Lessons of Spring

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Persist, Poetry.

Fern about to unfurl

This poem arrived in my inbox on the 19th. If you thought you’d already read enough poems about spring, I offer it as evidence to the contrary. Temps are reaching toward 70, and I am for it. I’m wearing sandals most days. My toes are painted bright pink with sparkles. It’s poetry month, so I am writing a poem a day, a practice I’ve been doing for so long it seems boastful to count the years. Like the buds and leaves and ferns and peonies shooting up from the earth and beginning to unfurl, this is a generative time.

This is a time when you can go out in the rain and let it shower you, turn your face to it. This is a time when you can walk in the light, reading a book on the bookends of your days. This is a time when you can stop and smell the lilacs blooming. Is there a better time for forgiveness than spring? Is there a better time for giving away the things you no longer need, be they material or spiritual?

Poem-a-day has been extra special this year, since it’s the first year since I started calling myself a poet again. Mind you, I’ve been writing poems since the beginning. Poetry was first. But I bought into this idea that I needed to commit to one thing somewhere along the way. I chose fiction. This is absurd, I know, but it’s the kind of limiting belief we can adopt when we are doing this work in the margins of our days while working our day jobs, raising kids, and cultivating the relationships in our lives. When I entered an MFA program in 2008, I was asked to choose a focus, so I did, and for three years, I worked hard, parented a middle schooler, and taught full time at a school that I was relatively new at, a curriculum I was still learning. Somewhere along the line, I started telling myself I was not a poet, I just liked writing poetry. I know, I know, this whole line of thinking is flawed, but it is the path I went down.

I’ve been writing at least a poem a week since the beginning of April last year over on Inked Voices, a website where writers work together in groups on all sorts of topics: critique groups, accountability, discussion groups, really any group you want to make. At first doubted I could keep up with a poem a week, but I have! Over the last few months, I’ve gone through my archive of poems, adding new ones along the way, and now I’ve got a chapbook and two collections in the works. I’m sending out poems to publishers. I got an acceptance this week—stay tuned for that in June!

I am also still writing fiction, short and long. I love the ability to move between projects, love to play in different forms. My fiction practice is elevated by the work I do in poetry.

I’ve been posting daily prompts all month here in Notes. It’s not too late to hop in and do the last week with us. Even if you’re not “a poet”. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

In this time of growth and new beginnings, what are you becoming now? What new practices are you trying on to cultivate your creative work? What new labels are you imagining for yourself? What labels are you letting go of?

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.