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When The Regal Renegade said she was participating in the 2011 A to Z blogging challenge, I was intrigued, and decided to play along.  When I was writing poetry in my 30’s, I loved challenges to use a new form, or pick random words, or other ways to nudge myself into traveling somewhere unexpected in my writing.  This blogging challenge has the same potential for exploration, and so during the month of April 2011, I signed up to be posting each day except Sundays, with each of the letters of the alphabet.  This also appeals to my previous incarnation as a librarian, and flipping through the card catalog, a deck of new worlds, voyages in each card.

The first word I thought of for A, was Artist.  I haven’t written poetry in a few years, and instead having been making art, but as a poet I was also an artist.  Imagery formed the body of my poems, especially visual and tactile senses.  At first it was difficult to imagine I could be a visual artist, because I imagined myself as a writer, as if this made all other arts impossible.  I have learned though that creativity is the spring that feeds all the arts, all the generative, budding beauty in our lives.  When we become good at something, this does not mean we must always do it.  This was a struggle at first for me, since I had done an MFA in poetry, sent my poems to journals, had them published, won grants, built an identiy as a poet.  It can be scary letting go of something that seems like a structural support, something that prevents the roof from caving in, but which actually rests on the foundation of creativity above all.

Over at Stratoz:  A is for After this and After that