1.

In the spring of 2023, I was living alone and falling in love and going on a lot of walks around my neighbourhood in East Vancouver. I was working on the same manuscript I’m working on now, and I remember thinking, while circling a nearby park on one of these walks, that my manuscript was terrible.

I knew it wasn’t. The work wasn’t terrible, but I was struggling with it, and the solution my mind offered up in response to this conflict was contempt. Quickly followed by dismissal: But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not actually a poet, I’m a non-fiction writer. (An obvious deceit.) Easier to believe my manuscript was as bad as I felt, or convince myself poetry didn’t matter to me, than to find a path forwards through the muck.

In this season, when people asked me about my manuscript, I would say something like, Oh, I’m in that phase where I hate my own work.

2.

A few months later, I took a friend who was visiting from California for a river hike in North Vancouver (hi, Bren!). We talked about poetry and writing and I told him that an editor at my dream press had offered to consider my manuscript, but I hadn’t sent her anything yet. I think he may have asked if I was afraid of rejection. Or perhaps, equally, of getting what I wanted.

3.

My manuscript as it existed in 2023 was terrible--in a sense. Not terrible as in “bad,” but terrible as in “repulsive,” or “inciting alarm or fear.” What’s clear now, two years later: These poems are terrible because they’re about the hardest years I lived through, and they’re honest, and what I experienced was terrible and scary. Briefly: a brain injury, misdiagnosis, gaslighting, chronic illness, disability, poverty, isolation, despair.

I spent a lot of last week copying poems from those years from one googledoc into another, one poem at a time, and after reading each one I found myself placing a hand over my heart in an unconscious gesture of both grief and comfort. These poems may be terrible, but in the sense that they tell the truth, they’re also good.

My best guess is that sometimes hating your own work is a natural part of the creative process. But revisiting these poems again made me wonder if the hatred I felt two years ago wasn’t entirely about the quality of my writing or the creative phase I was in. What if the thing I hated most wasn’t the poems, but the reality they articulated?

4.

I considered sharing one of my terrible poems here. Some of them have already been published, in literary journals and anthologies. But I know the only place they belong right now is in my manuscript draft, where all the poems about suffering and survival are in conversation with poems about beauty, desire, and the joy and disorientation of coming back to life.

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Notes & News:

1. I really enjoyed Mandy Len Catron’s essay on reimagining marriage and being, among other things, unapologetically earnest.

2. I’m currently reading Timothy Keller’s book Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World, which makes the argument that there is no truly irreligious human being, as even secularity is rooted in a set of faith beliefs.

3. I’m teaching some poetry workshops at the Vancouver Public Library next week. They’re free, and they’re full—but folks usually get in off the waitlists.