What:
I’ve been writing poetry since elementary school, and though I’ve tried to recall what prompted me to start, I honestly cannot remember. I wonder sometimes if it’s in my blood. My late grandmother, who was a difficult and emotionally distant person in daily life, nevertheless experienced a private, intense love of poetry. I’ve heard stories that she would prop a book up on her ironing board and sometimes become so engrossed that she’d burn one of my grandfather’s shirts. She sent me many books over the years, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Langston Hughes, and in each book she would make a small, precise checkmark on the page of poems she particularly wanted me to read. I look at these books now and try to piece her together, this mystery who created my mother and was responsible for much of her pain. Poetry to me has always been about communication, I suppose, about saying what we fail to say face to face. My parents are not writers but they’ve encouraged me in everything I’ve pursued, for which I am eternally grateful. The only time I quit writing for any stretch was graduate school. I attended the University of Iowa for a PhD in literature. When I arrived, we shared a building with the internationally revered Writers Workshop, and I soon internalized the message—at one point delivered to me quite directly—that I had no right to create poetry, that I couldn’t be a writer because I wasn’t a chosen member of the workshop. It took me years to (mostly) kick that aside and get back to poetry.
Why:
I am a scheduler, an overachiever, a multi-tasker, a manager…I get stuff done, in short, and I never miss a deadline. But when I write poetry, and only when I write poetry, I lose track of time. Hours pass, the trappings of life fall away, the clock disappears even in plain sight. I have to set an alarm on my phone when I need to stop to be in class or at my daughter’s school for pick-up because I will honestly fade into my work. What could be more revelatory that poetry is my passion? I run into trouble when I measure myself against others, but then I try to go back into the work and find that intense focus. As a graduate student and the early years of my professorship, I wrote literary criticism and research scholarship. While I was arguably more successful in that genre than any other—each essay I wrote was accepted by the first place I sent it!—I was also unfulfilled. Although I adored the subjects I researched, the act of writing academic work required me to erase myself and wear a cloak of belonging that never truly fit.
How:
I have sometimes gone months without writing a new poem, but the poems are always there, building up and waiting behind the dam for me to let them through. When my husband was sick with cancer, for example, I wrote nothing because I couldn’t write the words that were spinning in my mind and make them real. I still don’t write about his illness and recovery. Other poems have burst forth that one could argue are addressing the trauma indirectly, but I haven’t consciously been able to say “I’m going to write about Robert’s illness.” I resent and resist advice about things like daily practice or any static model, so what I do should never be read as advice. But I keep a tiny notebook with me most of the time and might write down a line or image as it comes to me. I’ve recorded voice memos to myself on my phone when I’ve been running or driving and a line comes to me. I sit down and write out poems in journals, crossing things out and sometimes tearing out whole pages of junk. My journals are a mess, in other words. I put work on the computer only when I’ve started to think about sharing it in publication form. Something about the ritual of typing on a keyboard changes the poem for me, like I’m acknowledging another stage of its growth. I usually block out a few hours on a Friday each week to work on my writing. Otherwise, I seek little moments here and there. It really can work. My community of mostly women writers keep me going as well.
Jessica Walsh’s Book of Gods and Grudges tells a tale of generational trauma and transcendence. She declares early on that “My first kin were killers,” people for whom “burnout was a luxury” they could not afford. Her speaker struggles through illness and sobriety and grappling with God as a problem she tries to solve as she finds her own calling. The poems are unflinchingly honest and impeccably crafted. They show us what it means to stay “flagrantly alive.” -Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems
Bio:
Jessica L. Walsh grew up in Ludington, Michigan, a small town on the Lake. She attended Kalamazoo College (BA, English and Spanish) and the University of Iowa (PhD, Literature). A professor at Harper College in suburban Chicago, she is also the blog manager for Agape Editions. She is the author of The Book of Gods and Grudges (2022), How to Break My Neck (2017) and The List of Last Tries (2019), as well as two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Tinderbox, Ninth Letter online, and more. Find her on Facebook, Instagram, or at jessicalwalsh.com.
Links:
Jessica’s Website
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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her multi-award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
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