Come Hell or High Water

on making a way

My first impulse to write came in the form of a poem. No one noticed. Not my parents. Not my teachers. It blew past them all, landing on deaf ears. In fairness, I missed it too. I didn’t yet understand that some of us arrive pre-wired for a particular way of seeing.

Years later, I wrote another poem after having my first baby. Like a pin dropped on a map, it sat alone for years, no new pins joining it.

Fourteen years after high school, I started college. By then, the urge to write had grown dense and insistent, but I gravitated toward stories in the form of narratives and fiction, as if poetry weren’t enough. I won an undergraduate prize for a poem about my divorce, then dismissed it as a fluke. None of my hard work in fiction won prizes.

When I began preparing graduate school applications, I asked a mentor for advice.

“I can’t decide whether to pursue poetry or fiction,” I told her.

“Your fiction is strong,” she said, quietly steering me away from poems.

In graduate school, I assembled my first book, a short story collection. Poetry receded completely. Outside writing programs, few people realize there’s a hierarchy among genres. Inside them, it’s unmistakable. Poets often place themselves at the top. Fiction writers hover nearby. Others fall lower. I didn’t invent this; I noticed it. My fiction cohort embraced me. Poets, not so much.

Once my book found a publisher, the impulse to write dimmed. I attempted a novel and failed badly enough to feel disgusted. What followed were wilderness years with no project, no center, only frustration. I wanted to write but couldn’t gather myself. Mostly, I complained in short essays about motherhood and marriage. Teaching helped. If I was supporting others who were finding their voices, my own silence felt less like an accusation.

In 2017, I committed to taking and posting one photograph a day on Instagram. What began as a joke became a discipline. Posting any old thing felt lazy, so each day I went looking for light, for story, for something worth framing. My eye sharpened. By the end of the year, I wanted to keep going.

Then it struck me. Could I capture a moment in language rather than image? That’s what a poem is, isn’t it?

“You’re not a poet,” I argued with myself. “You don’t even want to be one.”

I tried anyway. Much to my dismay, it worked. Those few lines didn’t soar, but they hummed, tentatively, recognizably.

The next day I tried again. Same result. Words struck a forgotten chord. The feeling was unsettling. I’m not a poet. Write the poem.

Surrender opened the floodgates. Within six months, I had hundreds of attempts, some of them good. The word poet began to fit.

I reached out to that old mentor and asked her to coffee, to talk about poems. My new confidence didn’t register. “I don’t have time,” she said.

The dismissal stayed with me. I thought back to her earlier guidance, the steady nudge away from poetry. Was my work too plain? Too unsophisticated? I didn’t know. What I did know was that the poems kept coming, urgent and insistent. Evidently, I had some catching up to do.

The idea of a book began to itch. “Too soon,” I told myself. “I’m not ready.”

Not long after, the mentor published her own book, to acclaim. From the back of the room, I watched her receive praise and attention and allowed myself, carefully, to imagine the same. When it was my turn in her book-signing line, I asked, “How many submissions did it take to get a yes?”

She looked at me, that familiar guardedness in her eyes. “Hundreds,” she said, sliding the signed copy toward me and reaching for the next book.

I doubt she meant to encourage me. But she did. If it took her hundreds of submissions, it might take me hundreds too. I had a book to sell, so I began.

Five years and ninety rejections later, my first book of poems sold on attempt ninety-one.

In those five years, I learned a few things. I am a poet. I take pride in that, and I think no less of writers who aren’t. Looking back, the signs were always there: a devotion to language, a lyric instinct, a mind tuned to image and metaphor. The materials of poetry lay scattered at my feet, waiting for time and deprivation to teach me how to gather them.

I don’t fault that mentor. I don’t resent her redirections, conscious or not. Maybe she disliked my poems. Our tastes are different. Maybe she saw something in them that made her wary. I’ll never know. What I do know is this: every time a door closed, I found another way in.

My book will be released in 2026—nine years after the most recent awakening in a decades-long cycle of impulses repeatedly ignored or misread. Like most things that matter, it found its way. If it’s meant to be, it always does.