I can easily say that I would never have become a poet without the first workshop I attended as a high-school dropout earning her AA degree at the local junior college. That workshop was revelatory for me. For the first time, it gave me as a sixteen-year-old the feeling of having a voice that mattered, and I wanted to feel that way more. But something changed as I wrote my way through my MFA and PhD and creative writing postdoc. The workshop became a space that felt competitive and stifling, and I quickly found I couldn’t produce anything true when I had to perform in those spaces.
I wrote the bulk of my first book, The Local World, while living abroad, both physically and emotionally about as far away as I could get from the performative pressures of the workshop. It helped that creative writing didn’t exist as a field of study in Poland, where I was living—as the conventional wisdom goes there, if you want to be a writer, you learn by reading and writing! But I didn’t have the luxury of distance with the next book, for which the pressure of the workshop was replaced by the pressure of earning tenure.
To my surprise, in therapy during the first year on the tenure track, I didn’t find myself talking about my marriage or my childhood or all the things I was juggling as a mother working full-time. Instead, I talked about my relationship with poetry. If this was a midlife crisis, then it had to do with finding joy again in writing. With letting go of the pressure to climb that endless ladder of achievement and publication and pursuit of accolades. With building a sense of belonging to a community of fellow writers and artists instead. After a few months, I put the collection of sonnets I’d just completed in a drawer and started working on a whole new manuscript, one that felt like what I really wanted to be writing.
How do poets figure out what kind of writer they are for the long haul? What does it mean to maintain creative integrity, regardless of success or failure? Though it took me eleven years to publish my next book, , I know that the book is true. It comes from a decade of re-centering myself in the joy of writing: being so immersed in the work itself that all pressures fall away. I wrote the poems from that feeling of immersion and out of a deep sense of commitment to exploring the connection between sexual aggression
