When I tell people, “Fiction is my recreation and poetry is my religion,” I worry that I’m making the first sound frivolous and the second precious, but truthfully, the blocks in my writing have often stemmed from how I’ve characterized the craft of writing poetry. I’ve felt I had to be my best self in poems: lyrical, perhaps a little wistful, always lovely, compassionate, and wise.
Now in middle age, I see I’m no self-possessed sage sitting in my garden, sundressed and hairbrushed, eating berries dipped in cream with clean fingers; I’m a small, petty troll snatching at beauty and munching its wings between mossy teeth. For so long I couldn’t access poems because I couldn’t be who I thought poetry needed me to be. And then because my life didn’t allow me to follow the tried/trite advice, “Have a regular writing practice! Be disciplined!” I felt like a failure. (“Not writing? Not a writer.”)
When I abandoned the old molds and started giving myself permission to produce on my own terms and timeline, I could hear Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath—my poetry patron saints—whispering in my ear, “Sharper. Stranger. Uglier. Truer.” Then the poems, the ones still covered in cocoon-goo, emerged.
—Megan Gannon, author of Dispatch From Every Second Guess
(Dzanc Books, 2026)
Photo credit: Ric Damm