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Month: January 2021

My new friend, Amanda Gorman

Like most of the country, I didn’t know who Amanda Gorman was before Tuesday, January 20. At any given time I could tell you a few of my favorite poems, a few of my favorite poets, but I couldn’t tell you who the current poet laureate or youth poet laureate is. I couldn’t even tell you who the poet in residence on The West Wing was, and I’ve seen that whole series three times. But I can tell you that despite my best efforts to be nonplussed by everything inaugural, I was legitimately excited to see that the youngest inaugural poet ever was a female person of color, and excited that I identified a lot with her story.

Granted, she is from Los Angeles and I am from about the furthest thing from Los Angeles. She grew up with a single mom; I grew up with a single dad. But like Gorman, I fell in love with poetry from a very young age (although my very young age was much before Amanda’s) because it felt like one of the only ways I could truly express myself. I wrote a ton of (really bad) poems as a kid, as an adolescent, and beyond. I still write bad poems when there’s a really big feeling I have that I don’t know how else to get through. For every poem I have had published, there are 20 more sitting in a folder.

And like Gorman, I have a speech impediment, too. Sometimes my stutter is barely noticeable if I am relaxed, not overthinking my speech, and talking to people I know, like when I read books to my kids. Other times, especially when I am talking to new people or speaking up in front of people, my brain will completely short-circuit my speech and cripple my ability to get through certain sounds without stuttering. And the longer I am away from regularly talking to people, like a whole year working from home in quarantine, the worse my stutter gets. It’s like, 18 months away, but I am already dreading doing book readings for Community Klepto and stuttering over certain words. Good thing I didn’t name my protagonist Millie or Rachel.

Poetry is a very solitary, deeply personal art. For most poets, it’s one of the only ways to express feelings and emotions they may not even consciously know they’re feeling. Refining a poem to use just the right words in a very concise form is long, tedious work. “The Hill We Climb” wasn’t written overnight. I’m no Amanda Gorman, but a poem of that length would have taken me weeks, maybe months. When we see a poem like “The Hill We Climb” read aloud for a few minutes on a national stage for the whole world to see, it’s easy to forget the long, lonely work of turning those personal thoughts into something worth reading. Watching someone who’s fought struggles with speech read her heart’s work so passionately and eloquently in front of the entire world… that’s incredibly inspiring to me.

It’s become part of my weekday monthly routine to listen to a poetry podcast while I walk around the block, drink my coffee, and wake the fuck up. Hearing Padraig O’Tuama read on Poetry Unbound sets the tone for the rest of my day and it’s been a great way to get introduced to new poets beyond the Seamus Haney and Emily Dickinson I had to read in college. Poets, especially modern poets, don’t get a lot of respect. They’re viewed as weirdos (and to be fair, some are – I distinctly remember going to a slam poetry open mic for extra credit and hearing a very hairy dude tell us not to clap for him because he was not a poet, but a conduit for a higher power). It’s easy to see poetry as something kitschy or woke or elitist. But after Tuesday, more people bought poetry than ever, and a 22-year-old poet is going to be taking her kitschy, woke, elitist work straight to the bank. And that’s awesome.

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Kelly Hitchcock’s Day Off

The office for my day job (which has been my guest bedroom since March) was closed for the MLK holiday today. In my mind, I was going to use this unexpected day off to focus on finishing editing Community Klepto and work on some other documents for my publisher, since they’re due at the end of the month. However, because I am a working mom, my day off ended up looking more like this:

  • Get the children off to school
  • Take the microvan for an overdue oil change and an overdue state inspection
  • Finish paperback (Dry) waiting for microvan
  • Take microvan through car wash because bird shit happens
  • Vacuum fossilized french fries and Reese’s Pieces out of the microvan
  • Pick up more Zyrtec-D because it’s cedar season in Austin
  • Barre class (yay! I usually have to do this before anyone else in my house wakes up)
  • Take bunch of bags of crap to the Goodwill, also the box spring for old bed, now bungeed to the top of the microvan
  • Goodwill won’t take box spring – attempt Habitat for Humanity Restore
  • Restore won’t take box spring – succeed at Salvation army 10 miles away
  • Start editing, realize I need to start crock pot
  • Start crock pot, realize I am too tired to stare at computer screen
  • Finish audiobook (Fight Club) falling asleep
  • Get up, finish editing book before retrieving children

The reality is that even when I have a day off my day is really just filled with the backlog of things that I haven’t been able to get to because I either can’t do them when I am working during the day or I can’t do them while I’m with my children on the weekend. This is the reality for all working parents, especially moms.

As a mom with a full time job and a book coming out next year, time for writing, editing, or doing author platform building comes at a premium, and often comes after my children decide they’re done jumping off their beds for the night and decide to actually sleep on them. So even when my “day of editing” gets derailed by a jillion other tasks that have to be done, I can feel a great sense of gratitude in actually getting editing time in when the sun is out.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that the manuscript is now officially ready for the publisher. And the children loved the crock pot soup.

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