River Elizabeth Hall : part one

River Elizabeth Hall (she/her) is a poet, and naturalist. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bear Review, Cirque, Main Street Rag, Nimrod, and Tinderbox, among many others. Her chapbook, Call a Body Home, was a semi-finalist in the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition. She leads generative creative writing workshops through Seattle Writers Circle, an Amherst Writers and Artists inspired community of writers. For more about her writing and other offerings, visit www.RiverElizabethHall.com.

Photo credit: Tristan Reidford

What are you working on?

My goal is to assemble a full-length collection of poetry by the end of 2022. However, it feels odd to say, “I’m working on a full-length,” because really I’m more focused on building poem by poem, line by line, or even word by word. I am beginning to track emerging themes and subthemes, ideas and motifs, but right now my focus is on making each poem shine as I move along. I’m getting closer to the initial assembly, but if it goes anything like my chapbook process I will probably take it apart and put it back together 50+ times while crying, and then, eventually, one day I will think to myself: 

“Oh my god, I did it.” 

It would be great if it was easier than that, but I’m not banking on it. I am finding that to assemble a collection of any kind requires a great deal of faith in oneself. Faith is something I’m a little short on in general and because of that, this process is an invitation for me to grow as a poet and a person.