My truth, in fact, is more nuanced; I didn’t reinvent myself so much as I returned to myself.

After receiving my master’s degree in English with a creative writing concentration from Florida State University in my early 20s, I knew I didn’t want to teach. I had no interest in pursuing a Ph.D. I had done some writing for the student newspaper, which allowed me to build a portfolio of news clips I used to market myself as a journalist. I ended up working for various weekly papers and a trade magazine until I finally landed my dream job, directing communications at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine.

But about 10 years into that job, and five years into a new marriage, I began to feel like something was missing. I started writing again, resubscribed to Poets & Writers, & found an editor in the P&W classifieds. I sent that editor maybe 60 poems I’d amassed over the years — of which, she said, maybe 10 had potential. That was humbling…and just what I needed.

I kept writing, kept revising, and began to more consistently send my work to literary journals. I also set a goal of publishing a book (I love the Robert Browning quote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” It just feels so perfect for the things I aspired to earlier in life, and to some extent, still do. ) I started small, sending to chapbook competitions and open reading periods as I didn’t have enough poems for a full-length. In 2016, my first chapbook, The Heart Contracts, was published by Finishing Line Press. In 2019, my second chapbook, Accommodations, won the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award.

Those publications were huge confidence builders, but it was a few years before I began working on what would become my debut full-length collection, The Grief Committee Minutes (2024, Saint Julian Press.) This past February, 17 months later, Bloodstream, my second collection would be released from Mercer University Press. What a journey it has been!

In my presentation, I used my personal poetry journal as “hook” to talk about how someone hoping to rekindle an old passion, or cultivate a new one in an intentional way, might go about pursuing that path. Not everyone’s passion will involve a transactional element, but I told folks to take what was useful and leave the rest!

· Look for Kindred Spirits

· Tune Out the Noise

· Set Goals and Visualize Success

· Be Patient, Be Consistent

· Get Comfortable with Self Promotion

This was the first PowerPoint presentation I’ve given in years, and the only one I’ve ever put together that focused solely on my poetry journey. It was rewarding in a way I hadn’t expected it to be, as putting together the slides was an opportunity to lookback at my life and my writing milestones and reflect on what they had meant to me. Equally or even more rewarding, though, was the warm welcome and response I received from the two dozen or so women who were present for my talk today. They seemed to be thinking a lot about their own lives and interests.

Although I’d taken a few poems to read after my talk, I only had so much time; the business meeting, which my presentation had followed, ran long, and I’d been given 25-30 minutes. It was pretty clear I wasn’t going to have time left over, with lunch being prepared in the kitchen and all these ladies on a schedule! I told them I’d be happy to come back anytime and talk more about my poetry, my writing process, my poems and my books, but that wasn’t going to happen today. After some engaging discussion and a delicious lunch, the group president told me she was already adding me to the calendar for next year to give a poetry reading.

I left the meeting host’s beautiful home with a full stomach and a full heart.