When the Words Write You

Erato,
Muse of Lyric Poetry

The last few days have been an extraordinary experience for me, an effusion of creativity that has exhausted my mind and barely allowed me a few precious hours of sleep each night. Wherever the Muse of Poetry has been in my life in recent years, she has suddenly returned, and is seriously determined to make up for lost time. I would imagine that every writer has experienced the feeling, at one time or another, that the pen grips the hand, bends the fingers around itself, and moves the author with a force over which she has no control. This flow of words is no guarantee that the output will be of high quality; the poems I've been producing recently may seem flat, or trite, or entirely overblown, to the eyes of another reader. In Anne of Avonlea, our beloved heroine describes the characters in a short story she is crafting as willful, unpredictable creatures, who continually escape her control and wreck the story in ways that she must excise or correct heavily within a few pages. Still, there is no denying that when the words are writing you, it's some of the easiest writing you'll ever do in your life, and every author yearns for this state to descend upon her from time to time. Editing will wait until tomorrow; there is no muse of proofing, and rarely any ecstasy involved, either.

16th-century depiction
of Chaos

If the chaos and difficulties of recent months have been the slough through which I must wade to capture a single sentence on paper, the rediscovery of a self that had dreams, and confidence, and an ability simply to let the words flow as they would, in the past few weeks has been the force capable of navigating me safely out of my slump. No writer gets to enjoy the sensation of the words writing her for very long, but while it's happening, I keep my pen and dedicated poetry journal ever handy, my synapses crafting lines even as I'm drifting off at unholy hours of the morning. The reality is that no one but my dearest friends and my older self may ever be interested in perusing these lines again, but the feeling that I am capable of such output bolsters me through a time of cruel uncertainty in so many others areas of existence.