Friday & Favourites Vol. 19

peer into our process

Hello, my dear, dear friends. It is raining outside as I (Emily) write this and I can taste the moisture and the electricity in the air. If there is going to be a power outage tonight, I am ill-prepared….Lightning can strike at any time, before the clap of thunder that echoes out a late warning.

Today we are going to talk about inspiration and the writing process. Sometimes, a poem comes to you like a thunderclap, so you stop everything you are doing and write it down before it escapes you. Sometimes, you have one good line and a poem takes years to finish. There is no right way to finish a poem; not all poems go through the same process. Because poetry is an art, not a science. There is a mystical quality that cannot be measured.

I (Emily) started writing Daughters of Eve, Eat This Scroll last year during Lent. It was a challenge in a Facebook group where we used words from a page of a vintage dictionary to write a poem a day.

the page that inspired Daughters of Eve, Eat This Scroll

My goal during this challenge was to experiment with various forms. And for this poem, I wanted to practice writing prose poems. I wrote in stream of consciousness. I later submitted my prose poem to a critique group which Julia is part of. While the group enjoyed reading it, many felt that the paragraphs didn’t go well with each other. I forgot about this prose poem for months. I let it sit at the bottom of my Google Docs. 

Then in Summer, Poetry Magazine introduced me to a new form, the Burning Haibun. It is a form I wanted to experiment with. I didn’t want to write it from scratch, so I dug up that prose poem I wrote and started to whittle it down to one paragraph. Then I did an erasure on that paragraph. Then I boiled the preceding part into a haiku.

The process for a Burning Haibun is like that. You write pages and pages of word vomitty prose. You boil it down to one paragraph. You make an erasure poem out of the first paragraph. Then you make a haiku out of it.

Journal entries, your word vomits, and forgotten stories will make excellent candidates for this form.

Daughter of Eve, Eat This Scroll, first published in Vita Poetica

I (Julia) wrote this poem on a note in my phone after taking a walk with my infant son. I was tired, yet I felt better than I had in the months since he was born. I’d been inspired by a mulberry that got squished behind him in his stroller. The shocking purple stain, the sun on my face, and the new happy glow I felt—I wrote down what I could of the experience and set it aside. Here’s what I wrote:

They say they’re invasive
I tend to agree
Sidewalk littered 
Hands bled purple
Birds seeking refuge in the branches,
Seeds and fruit
Leaves covered in holes from some sort of insect

Later I went back and began with the line that is now the first line of the poem, and built on the imagery from that initial “sketch.” Once it was finished, I couldn’t even decide if it worked as a poem. The ending felt flat, it was long and awkward… and some stanzas were in the wrong order. I sent it to Emily and she pointed out the line about the internet (which had ended up in the middle of my first full draft) and said she thought the poem started there. I reworked it some more and got feedback from her and a few other key readers and then sent it out for submissions. It ended up finding a home in

Kimberly Phinney

’s journal, The Way Back to Ourselves, where I found even more creative community!

Poetry is not always a lightning strike. Sometimes we receive a poem and write it all in one electric sitting, our pen streaking across the page like bolts of neon. Other times, poems come slowly, and carefully, like a sculpture being carved from marble. It takes skill, patience, and practice to be able to chisel a poem into being. We hope seeing our processes help encourage you in your own endeavors.

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Favourite things this week to spark your creativity:

1. A free e-course on creativity by Stephen Roach.

2. Allegory by Dianne Suess

3. This is a helpful article on whether you are a poet of the body, heart, mind, or soul

4. This is a helpful tutorial on how to keep a commonplace journal.

5. For some good reads, check out this issue of the Clayjar Review.

Thank you so much for reading! May God replenish your creative well and may you all have a blessed weekend!

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