything is grist for the mill. 

Shadow work is the writer’s work. 

It’s what we’ve been called to do, whether we know it or not. Doing this work is a way of deepening self-awareness and self-reflection, two things every great writer needs. 

Yeah, but you don’t want to and it’s scary, I can hear you now. Heck, maybe that’s just me. 

Shadow work can feel scary. But what’s scarier? Exploring aspects of ourselves that might be holding us back, or being held back from what we want and never knowing why? 

If we want off the hamster wheel of self-sabotage and self-destructive behaviors (and the shame spiral that accompanies it), this is something we should try. 

Using Poetry to Engage in Shadow Work

Poetry, more than any other type of writing, is particularly suited for shadow work. You can’t drone on for pages, getting lost in melancholy. You must cut to the quick, to the heart of the matter.

Using poetry, you can hem the dark thoughts into a nice, comforting ballad, or my favorite, the Haiku—something with strict rules to contain the mess that is our whole selves. 

Be aware of when you have a strong reaction to something, either positive or negative. That’s it. That’s the first step—to get still and to notice. Two things every poet needs to do in order to write well. 

Here are a few more writing prompts to get you started:

When was the last time I felt at peace?
When is the critical voice in my head the loudest? 
When is it the quietest?
When do I feel angry? Why? How does it feel in my body?

Go slow, be kind to yourself, and if emotions get too scary, you can and should get professional mental health help, especially when dealing with trauma. The impact of a good therapist is life-changing. 

The second step is to allow yourself space to process what you’ve noticed. This isn’t a six-day cleanse. This is going to take some time. 

The last step is probably the hardest, and that’s to accept and integrate those traits. There are no three-step Powerpoint presentations for this. But there are ways you can tell the work is, well, is working:

Signs You’ve Been Doing Shadow Work:

Judging: You judge other people (and yourself) less. When you’ve made the courageous choice to look at your own darkness and offer yourself kindness and forgiveness, extending that to others is much easier. 

Triggers: Other people don’t trigger you like they used to. You notice the behavior, but you no longer feel compelled to respond.

The Blame Game: When a shadow trait pops up, you stop denying it and blaming yourself for not having everything under control. For some, this deepens into not blaming the person or event that triggered the response in the first place. You get curious, but you don’t get ashamed. 

Not Special: You realize you’re not special. You’re unique, wonderful, and lovely, and no one is exactly like you on the whole planet with all of the memories, dreams, and potential for greatness. But you’re not abnormal. The fates, God, or the universe didn’t set you aside at birth to suffer or cause your loved ones to suffer. You’re just you. Flawed, egotistical, with some trauma wounds from other people who didn’t do their own shadow work.

Confidence: Slowly, over time, you gain confidence in yourself and your abilities based on self-awareness. You know you’re worthy. You know if you write that poem or release that memoir, everything will be okay. You won’t be shamed or unloved. And if you are, you understand they are in pain and haven’t been doing their own shadow work. 

Peace: Your life is more peaceful. When you love your whole self, every other interaction flows more positively. And when you mess up, because you will, you’ll be able to respond with self-compassion, awareness, and a sweet alertness to what is changing inside of you.

In short, and because I love you, I encourage you to start noticing what you’re feeling and when. And next time you write the poem that breaks open someone else’s trauma and lays bare all they’ve been struggling with, and they email you to thank you for showing them they aren’t alone, you can turn around and thank me. No, that’s not right; thank yourself. But start. And then tell us what feeling you’re most curious about today.

Extra Resources for the Shadow-Curious:

Shadow Work for Poets: Prompts to Guide Your Poetic Journey by Dimitri Reyes and Jacinia Perez 
Shadow Work Journal for Self-Love by Latha Jay and Valerie Inez
The Benefits of Shadow Work and How to Use It On Your Journey

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post Uplevel Your Life: Using Poetry for Shadow Work appeared first on DIY MFA.

So many buts. There are bills to pay, mouths to feed, and a Starbucks/Amazon addiction to indulge in. 

Well, do not despair. I have good news for you, my friend. You don’t have to quit your high-powered litigation career to wander around barefoot in the wilds, gathering words like mushrooms. 

You can be a practicing poet. While you pay those bills, think of playing with poetry as a gateway drug to a more meaningful, intrinsically whole, present, and attuned life.

Everyone Can Be a Practicing Poet

I am convinced the social media and real-life addictions we all have to entertainment and distractions, not to mention sugar and alcohol, are masking something real, something needful, some seed deep within us that can only be watered by stillness. 

And, maybe, silliness?

Hear me out. My theory is that we are all poets. All of us. Even Aunt Shelly, the woman who irons her socks, has spreadsheets for every facet of her life, and knows the exact statistics on how much non-fiction one should be reading to stave off dementia in old age. Even engineers. Even medical malpractice lawyers might be practicing poets in disguise.

Just because you can’t spend your mornings reflecting on the sun rising over the top of your beautifully maintained orchids, out the (clean) window onto the front yard whose lawn is mowed, with no worries about a commute and/or dragging the kids kicking and screaming to the bus stop doesn’t mean you can’t find time to pen some poetry. 

There is always time in the pockets. These “dead times,” like waiting in line or between appointments, pick-ups, and drop-offs, are waiting for you to put up your phone and drop some verse. 

Just because these pockets are not oceans is no reason to wait until you retire. You can be a practicing poet right now while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store. 

It’s Biologically Good for You

left shoe untied
four almonds falling
a steady hand reaching out

The little Haiku poem above might not look like much, but while I was standing in line thinking of these words, rearranging them in my head, and then writing them down, something amazing was happening to me. The parts of my brain associated with memory, recall, and emotional processing lit up like Christmas. These are the same areas that are triggered when we are relaxed but focused. Think: having an interesting conversation with a good friend versus zoning out in front of the TV. Becoming a practicing poet is good for you, even at a biological level.

Writing also engages both the analytical and emotional sides of our mental processing. It’s like doing a whole-body workout, but for your brain. I think we can all use more of that.

Will People Make Fun of Me?

Probably. Do you care? 

If they like you, they’ll probably want to try it too. Odds are they’ll be amazed you’re writing and confess a long-buried desire of their own to write. 

You might be wondering where you can practice being a poet. I am here to tell you, literally anywhere. Do you think the woman sitting beside you during that 80-minute meeting about who should be included in the next organizing committee is writing notes related to work? I guarantee she’s making her grocery list. Or figuring out how much she needs to save to make it to Barbados this winter. Or she’s read this article and is trying to figure out what rhymes with “this could have been an email.”

What Does a Beginning Practicing Poet Read?

To write poetry, it helps to read it. Maybe even start by reading it. Let me assure you that poetry is not reserved for PhDs in literary theory. Poetry is humankind’s deep connection with self and nature, boiled down to snack-sized sound bites you can chew on your way to work. Or while eating that Keto, gluten-free, low-sugar breakfast bar.

Here are a few books to get you started:

A Year With Rumi (Daily readings) by Coleman Barks Pull in one poem a day and watch your life transform. I have read this cover to cover and keep re-reading it. There is one poem for every day of the year. They are short, powerful, and lovely.

Here are a few others I haven’t read but are on my Bookshop waitlist. Flowers waiting to be picked, you could say.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work. I am sold. 

The 100 Best Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell This one is rated well and benefits from many different poems and poets. I hope to find another favorite author here, and you might too. This is a good start if you aren’t sure what kind of poems you like.

I used to work on poems while I worked at a call center in my twenties between calls. I must have done something right, they made me a supervisor. So, there you are. Subjective proof that writing poetry is good not just for the brain and the soul but also for your career.

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies.

You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post Become a Practicing Poet appeared first on DIY MFA.

The Narrative Poem

The poem below is a narrative poem, and as you can guess from the name, it is poetry that tells a story. These types of poems don’t need to rhyme, although they’re punchier when they do. Greek poet Homer’s epic poems The Odyssey and The Iliad are narrative. But I’m not talking about ancient Greek poems; this one I will share is more… Canadian Gothic. (Trademark pending.) 

The Cremation poem is a grisly, Gothic story of two friends mushing their way along the Dawson Trail, looking for gold. Spoiler alert: one of them dies.

The Moment

I’m sitting in a small Canadian classroom at the end of January 1992. The top songs on the radio are “Jump” by Kris Kross, “Tears In Heaven” by Eric Clapton, and “Song Instead of a Kiss” by Alannah Myles.

My English teacher is reading The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. It was just after recess, and our hair was still sweaty from our wool hats, our cheeks stinging and red from the below-freezing temperatures of a typical East Coast Canadian winter. Technically speaking, we weren’t allowed to have snowball fights at school (the ghost of a boy who lost an eye floats to my memory), but we knew where the blind spots were.

The Cremation of Sam McGee was set during the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800s, so we were whirling back through time as she spoke. Snowballs were reversing themselves, urban sprawl rewinding backward until all were forest, glen, and frozen ponds, and we stood, breathless, terrified at the wildness around us. 

The Storm

Our teacher tapped into something in our collective psyche that day — as another snowstorm darkened our classroom windows and tossed small white flurries of snow that would add up fast. The blizzard that started that day closed schools for five days, dumped over five feet of snow, and caused 19 deaths, four directly related to the storm.

I hope reading this won’t trigger another epic storm, but if it does, I warned you. There’s magic in The Cremation of Sam McGee, and you can read it here. 

If reading this poem triggers another massive storm, don’t blame me. Blame that whiny Sam McGee. Do you have a similar “first” experience with a poem that made you rethink how you felt about poetry? What type was it? Which one? Tell us all about it!

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post Exposing Yourself to Narrative Poetry: Canadian Gothic-Style appeared first on DIY MFA.

Flash Fiction Is For Beginners

Flash fiction, also known as sudden fiction, short-short stories, microfiction, or microstories, is a genre of fiction defined as a very short story. Flash fiction stories can be as short as six words to about 1,000 words on the long end. Cool, right? Fun, even. And a great place to start if you’re just starting out as a writer.

Flash fiction must have a complete plot, beginning, middle, and end. Great examples holds some sort of surprise or a twist ending with the goal of making the reader think about the story’s real meaning. It isn’t a gimmick. It’s a way to make us think differently about ourselves or the world. The best-known flash fiction story is this one that is often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

There isn’t enough build or history for me to cry, but I feel the commiserate ache in my chest as a parent. Those six words are heavy and sharp, and they cut quickly.

Flash Fiction Is Popular

It’s fun — we got that. It’s a challenge; check. For those of you who still need a push to try this type of fiction, let us assure you the market for it is extensive and is growing. 

A Google search for flash fiction markets nets 9,030,000 hits in 0.47 seconds.

When I check my own Duotrope account, it lists 882 publications looking for flash fiction. Your chances of finding a place for your short fiction work are measurably and reliably higher than a full-length novel. I know we’ve all heard enough about Elon Musk and Twitter, but try your hand at the 280-character “twittature” that includes many different genres, aphorisms, and poetry.

Flash Fiction Is Good For Your Creativity

Forget all the fun my-name-in-print butterflies we’re getting — writing flash fiction will make you a better writer. For the same reason writing poetry will up your writing game; you will need to focus. There isn’t time for subplots, five romantic interests, and an explanation of how our main character got that sexy scar above his (or her) eyebrow. 

Flash fiction is a container to hold us, and in that way, it can free us to shake off the chains that hold our creativity down. It’s like a pottery kiln that fires the impurities and fluff away. Don’t you want to find out what beautiful clay vase you have inside you? Or maybe it’s a hammer or a sword that rights childhood wrongs and frees the child within.

Flash Fiction Practice

So how do we start? Right here, right now. Refill your coffee and get some pen and paper. Start with a nice round 260 words and use these tips to focus your narrative:

• Stick to one moment. Focus on one specific moment in time, one scene. That’s all we have time for. 
• Stay with one or two characters. Again, this isn’t a party, it’s a dinner date with your best friend(s).
• Use imagery that packs a punch. Every word and every image must sear their tongues and linger behind their eyelids after they close them for the night.
• POV: The first-person POV will create an instant connection, BUT flash fiction is for experimenting. Experiment.
• Don’t forget the surprise or twist at the end. That makes good flash fiction great (and it’s more fun). Experiment.
• Include your title. When you have so few words, the title can be the punchline too.

Lastly, if you’re looking for inspiration, the New Yorker has a series of very short stories they just posted last summer: Flash Fiction.

Really lastly, don’t explore too much — just get started and then tell us all about it.

Angela is the DIY MFA community welcome dragon (and protector of the realm). She also serves a supportive role as the HUB community curriculum advisor and social media fun time meme coordinator. In her spare time, Angela is a short, tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. She will send you frosting if you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises. You can follow her antics on her website.

The post Flash Fiction: No Flash in the Pan appeared first on DIY MFA.

As many of you know, I am not only a columnist, but I also work for DIY MFA as the Community Welcome Dragon. I handle many of the emails to free Gabriela and the crew to focus on creating new courses and content for us (ScribLandia, FLOW, and all the awesomesauce new stuff headed our way.)

So hear me when I say we have seen every question about writing known to humankind and probably more. I thought today I would gather the most common questions people ask about starting writing (or starting writing again) here in one place. Voila! I know. I ate my Wheaties this morning.

First, let me put your mind at ease about something we hear a lot, something no one tells you at first:

You can have a day job and be a writer. 

Did you know that sixty-six percent of emerging writers have day jobs? I would hazard a guess that at least half of the rest have someone in their household who is paying the bills for them, allowing them to write. My number one tip for beginner writers is to remember it’s okay to not demand your creativity pay the bills. Flip those pancakes, fix those computers, litigate that jaywalker, and hold your artist head high. YOU are a writer. You contain multitudes. You are a conjurer of beauty and truth. 

Boom! Let’s do this.

Write with Focus

Creating a writing practice we can stick to (or be flexible yet consistent with) is the key to everything else. And yet, staying consistent in our writing and getting our story to the end is the number one problem people ask about. There are loads of techniques like Pomodoro (a time management method based on 25-minute stretches of focused work broken by five-minute breaks), rewarding yourself each time you write, finding a partner to keep you accountable, and so many more. I have used different strategies, often in the same week. Because I am a people pleaser (I know, I’m working on it), what keeps me consistent is having a scheduled time to write with a group of people each day or week. Because it’s scheduled, and other people will miss me if I’m not there, it works! We do this weekly at the HUB! 

But you don’t have to listen to me; listen to Gabriela! Here is a wonderful podcast episode Gabriela did about keeping your creative consistency with Lisa Gardner.

In the end, you are in charge of how much you write and when. As a mom (with the best day job ever), I get the Cirque-Du-Soliel-like acrobatics involved in staying consistent. Let the magic of creating call to you. Don’t give up, and you will find a way.

Read with Purpose

Teaching yourself the craft of writing requires grit and passion—two things you’ll need to keep those 3 am dreams alive. Here are seven essential writing books to get you back on track. Any of these will make a huge difference. If you’re a slow reader, try Audible versions, or find an online book club so you can also jump in and benefit from group discussions and analysis. Most of these books are also at your local library and did you know that you can request a book be available at your library if it isn’t already? 

Yes, you can!

Here is a list of seven of the powerhouse essential reading lists for beginner writers:

1. Save the Cat! Blake Snyder
2. On Writing Stephen King
3. Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont
4. Writing down the Bones Natalie Goldberg
5. Now Write! (Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers)
6. The 3 A.M Ephiphany Brian Kiteley
7. DIY MFA Gabriela Pereira

Don’t forget the most fun part of beginning your writer’s education: finding books in the genre or category you want to write. How fun is that? Books about magical women and terrifying dragons? Yes, please!

Build Your Community

Lastly, building a writing community can be a struggle. After all, to do our job, we writers must be perfectly fine alone for hours on end! But building that network is so important to a writing career, and it is also a lot of fun when you find your tribe. Or tribes. 

Gabriela interviewed author and blogger Jeff Goins, all about how to find and grow your writing community no matter where in the world you are. 

Also, I highly recommend joining our Facebook group Word Nerds Unite as a place to start finding like-minded fellow writers. Our community is supportive and encouraging, plus we have a lot of fun!

But what if Facebook, and social media in general isn’t your jam? You are (absolutely) not alone in feeling this way and you can still build your community. There are so many great pop-up writing groups out there who meet daily, weekly, or monthly over ZOOM to just connect and write at a regular time. Finding one that fits you is a matter of using those fingers to google writers groups! 

Prefer building community in real life? Why not do both with a check at your local library. In-person groups that had fallen off during COVID are now getting back together again. If you don’t see one you can always start your own.

Conferences, writing groups, and courses are everywhere these days and it feels like I can’t google ‘how would dragons breathe fire in real life’ without seeing an advertisement for a new writing conference. 

I will leave you with a stanza from poet Jalynn Harris, from the poem The Life of a Writer: 

the life of a writer is desire 

            i hammer into the page 

                        i make up my mind: the streetlight 

As always, we hope this helps in some small way. Thank you for listening to the siren call of creativity. When we are brave enough to chase that dream, we make space for others to do the same. Not a bad place to start.

Did I miss an essential book in your writing repertoire? I’d love to hear what resources have helped you along the way.

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

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It struck me if they were able to read and write, everything they created would be a bestseller. They do not hold back. I had the sudden urge, as I was pouring vinegar in a pumpkin full of baking soda, to rush home and write down everything I was too scared to write earlier this morning. As the pumpkin ‘threw-up’ (SCIENCE!) and they laughed and stepped back and held their mouths or their stomachs, I reminded them not to eat too much turkey at Thanksgiving or they’d throw up too. Then I made fake throw-up sounds because when a toddler laughs, an angel gets their wings.

See? I only spent two hours with these guys and I just wrote the word ‘throw-up’ thrice! It’s working! 

Writing Truth Like a Toddler

Seriously, you know where I’m going with this. To write truth, we need to strip away the layers of social pressure to conform, to fit in, to be cool, perfect, and smart. We need to throw it all away and stare at our base selves in the mirror, in the darkness of our raw fear and write what we don’t want to face, let alone feel.

That’s intense. Let me step back in true toddler style and tell you it is all going to be okay. Someone will help you when you get into trouble. Someone always does. 

If you’re not ready to spill your heart on paper and share it with the whole world, try writing a poem with your family. If you’ve got access to someone’s kids around the ages of four to nine, even better. 

Here is what you do, and hopefully after doing this you will be brave enough to show us who you really are. I want to see who you really are.

Putting Truth into Practice: the Cinquain Poem Exercise

A cinquain poem is a poem with five lines, and each one has a rule. (Toddlers love rules, if only so they know how many they’re breaking.)

Line 1 – one-word title

Line 2 – two words that describe the title

Line 3 – three action words about the title

Line 4 – four words that express a thought or feeling about the title

Line 5 – one word that means the same thing as the title.

This is a collaborative exercise – best done while Thanksgiving dinner is being made so as to have fun AND keep the littles out of the kitchen.

Here is an example we came up with:

A Turkey

Brown and juicy

Running, gobbling, flying

Surprised turkey is sad

Dinner

As you can see – this is easy and fun and kids love working together to create something new. Don’t be surprised if there are some bodily function words that come up that aren’t acceptable during dinner time conversation. This is for the laughs, as bodily functions are hilarious and make grown-ups huffy.

Are you a teacher or a parent of young children? What type of poems have you tried? What’s the most surprising thing that came out of creating poetry with children?

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native who grew up a stone’s throw from Stephen King’s Maine. She now lives in Texas and sees Chuck Norris on the always. Angela is a short tall-story-teller who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you Cilantro seeds. She lives with her husband, two human children, and three fur babies. You can follow her antics on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

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Writing, like reading, transports a soul. This is also true. Even if you’re only in it for the money and fame (ha, ha), if you keep at it, you will discover things about yourself and the world you could know in no other way. Writing changes you. It changes who you are. What you want. And, if we’re lucky, we get to pay the bills with it too.

Do you know what’s also true? Writing a novel isn’t all sunshine and unicorn butts. 

Whether you think being creative ennobles your life or not, I think we can all agree that when we create, something worthwhile emerges from the process. Whether we are playing with poetry, short stories, memoirs, or a fantasy about a girl and her dragons, each of us gains a small or large reward when we put pen to paper. This alone makes writing worthwhile and makes a life lived in pursuit of that exploration purposeful, fulfilling, and, dare I say…magical? 

My truth is that I would not trade this passion for all the gold in the world. Thank you to all the planets raining diamonds right now, but give me my stubby pencil and some lined paper, and I will be enthralled for all the ages. 

Starting a Project (opening the door to wonder and mystery)

Is there anything better than the beginning of a new project? The first sketch of an irresistible plot? When your main character bursts from your imagination onto the page? Then you watch as your friend reads it, and now that character that only lived in your own brain is now living in hers, too. What more thrilling kind of magic is that? Talk about sunshine and unicorn behinds.

In the shiny new beginning, it’s not hard to find the fire and passion that brought us to chase that thought or character through the rabbit hole of our pages. A fantastic new world awaits us. Literally, anything could happen.

Let’s move deeper for a quick second. Do you ever stop to think that our words can reach minds in far-off countries we may never visit? Our thoughts can reach into the future to minds not even alive yet. Our work as creatives comforts us in our darkest hours, inspires us, enrages us, and reveals the cracks and faults of ourselves and our societies. I ask again – what more potent kind of magic or technology is there? If you haven’t even started, goodness, what are you even waiting for? 

The Elephant Graveyard (the bones of our abandoned ideas)

Then, if we persevere, we get to the middle – that phase of the process where we need to buckle down and finish. This is where the elephant graveyard is. This is where our story sparkle can stall. 

The bones of our previous attempts are scattered around us, and the sky turns a dull shade of bruised blue. We are filled with anxiety, doubt, inertia, and overwhelm. For me, this looks like pushing through the middle even though I am absolutely convinced no one will ever read what I’m writing, and no one ever should. I am a fraud, a sham, a talentless hack with no business asking anyone to read even one word. The force that drove me to put pen to paper has fizzled. The demands and drudgery of daily life that must be done start to get louder. Because bills need paying and someone needs to buy the darned groceries. And because writing takes time. It needs space and room to grow, and I need to be a little pushy about my writing time. No one else will do this for you or me. Getting stuck isn’t the end; it’s just a mood that will pass as you keep writing.

Here, among the solitude of your abandoned works, you must grieve. Sit down and give a good, cleansing cry over the realization this isn’t going to be the easiest thing you’ve ever done. You remind yourself that almost everyone feels this way about the middle. There is some grit needed in this place. You, kind reader, have that grit. 

Completing the Process (the incomparable feeling of writing ‘the end’)

From beginning to end, the writing process takes time and intention, and being with our work to the end builds trust in ourselves and our work. I have committed myself to finishing what I started. There are large and small rewards to this, too. Completing the creative process feels liberating, a shot across the bow of fate. Finishing is a flare of fiery hope into the ragged darkness of our doubt. Because if we did it once, we can do it again. And next time, it’s going to be even better. 

To sum up, when your story stalls in the middle, and it will, you can just toss out the ‘beat myself up’ playbook and the ‘this means I’m not a real writer’ primer, sit down, and get it finished. Finish it rusty if you have to, but finish it. That’s the secret no one tells you. There is no secret. It’s just inspiration and tenacity that will get you to the end. That and a boatload of Cheetos. 

And remember, adventure and comfort are never farther away than the closest book or the nearest pen. You got this!

Tell me, what project are you in the middle of that you would like to finish?

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native that lives and works in the great state of Texas. Angela loves to garden, write about dragons, and eat cake. She is the proud author of her debut YA fantasy novel, A Phoenix Rises, a finalist in the Dante Rossetti Book Awards for YA for 2021. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and three cranky fur babies. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram or her website.

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About Lesley Wheeler

Lesley Wheeler’s latest book and debut work of nonfiction, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, was published in May 2022 by Tinderbox Editions. A hybrid of memoir and criticism informed by the cognitive science of “literary transportation”–getting lost in a book–it reads 21st-century poetry with academic depth and personal significance. Wheeler is also the Poetry Editor of Shenandoah and the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at W&L University. Her poetry reviews have appeared in the Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Strange Horizons, and many other journals.

Interview with Lesley Wheeler

Angela Yeh: You have a full-time job, a family, and are the poetry editor of the Shenandoah. How did you ever find the time to write Poetry’s Possible Worlds?

Lesley Wheeler: I am not capable of writing in long forms at all during the school year. I need some concentrated time to do that. I can write poems in fragments in an hour here and there. You can take an hour to get the bones of a poem down and another hour to revise what looks like a poem. I don’t think nonfiction works that way.

AY: Right. I think about poetry as the Instagram of the literary world. Longer fiction takes time and space to focus on. I liked what you wrote about poetry as a whole world that people don’t often associate with poetry. Can you tell us a little about that?

LW: Poetry has world-building qualities. It’s trying to build little universes that transport readers. I think people have underestimated the extent to which that is true: that poetry has the power to conjure another world fast.

AY: I love the concept of poetry writing as building little universes, and I feel the same. I’ve gotten just as lost in a poem as I have a longer-length work of fiction. Have you had any push-back to the idea that poetry can transport you as much or more than novels, for example?

LW: I may at some point, but haven’t yet! I often feel that when I’m absorbed into any work of literature, when my attention is controlled, I’m stepping over a threshold into an alternate universe. For that reason, I think all literature has a kinship with fantasy fiction. Poetry and fantasy are more related than they are different, although some literary worlds seem more familiar than others. Genre is a continuum more than a set of cleanly separate categories.

AY: There is a lot to unpack there. I love this idea of literary transportation you write about – I have experienced this many times in my life, both when I read and when I write but can you tell us a little more about what you think is going on when this happens? How do you think reading and writing create change in people? 

LW: There are simple ways literature changes us that people don’t often think of; reading, for instance, changes your memories. The brain doesn’t always distinguish between what you’ve experienced and what you’ve read. Reading can add to our store of experiences that we identify with. 

Also, experiencing literature or entering what is sometimes called flow physically changes us – it can change our pulse and respiration. I find it to be a profoundly soothing experience when I am transported. It’s a lot like prayer and meditation. And, of course, literature can occasionally change people’s minds and influence their politics. I have a colleague, for instance, a cognitive scientist named Dan Johnson, who has researched people’s prejudices before and after reading a tale of an Arab American woman’s experience. He finds alterations in people’s prejudices immediately after reading. 

This is great, and one hopes that is true, but the research on that is still unfolding.

AY: Right, we don’t yet know how long those alterations last.

LW: Right. I don’t think it’s 100% clear yet. Does it change your potential sympathy for a real woman in the world, or does it only operate in the abstract? I think it’s very hard to determine to what extent reading makes us better people, although we want that to be true. All of us readers feel good about what we do. But it also could be true, as Suzanne Keen suggests in her book Empathy and the Novel, that I spend less time in activism because I spend more time reading and writing literature.

One famous example of literature’s real power in the world was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the 19th century, it influenced abolitionist arguments and eventually affected legislation. I just don’t think it happens very often. 

AY: Right. I just read ‘The Moon is Down’ (title inserted post interview) by John Steinbeck. Someone had recommended it to me after our conversation about the war in Ukraine as an example of literature affecting the war. But it shows that we can only think of two or three right now.

LW: Yes, exactly.

AY: Changing track here for a  minute, you write that there are risks to reading personally as a critical practice – what does this mean to you? What am I risking when I read personally as a critical practice?

LW: I worried, as I was writing, that I was centering myself as opposed to centering the poems. I worried especially about that as a white writer. Being a critic and writing about my love of poetry is service to poetry. It is bringing new work to other people’s attention. But writing a memoir about reading other people’s poetry is tricky. Striking that balance in each chapter–between meditation on the poem and unfolding how the poem intersected with my own life—was hard., Poetry’s Possible Worlds took ten years to write, and that’s partly why. It was really important to me not to write a narcissistic book, as if these poems are only important because they influenced me personally. 

Certainly, the poems are worth reading in their own right. 

AY: The poetry was lovely. I would read them a few times and then read your analysis with anticipation. I loved reading your book – critical theory intertwined with the unfolding of your life from the death of your father and what that meant, finally to the death of your mother and how those experiences affected your interaction with the poetry. 

We have a lot of beginner writers concerned about the balance of writing about uncomfortable subjects, between the need to write about trauma and the fear of ‘rocking the boat’ with family members or, what if my mom reads this, you know? I feel like you did this very well. How did you thread that needle for yourself, and what was that like?

LW: How I’ve threaded the needle for myself has changed over the years. I used to write much more frankly about my children, and I now realize it’s completely fair for them to object to that sometimes. One of my revisions to this book was that I took out many references to the specifics of their lives. I was fairly frank about assault and harassment because I’m not interested in protecting the feelings of people who treat others so badly. 

I’ve thought a lot about how my mom read all my books, and some part of me knew that she would not be reading this one. Her death was terrible, but it also enables me to be more frank about my childhood. My father was abusive, and I did not feel defended enough by my mother. That would have been very hard to talk to her about. Even though I miss her very much, there is paradoxical freedom in not worrying about her responses to my writing. 

The most important thing is to ground your stories in your own experience, minimize your speculation into other people’s motives and experiences, focusing instead on what the experience meant for you. What a therapist would call making ‘I’ statements, rather than “you did this to me.” 

AY: Right, that is fantastic advice, thank you. Being brave and open about our experiences improves our writing, and the reader is better off too. I will take that advice for myself, thank you. So, to wrap up, what would your advice be for anyone looking to get into writing and reading poetry today?

LW: The advice is the same that many people give: read a lot. Find what you love, and study how it’s put together. Something I did a lot at the beginning was focus on contemporary authors’ first poetry collections. I would also look at the acknowledgments page to see where they had published, so I could go to those magazines and see if I could submit there, too. The acknowledgments page is a pretty valuable guide to the literary ecosystem. My second piece of advice is to treat writing and publishing as a research project. Learning the skills and craft takes a long time, but you must also research how the publishing world works. Finally, if you’re not going the MFA route, as I didn’t, I think the smaller weeklong or weekend workshops are tremendously helpful. 

AY: Ah, yes, the acknowledgments page! Brilliant. I know you’re busy, so thank you for speaking with me today and sharing your insights about poetry.

You can find out more about Lesley on her website or follow her on Twitter or Instagram! Be sure to check out Poetry’s Possible Worlds for yourself.

Angela Yeh is an East Coast Canadian native that lives and works in the great state of Texas. Angela is a black belt wanna-be who loves to garden, write about magic, and eat cake. If you’d like to check out her first published novel, A Phoenix Rises, she will send you cookies. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and three cranky fur babies. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram or on her website.

The post Lesley Wheeler Shares How to Take Poetry Personally appeared first on DIY MFA.