Symposium Follow-Up

Its a fact that public speaking is one of the most common fears for people, and that's certainly the case for me, especially when it comes to reading my own work. Initially, I had a lot of anxiety regarding the presentation; I wasn't sure what I was going to choose to read and ultimately decided on three poems. I wrote "Firelight Shadows" two years ago, and think its probably one of the best pieces I've done so I immediately knew that I wanted to submit it for the symposium. The two other poems "She Has Cancer" and "Listen to the Creek" were not in existence when I submitted them in the abstract. I knew that I wanted to write a piece relating to someone's struggle with cancer as I've known many people who have/are battling the disease. As you all know from my first post, my Mom battled breast cancer three years ago, and many of the details in "She Has Cancer" (the scalp, the saltines) ... came from personal recollections. The same can be said for "Listen to the Creek". I love going camping, and on one particular trip last summer to a campsite in the Olympic Peninsula there was a small creek located just beyond are campsite. I remember lying awake at night listening to the water, and when I was constructing the poem I took down several notes about what I could recall.

I remember Jo March in Little Women insisting *initially* that you shouldn't write what you know, but I think nothing could be further from the truth. When I write I always go back to the five senses, the concept of showing and not telling. Ask yourself what did this person, place or thing look like, smell like, sound like, feel like, taste like... and its impossible not to derive a starting point for a piece. The important thing to remember is that we're all different. No two people are going to have the exact same perceptions and for this reason writing continues to evolve. That's why I think the symposium is necessary. We gain so much from exposing our work to each other. I thought that everyone did a really wonderful job reading their work from the short stories to the poems, to the essays... sitting amongst a group of writers was very rewarding. The only thing I wish had been different was the room temperature, which I estimate to have been about 90 degrees. Though I admit the heat kept me from fixating over my presentation, so in that respect I guess I'm sort of grateful.