Here’s a short essay on how I write poems, a contribution to the “25th Hour” column at Mothers Always Write, on process and mothering.
As mothers who write, we often stretch and steal and bend time in order to make new work. The writers in this column compose poems in their minds as they rock babies, prepare lunches, or wait in the school pickup line. They carry notebooks in their purses, and write on the back of junk mail envelopes at the post office. These mothers always write, even when we’re not writing.
“In the Margins”speaks to the way I’ve stretched time throughout my life, writing poems since I was young, always at the edge of things.
How do you make time to write? Do you write in the margins of life, too?
Read my essay at Mothers Always Write, then click over to my poem “Sunflowers.”
Melissa Poulin 