How I Came to Write Poetry

I started writing poetry unexpectedly

when the COVID-19 lockdowns started in March, 2020.

There was something about being isolated that inspired me. I have had a habit of writing daily (not poetry) since 2017. My writing was meditative and spiritual, yet once the pandemic hit, I found that my writing had a poetic tone to it. I felt as if “something” had taken over me. I set it out into stanzas, and was surprised that it read like poetry.

I have come to realize that as my writing grew more intuitive and spiritual, my creativity unleashed and poetry was one of the results. The poetry I write is reflective, even though I find inspiration in expected (nature, emotions, feelings, experiences) and unexpected places (mundane, routine, random words).

Once I started writing poems, I couldn’t stop. Over the course of ten months, I wrote nearly 200 poems. Much of those ended up in my first book of poetry, Embody, and will be published in the other two books that will follow, Embrace and Embolden.

Although my writing fervor has calmed—sometimes several weeks pass before I write a poem—I continue to write, which is why I am working on a fourth book that I haven’t yet fully conceptualized.