When I look back, I love the path I took to get to this point in my writing career. I took my time. I got rejected. I tried again. I built a family. I kept myself open to opportunities, like working for the Dodge Poetry Festival and for WPSU, an NPR member station. When I felt disconnected, I made new ways to connect, like making a tumblr to celebrate poetic thought and contemplation at http://npmdaily.tumblr.com/. I found ways to keep writing and writing kept finding me.
Writing is one of the most incredible ways to spend your time. It’s consuming. You’re hyper-focused. You forget to eat. You feel invincible, if only because you feel entirely in your head. This is probably strange, but enjoying writing is one of the few things that makes me feel slightly more comfortable about losing my physical self when I die. It’s that powerful to me.
When I taught at TCNJ in the 2012/2013 year, a student came to me and showed me a long piece of writing on her computer. She told me it was the first time she’d written anything for herself—not for a class or to a prompt, just for herself. I could tell she understood that she’d discovered what’s basically a relationship.
Think about it like this… You see a movie with a friend, and then you two talk about it. The movie becomes better, or maybe worse. The jokes become funnier in their retelling. It becomes a new thing, this living through the movie. And it’s just as good as the movie, or it’s totally different and hard to describe as good or bad because no one asks us to.
That’s writing, but without the friend. You experience the world, and then you re-experience it through writing, and everything changes. It deepens. You change the colors of things. You make something absurd. No one was laughing but you write that someone was. The sun comes out. The stars come out too. Then the worms. They were already out. You get to live some part of your life again and live a new life.
I think it’s terribly important. I want it for everyone.
Read some of Sarah’s poetry here.