How A One Year Poetry Apprenticeship Changed My Writing Life
In February 2023, I anxiously logged in to my first cohort meeting with the Loft Literary Center’s Poetry Apprenticeship program. 12 other rectangles with faces that beamed with intelligence and poetic brilliance lit up my screen. Who were these writers? The conversation started, and I felt out of my league already—rusty with the poetry terminology and the names of contemporary poets rolling so readily from everyone’s tongues. Gradually, with the help of mentor and poet Gretchen Marquette, I found my footing and embarked on a trajectory for my work.
Until I started the program, my poetry writing had been precious to me but sporadic. I went on a yearly “writing retreat” with my friends from college (I put “writing” in quotations because we primarily take our snacking and napping seriously on these ventures). I wrote a yearly poem for our Christmas card. When inspiration hit, I would jot down some lines, hoping that someday it might become a poem. In a given year, I might write 3-6 poems.
In my first 1:1 meeting with Gretchen, she had me dream big and set a goal for the year. Her encouragement was to write a book. A whole book of poems….meaning 80+ poems so that I could selectively trim it back to the ones that fit best together into a neat collection of 60ish poems. I felt the rush of a dream taking flight—author a book? Someone cool thinks I can do it in a year and will show me the steps? I set my sights on finishing a manuscript within the year.
Gretchen also started all of us on an intense reading schedule, tailored to our individual styles and the areas we were interested in growing as poets. Having only read select poems from poets, reading entire collections was new to me—and awesome. For the first time, I saw how poets built themes and tension over the course of multiple poems, used repeating images and altered the style of poems to create rhythm and surprises for the reader. I read collections by Victoria Chang (Obit & The Trees Witness Everything), Oliver De La Paz (Requiem for the Orchard), Danusha Lameris (Bonfire Opera), and Devon Walker-Figueroa (Philomath). This doesn’t even count the collections I read for the poets I actually got to meet when they visited our group over zoom—Katrina Vandenberg, Jim Moore, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Michael Torres, and Deborah Keenan.
“Nobody wants their life/to become unrecognizable to them.”
With my “full time job” being poet, I dove in, devoting time every single day to the work of my writing. Amidst caring for my health, my child, and my home, I carved out space for poetry, and the dream began taking shape—with my true self as the loudest cheerleader. In her book, May Day, in the poem, “Split,” Gretchen Marquette writes, “Nobody wants their life/to become unrecognizable to them.” Poetry was becoming a way back to myself, and it was a joyful reunion. By the time the snow melted, I had a couple dozen poems…enough to feel like a book was just maybe possible (don’t be too impressed about my pace, here in MN we still had snow in June…)
A Target parking lot in Minnesota, mid-March, 2023. The lone shopping cart is symbolic of the seemingly impossible task the writer set for herself.
Gradually, I got to know my cohort members, all with unique voices and skills and dreams of their own, and my initial intimidation dissolved into a trust towards these kindred, poetry-loving souls. I have so much more to say about the fabulous writing of these people and the important relationships I made—but more on that another time.
My awesome 2023 cohort in full-Zoom-dorkiness
And now, here I am wrapping up that year, writing an acknowledgments page and trying to settle on a title (stay tuned) for my first full collection of poetry which will be ready to go out to contests and publishers in the new year. I feel like the thing to say right now is, “I can’t believe it.” But I can believe it. I wrote a book by working faithfully with a lot of hope, with a ton of support (babysitters, spouse, friends, Gretchen, my parents, my cohort, Cory), allowing plenty of failure, and just going line by line or bird by bird as someone once said. I’m really proud of myself. I believe in myself as a writer for the first time, and even without my next flight plan, I trust my wings.
