"This is a place..."

"This is the Place"

This is a place

where dreams live,

imagination dances,

and happiness

is only a brushstroke away.

This is a place for stories,

for musings,

for half-baked ideas

(and full-baked doodles).

Free verse or whole verse,

locked-up verses and curses

wishes, and fishes

swimming in stanzas;

Musings and choosings,

"Why one versus another?"

This is that place.

That place-- of no reason at all,

other than "just because."

Because we need this place--

a place to be free,

to be ourselves--

the community of Me,

not judging or editing.

This is the place, where value comes simply

from existing, from reveling

in our own searing beams of light.

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In college, I took a series of creative writing classes. I loved writing all through high school, and I wanted to be able to do more of that in college. The professor that I had for the series of 3 classes over a year and a half left a permanent mark on me as a writer.

This professor (while I understand the need to have high standards, and I have no doubt that she, deep down, was trying to motivate me and improve my writing skills), I believe, took it as a personal challenge to see how many synonyms she could find for the word "cliche" and apply them to my work. "Hackneyed," "trite," "predictable," and "overdone" were a few that popped up quite frequently. As I said, having had the past decade to reflect on this, I do truly believe that at least on some level she was trying to improve my writing.

But, as a person who consistently overachieved at everything I tried, I did not take well to her motivation methods. Oh, I kept the classes, I tried to write to please her, and I really did try to learn from her criticisms. But she had killed the joy in writing in me. I felt ignorant. I felt stupid. I stopped writing poems or stories just for myself. I convinced myself that I was a hackneyed, cliched, boring uneducated writer, and that I "couldn't write."

This followed me into my jobs. "Oh, I can't write that," I'd say if asked to write a press release or text for a brochure. "I'm not good at writing. Give me the base text and I'll edit it a bit, or I can design around it, but I can't come up with the copy."

It was at the Formational Prayer seminar in January 2016 that I realized how deeply the wound of "Hackneyed" still carried into my life and affected me. I realized how much hatred I had for the monster-ized version of that professor in my memory. I realized how much I had denied my true self in cutting off the writing of fun stories or silly poems or free verse musings. All I'd done in the last ten years was limit myself. It hadn't affected the professor one way or another that I stopped writing. I only shortchanged the world from hearing my voice, and I shortchanged my soul from expressing itself in that way.

So, this blog in an attempt to change that. I want to write. I want to improve my writing. I want to return to poetry, which is a genre I have always loved. From time to time, I'll be posting poems, for discussion or feedback, but mostly just to reteach the injured college student in my brain and reassure her that "Yes, you are a writer."

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