Here’s a peek inside my early introduction to poetry: I came across Tennyson’s collected works, an 1880s copy in a used bookstore when I was 15. I took it home and started reading voraciously – I loved the imagery of “The Lady of Shalott”:

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

The poem foretold, in a way, the writerly wasteland that I’d find myself in for a few years: I didn’t know any other poets as a teenager, and anyone I told that I wanted to be a poet gave me the hairy eyeball. Next, I discovered Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, female poets with a strong confessional style that I’d incorporate into my own work. But their suicides left me desolate. Is that what became of women poets? In college, I wrote my 50-page senior thesis on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse because I was fixated on the idea of women writers needing a space or room of their own to write, without having any sort of specter (mother, patriarchy, spouse, etc.) hanging over, negatively influencing the work.

Fast forward to now, writer me at age 37. I’m a magazine editor, poet, wife and mother of two. I’ve published one poetry chapbook, Arrangement of Desire, and am looking for a home for my second collection, Necessary Work. The reality of my life, as is most working mother-writers’ lives, is that there never seems to be enough time to do everything. So what do we do? Write at midnight. Work out at 6 am. Steal 15 minutes to hide in the bath tub after bedtime and write down the bones of a poem. Read our children snippets of poems we love. Read our husbands our poems and ask for feedback.

I joined Minerva Rising as its media director almost six months ago. It’s an answer to the question I start asking in college: Where do women go to write? Where do women writers find each other? I’ve given poetry readings between two very rough pregnancies and babies in the NICU. I’ve corresponded with other women poets online in the hopes of finding a mentor or poetry reader for my work. I found Minerva Rising while I was browsing Duotrope, and I loved its mission: to honor the creativity in every woman and offer a space for women to explore, share and grow that creativity.

In the short time that I’ve been on staff, I’ve had the great fortune to be part of choosing the Owl of Minerva Award recipient – Chelsey Clammer, who plans to fund a woman-centric writing retreat that will take place in a cabin in the middle of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I was humbled by the number of applications, which ranged from stay-at-home mothers who wanted to go to a retreat to jump-start their novel to women who wanted to visit their family’s homeland to write about a grandmother whose life had been lost in shadow. All of us are women writing our way out of chaos, loss or sorrow; writing because we can’t not write; writing because it’s the way we tell our stories and that of our foremothers.

Minerva Rising is that space or room for women to gather, write and grow their creativity. In this blog entry, I wanted to share a poem with you, “Blessings and Stones,” that was first published (and since revised several times) in my first chapbook. Of course, Woolf also committed suicide, another woman writer overtaken. In this poem, I paid homage to Woolf’s (and Sexton’s and Plath’s) quest to find that space to be creative; my take was that each of our lives is an act of creation. We are creatrix; we are writing, sculpting, painting these lives into poetry, pottery and wall murals. I’m honoring the creatrix in each woman.

Weary, I fill

my pockets with stones,

and walk with my leaving

into the River Ouse. A simple

declaration: I can’t go

 

If each failure is a stone,

dark weights carried

to death, what could ever suffice

to balance them?

I have a feeling

 

I shall go mad

if I stay with my ripening

heart in this life.

What’s this substance

that washes over me, as I walk

as if going out

to meet God? Desire

 

for wings, for time to change?

My neck contracts: You see, this here

is living. I’ll behold my passing.

Is the failure walking

into the river, or not

looking back?

 

My blessings will all return to dust

(desire’s fire never lets up

till it rests in thee) –

but my bones, these teeth, spine’s spires,

will root me here, in the way I loved …

 

If you haven’t done so, consider submitting or purchasing a subscription to Minerva Rising for yourself or a friend — join and support a beautiful community of women writers. And, check out (and purchase) our chapbook Two White Beds, by Laura Cherry.