When Poetry Says What Ordinary Words Cannot

When I finished writing Shining Through: A Journey of Love and Resilience, I had told my story.

At least, I thought I had.

A memoir gives you room to explain. You can provide context, tell someone what happened, describe the people and places involved, and connect one experience to another.

But after writing Shining Through, I realized there were still things left over.

Not necessarily more stories.

More feelings.

Thoughts that didn't quite belong in a chapter. Emotions that surfaced while I was writing. Things I realized afterward. Moments that didn't need pages of explanation because, sometimes, a few carefully chosen words said exactly what I needed them to say.

That became Salt & Stardust.

What Didn't Fit Into Shining Through

Salt & Stardust grew, in many ways, from the process of writing my memoir.

Some of it was what I couldn't fit into Shining Through. Some of it was what I thought about after the fact. And some of it was simply the emotion that came along with revisiting my life closely enough to write it down.

Writing a memoir asks you to spend a lot of time with your past.

You don't just remember what happened.

You remember how it felt.

Sometimes you understand something differently when you're looking back at it years later. Sometimes a memory that seemed small suddenly carries much more weight. And sometimes writing one thing opens the door to another thought you weren't expecting at all.

I didn't always need another chapter to explore those feelings.

Sometimes I needed a poem.

Some Thoughts Aren't Meant to Be Long

I've learned that not every thought needs a beginning, middle, and end.

Some arrive almost complete.

A feeling.

An image.

A sentence.

A realization that hits you at exactly the right—or wrong—moment.

Trying to stretch those thoughts into pages would have taken something away from them.

Poetry allowed me to leave them exactly as they were.

There is freedom in that.

I can spend thousands of words developing a fantasy world or explaining an experience from my life, but I can also take something deeply personal and reduce it to a handful of lines.

Neither form is more meaningful than the other.

They're simply different ways of telling the truth.

And Salt & Stardust gave those shorter truths somewhere to live.

Then Came Wild Grace

If Salt & Stardust was connected to what I felt while looking backward, Wild Grace came after.

After the remembering.

After putting so much of my life on paper.

After sitting with the emotions that followed.

Wild Grace became, in many ways, a reflection of what I became from everything.

There is a difference between writing from inside an experience and writing after you've had enough distance to recognize what it changed in you.

That doesn't mean everything is neatly resolved.

Life rarely works that way.

But there comes a point when you begin recognizing yourself differently.

You see the strength that grew alongside the hurt.

The boundaries you learned to create.

The things you no longer apologize for.

The softness you somehow managed to keep.

The parts of yourself you reclaimed.

The parts you outgrew.

And maybe even the parts you finally learned to love.

That is where Wild Grace lives.

Salt, Stardust, and Grace

Looking at the books now, I can see a progression that I don't think I completely understood while I was writing them.

Shining Through told the story.

Salt & Stardust held much of the emotion that surrounded the story.

And Wild Grace reflected the person who walked out the other side of it.

They are separate books, but pieces of them belong to the same journey.

Maybe that's one of my favorite things about writing.

You don't always know what you're creating while you're creating it.

Sometimes you have to look backward before you can see the thread connecting everything.

Giving a Feeling Just Enough Words

Poetry taught me that I don't always have to explain myself.

That's a difficult lesson for someone who is accustomed to writing with detail, context, and purpose.

Sometimes a feeling doesn't need to be dissected.

It just needs to be felt.

A few lines can hold grief.

A few lines can hold anger.

They can hold love, longing, peace, acceptance, humor, memory, strength, or contradiction.

Sometimes twenty words can say something that twenty pages never could.

That's what poetry became for me.

A place for the thoughts that were too small for chapters but far too important to leave unwritten.

Salt & Stardust gave a home to what remained after telling my story.

Wild Grace gave a voice to who I was becoming because of it.

And somewhere between the memoir and the poetry, I realized something:

I don't have to choose one way to tell my story.

Some stories need chapters.

Some need worlds.

And some only need a few lines.