I’ve been known to habitually start newsletters and then abandon them, so I apologize if this comes through to you unexpectedly. I think this habit is similar to my relationship with journals. Recently going through storage bins one was nearly half-full with half-abandoned notebooks, as if starting a new one would give me the motivation to write.

I’m writing today because now a year into my Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, and then two years ago turning back to music and poetry after a long hiatus that engulfed my early adulthood, I’m looking at a life where most of my time is spent in relationship to my creativity and the production of art-writing-music. This is in contrast to the nearly twenty years prior where I had no time or capacity for creativity.

I want to reflect on some of the things that have helped me nurture this life, in case that is useful to you. I want to note that before I could even contemplate having space for creativity, I had to leave work where I was in crisis response for nearly a decade, and that I was only able to do this through the support of family. It took a year for my brain to start to recover from being in constant putting-out-fires mode and believe that the time and effort to make art of my own was worthy. Material conditions are real barriers. But once I was there, the following have been critical:

1. Friends willing to read / listen to early work and give encouragement. Two years ago in the early stages of writing my own songs, I didn’t need criticism. I needed to hear at a basic level if I was making something that could be called a song or not and if it brought some amount of joy and I should continue. Similarly if what I was writing was actually a poem. I’m so grateful to the friends I could put my trust in to do this. I needed to hear that what I was doing was worthwhile or I would not have kept going. You may come across a lot of messages out there deterring artists from needing external validation, but I think this is something humans need. Try to be that human that encourages people to create.
2. Mentors / teachers who could provide a balance of critical feedback and encouragement. Once I had built up my own stores of validation, from myself and trusted friends, I was ready to hear how I could do better. I didn’t want to hear this from just anyone, but from artists I respected who I felt understood my work. I took voice lessons once I had a set of songs for my EP, and I remember my teacher often asking me what note I was trying to sing and then to go for that. Apparently I have a tendency toward the in-between. It was a good lesson in craft, to have intention behind your work that comes across clearly to others. I have received this from my poetry mentors in my MFA program as well, who work to discern what I might be trying to do, and encourage me to hone this toward resonance and purpose. This kind of criticism helps me keep moving forward in a better way.
3. A willingness on my part to dig deep into my heart and excavate the thing I really want other people to hear / read. I attribute this quality to my natal Gemini Moon, but I have a tendency to skip emotional steps and move onto the next thing. I have to force myself to really sit with the emotional core behind the work and understand it well enough myself to bring it out into art. I cried a lot in the first semester of my MFA program, realizing how far I was from what I was trying to do, and the depth of process it would require of me. I’ve found in poetry there is really no where to hide. It is clear to readers what the character of the poet is and how they see the world, and if you skip steps you risk coming across as trite or a flattened “superior-poet” personality. To get beyond this is some of the hardest work.
4. Being willing to be seen and receive criticism from the broader world. This is an area I’m actively working through. When I released my EP I did it through Bandcamp and it took me forever to distribute it to streaming services because honestly I was a bit ambivalent about actually being heard. It sends my heart beating out my chest to play for other people. I just submitted a group of poems that contain a perspective I’m sure some people will hate, and political statements on identity I could see some people I know taking issue with. Part of me hopes they never get published, because if they do everyone will know what a terrible person I am, in theory. I will need to decide whose criticism matters and whose opinions are unfounded and be grounded in who I know myself to be.
5. Another area of growth right now are collaborations. The more I feel solid in myself and my contributions the more exciting it is to work with others and create something new from the interplay between each of our creative processes. It’s like an mature version of play, where the dance, the conversation, is what makes it interesting. You have to be willing to be influenced by others, and I think it is OK to choose your collaborators wisely. It was easier for me to start by collaborating with plants or the river, to allow my head to get full up with inputs on the things I wanted to write about, and from there start to think about other people.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope some of these thoughts inspire you to take a look at your own creative life and see what needs tending. I’ll close by sharing my latest poem that was published in Poetry Northwest, titled “Coyote Poem.”

As Cutcha Risling Baldy writes in her paper Coyote is not a metaphor, “Coyote First Person is not an archetype or ‘character.’ Coyote First Person is discourse and knowledge. Coyote First Person is a building block for decolonization in a modern context and should be explored as an unsettling force that challenges settler colonialism” (9). I had to write this poem as coyote kept appearing to me as I walked in different places along the Santa Ana river this past year. They seemed to be saying they would keep appearing until I wrote a poem about them, and so I did, and haven’t seen a coyote since.