Enter a competition.
I encourage you to do it.
It’s been a hot minute since I did a contest. Although I’ve left my four blogs untouched for the last two weeks due to renovation and, you know, an active life; I’ve been more active writing this summer than in previous years.
I allowed my career to run my life for the past six years rather than take time for the things I love and enjoy. My goal this summer had been to work on my memoir, A Messed Up Kind of Beautiful.
It is there, and I remember exactly where I left off.
Instead poetry poured from me for a lot of the summer.
I ended up creating two collections in one, and I’ve divided them now into two different collections. One covers my journalism experiences, and the other, a district I’m grateful to have left because of what it cost me. I took a microcosm of the Tall Tales of Luska Road collection. I’ve called it Luska Road.
I did this because I entered my collection into a contest. I wanted to enter the entire work, but it was too many pages for a smaller collection. I picked out the best of what I’ve written and edited. I placed the poems in the smaller collection in a logical sequence to work as a smaller memoir in verse.
It tells a story of people and things constantly cast off from a part of town where wealthier people once lived and smoked cigarettes to my child feeling cast aside because of where I worked. For the first time, he openly expressed his anger with me over what he feels my former school did to him.
Something about: “Those kids are just your students. I am your son.”
This work, Luska Road, whether it impresses anyone or not has allowed me to artistically work through love, heartbreak, anger, and trauma. It has allowed me to figure out how to open up to my son. I am extremely proud of the work, too, because it is some of the best poetry I’ve written in years.
I’m proud that by the end of July I submitted a collection into a competition I felt was worth the entry.
Corrie's Season 