I've been putting together the manuscript for my book which entailed choosing the pieces. From there, I sorted them by content. Interestingly, they fell into some pretty direct categories, not just Love and Death like I thought they would. In fact, as I was writing the Introduction for the book, I read through my poems as arranged in this form and a strange thing happened. They actually came together to tell a story.
Okay, of course I wanted to tell a story but there was always this feeling like each poem is it's own, separate, isolated tale and stands alone from any other piece. Starting out, or shall I say stalling out, I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of arranging these - like it was an impossible task for an artist working on her first book. It was the proverbial gorilla on my back, and so I stalled. I found other tasks to work on: my website, audio recordings of my reading selected pieces, writing an announcement. You know, support work you need to do AFTER you submit your manuscript.
I had to admit it. I had the Writer's Block. Taking these little scraps of paper and leaping to a finished book was impossible for me to get my head around and it was becoming urgent for me to wrap it up. That pressure added to the overwhelm and it began to feel like I would be defeated in the very activity I'd always wanted to accomplish: to publish a book.
Last week I gave up! It was that inevitable moment of complete surrender and with a big, dramatic exhalation, I threw myself down flat on the floor. "I give up." I said to Patrick. "I may as well resolve myself to be happy only working with data." We looked at each other. That was it! An epiphany!
I am a highly visual person but that is not all I am. For years, I've worked in digital asset management (DAM) and understand the science of data manipulation, and that science begins with the Metadata - the simple yet important info that may seem superfluous but can make or break any project. I rushed to the laptop.
Months ago, I had added my poetry into cells of a spreadsheet. For each entry, there was a date, a word count, theme, title, etc. These were helpful for preserving the character of the works, but this AHA! moment helped me to land on something else: KEYWORDS. Yes, the very stuff that Google and any other algorithm uses to curate the feed that one sees in a search or Facebook feed.
It was a weird sensation to jump in as a data professional, taking a dispassionate look at the data in each entry and assigning it appropriate KEYWORDS... and moving on to the next. I flew through the task and concluded with a sort and summation of each KEYWORD. And then, there in front of me, was the clear and unambiguous direction for my book.
The themes were clear: beyond Love and Death, other top scoring themes emerged. Sleep, Breath, Time floated into a near perfect pattern with an ever present entity - the state of insomnia. Excited, I pulled the poems in the most numerous categories. Printing and cutting them out into strips of verse brought me back to my Visual Artist space. I love the tactile experience of paper and immersed myself in dividing them into their respective sections. I read one section at a time, moving the pieces, as if by magic, into each proper place where cadences emerged, merging one section into the next.
Suddenly, a new story developed. I want you to understand this. I saw, for the first time in my life, the threads of my Soul weaving through the life story I didn't know I was writing about. The music in my mind, that guides my words, is the sound of the world as I experience it. To call it magical is to understate the feeling of miraculous revelation.
This book has changed me forever. I hope it will change you too.