Five Years

November 16, 2013

by Sarah Nichols

When I signed up for Sally Terrell’s Memoir workshop back in the fall of 2007, I hadn’t planned on writing poetry again. Maybe I had let it slip that I had had a poem published in a journal in 2002, or that I had won a few awards. I was showing off, but as far the poems went, silence had crept in, almost without my noticing it.

Poetry—writing—is tough work. And yet, a writer is all I ever I wanted to be. I never saw myself writing poetry: I was always Woodward and Bernstein, or I had written the next Great American Novel. I work in miniature now, and it is through poetry that I work. And I’m reasonably content with that most of the time. The silence was a kind of defiant writer’s block. One day, in class, Sally asked if I would read the poem that was published, and I asked her if she would read it for me. She agreed, and then she told me that I had to start writing poetry again. I remember being sort of flippant about it; a kind of “yeah, sure, that’ll happen” response. Part of me wanted to please this brilliant woman, but on the other hand, I just wanted to go back to screwing around and wasting what I had.

In those years, too, I was frequently treated for depression at UCONN Health Center, and that fall semester I found myself in a familiar place: the first floor psychiatric unit. For my own protection, they took away a string in my sweater, and my pen. They allowed me my books (one of them was Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady), and a dull pencil. For whatever reason, the experience of reading James’s novel on a locked psychiatric ward provided me with my first poem in five years. I told Sally about this, and she encouraged me to submit it to the Freshwater Student Poetry Contest for 2008; it took First Prize.

2012 marked five years since that return to poetry. It also saw the publication of my first book of poems. As I write, it occurs to me that this is a little piece of memoir; I remember that Sally taught me, in the workshop, to braid disparate pieces of narrative together, if I can, but I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that here. It reminds me of how difficult I find prose, even when the ideas are flowing, and I am writing about my own life. I ask myself what it took to get from that one poem in written in the hospital to a book of poems, and the answer is hard work, pain, and steady encouragement. The pain was mostly self-inflicted. The hard work was something that I had to develop for myself. As for the encouragement, I’ve received that, again and again, from the Tunxis community. It’s come from constructive criticism on a paper, and the opportunity to expose other students to my own influences. Maybe it’s simply that time has been taken to listen to my ideas.

I write to save my life, and to give it meaning. It’s less about wanting to do it, than about having to. The mentors that I have found at Tunxis seem to understand this. I tried to run away from being a writer for a long time, and I have a responsibility now not to run away from that gift. It is sometimes a hard gift, but it’s still a gift.

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