How did you first engage with poetry?
When I was about 5 years old I wanted to be a painter. There was this underground tunnel that connected my elementary school to the middle school next door where my mother worked and no one was allowed to go through the tunnel except me, in winter, as my mother would drive me home after school. There was an art room in the tunnel with frames and canvas and paints and I was so small and the tunnel seemed so large and dark and this art room smell of paint and oil and wood and musty humid tunnel was only mine and it felt special. We got to use the art room one day for class and I was so excited, I made what I know now to be an abstract but then was just an excitement of painting and no skill. I was so proud of it. My teacher saw my painting and said no, that’s not what you were supposed to do, you should have done it like this and she showed me another student’s painting which was like a ship the way a kid would draw a ship. Half circle, a line up the middle, a triangle sail.
I was devastated. I was a sensitive kid and the teacher didn’t know that would affect me so much. It wasn’t her fault but I never painted again after that. I covered up that desire with a sheet.
The next year I had a teacher named Mrs. Dawson. She had this recipe box, like a little rectangular box filled with little rectangular pieces of paper and on each piece of paper was a writing prompt. Stuff like, “You’re in a hot air balloon and you can’t make it land, where does it go? What do you see?” or “You’re on a beach and you find a glass bottle with a letter in it from far away, what does the letter say?” Stuff like that. I was a bright kid and eager to learn and I’d finish my work early and she had me write stories from those prompts to keep me busy and sometimes she’d have me read those stories in front of the class. She was very encouraging. I was a quiet kid and shy and that experience helped me find a voice through writing, an outlet for that special feeling I used to have aimed toward painting.
Then I had a hard time as a teenager. I was bullied and made fun of a lot. No matter what I did I was judged. Harshly. I started writing poems and journals because I wasn’t judged there. I could write whatever I wanted and the page never judged me. I used to write letters to an imaginary woman named Sophia, I told her all my secrets. I’ve never told anyone about that. And I still remember the first poem I wrote: it was an acrostic of the name of the girl in my class that I liked. I always had a crush on every girl, as I’ve gotten more comfortable with myself as an adult that’s become a crush on every person. I want to write an acrostic for every person.
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