I started writing in high school. Mostly journaling. Always pages that were torn out and then thrown out because I was so scared they would be found.
I started writing short stories in college.
I still have the first chapter book that I wrote – and didn’t finish. It has traveled four laptops and two external hard drives. I don’t know if I’ll ever complete it, but at a minimum I should go back and reread it.
Andrea Gibson died today, and it hit me hard. Much harder than I think it should for it being a complete stranger. At the same time, I remember reading their poems. I remember my eyeballs glued to my computer screen watching Andrea Gibson perform “For Eli”. Their body language, hands dancing back and forth from their body to the microphone stand. It was their words. It was their voice. It was also the fact that I knew people who joined the Army before we graduated high school. I almost became one of them. I remember crying while listening.
And that’s what happened today while I relistened to that video I saw in 2007.
I didn’t start writing poetry until the pandemic. But when I did, they were one of the first poets I went back to for inspiration. And when I started, I couldn’t stop. I started performing. I had a few poems published. And when I moved and writing started to feel hard, poetry was the first thing I stopped doing consistently.
Over the past year, I’ve written a few poems here and there on my computer or in my phone. I’ve written dozens of verses of incomplete poems in my head. Sometimes, when I’m driving I will record myself talking as though I’m saying a poem into the world because I’m driving I can’t write it at the same time. And when I do this, I see myself in my head performing on stage with a microphone in the darkness. I think about my body language, my hands, my face – my voice.
I don’t know why I’ve been hesitant to get back into writing poetry again.
I didn’t know what to write about this week.
I cried hard twice in the past seven days, maybe three times. I haven’t been sleeping great, but I’m trying to settle down better at night. I went to a fitness class last week and I really want to go back. I had a board training on Saturday that went well. We’re at the beach trying to be on vacation.
But none of these were things that sparked me to write. It was a struggle to sit at my computer to put thoughts to the keys.
When I read that Andrea Gibson died this evening, I starting crying. I texted a friend and starting jotting notes in my notes app on my phone. And I knew that this is what I needed to reflect on – why I write. What it does for me – not necessarily the content that I’m creating. Sometimes I get stuck because I can’t figure out the perfect thing to write. I’ve used prompts in the past when I struggled to write organically – I may use those this week, or at least once.
I also want to dig back through some of those who have inspired me, motivated me, and made me feel less alone. That’s my homework for the week.
