Today, I’m thinking of the fact that writing no longer comes easy to me. I no longer feel as excited about penning down my thoughts as I once did. I published my first book in 2010- a poetry collection- and I thought I would be writing steadily since then. I imagined I would have published more fiction and poetry collections by now. But over a decade later, I have written a great deal- more what I have to than what I want to… and the next book is going to likely be an academic monograph.
I’ve changed as a writer. The wounds I have felt as a person have healed but left scars on my writing hand that make it hard to write; experiences have both sharpened my writing voice as well as left me less driven to share it.
Today as I struggle to think of what to write, and who I am as a writer, I think of my poetry. The very first things I wrote were poems. Poetry- the exercise of expressing the most feeling/thought in the least amount of words possible… using imagery-infused words to paint the canvas of the readers’ heart with empathy… it is poetry that has best evidenced my being a writer over the years, and it is with poetry that I attempt to explain why I am struggling to write, struggling to believe in my writing again today.
