How I Accidentally Became a Poet

I have always been a storyteller. I won’t bother you with all of the anecdotes, just one: I am eight, and I don’t know how to pen the complex words for my tale about a lost girl and her pirates. During class, my daydreams are occupied with memorizing the next scene. After school, I wait, not so patiently, for my mother to come home. Then, like an orator in a great hall, I stand beside her bed and recite the fictional unfoldings. She scribes them with a swift and loyal hand. Together, we revel in the newest imaginings, manifested, and she teaches me how to read cursive. It is like this for a year, maybe less, at least until I can string together a complete sentence and have become familiar with our second-hand thesaurus.

And then, I couldn’t be stopped.

If you discovered me from my poems, you may be surprised to know that poetry wasn’t my first passion. My big, harbored secret had always been fiction, the great adventures hidden in margins and sticky notes of coursework. And when I should have been studying the structures of cells or the periodic table, my stories and I would hope, “one day … one day.”

My history with college is tangled. I won’t bore you with all of the versions, just one: Like any storyteller, I wanted to learn everything about the human experience. Psychology and I had a passionate companionship that ended in the rather abrupt realization that I didn’t want to be a doctor of any sort. Curiosity had simply gotten the best of me. Three years deep and far from a degree, I returned to the comforting, motherly embrace of literature.

One summer, during a forgetful isolation, I was late registering for my creative writing courses. Most the ones I wanted to take were already full, yet, Intro to Poetry had five available spaces. Haphazardly, I added it to my schedule, certain I could replace it by the graces of someone else’s indecision.

But I never did.

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself hefting an armful of poems across campus one morning with the dreadful attitude of, “What have I gotten myself into?” Like many, the first books I read were by Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Later, in the wilds of high school, Homer, Shakespeare, and Poe were among the few poets I had studied. And when I was twenty-one, I foolishly decided to minor in Latin (another awkward academic accident), which was saturated in metered poetry about life, death, and mostly warfare. By then, I had harbored an impression that poetry was either for childish silliness or cheerless solemnity and nothing in-between.

And I was so wrong.

I learned precious things from that poetry course (and the ones I took after like a night owl who finally found something earthly to occupy their midnight ruminations). I won’t blather about all of them, just one: In poetry, honesty is absolutely necessary. When you are a poet, whether for a fleeting moment or decidedly a lifetime, you must learn how to shatter the enduring walls that we, humans, build around ourselves. You must sit bare upon the shrapnel and try to decipher what is left.

Then, you write about it.

I was so accidentally inspired by this search for honesty and vulnerability that it seeped into some of my earliest poems. In Queen of the Gulls, I wrote:

“You forgot to feed the gulls.

They found me, raw and resigned

on the mound of collapsed sand castles

and made me the queen of their vagrant colony.”

Although there isn’t a single vision to encapsulate the experience of being a poet, I’m rather drawn to the lonely queen, saturated in the rawness of heartache, waiting upon ruin for her metamorphosis. Yet, even after writing Queen of the Gulls and other careful poems, I didn’t feel like a poet.

I didn’t want to.

From where I gaze now, over a hundred poems and a debut collection deep, it aches to admit that I simply couldn’t hold space for poetry then. If I’m honest, I was terrified it would replace my fiction. So, like my fearless childhood cat who often strayed too far from home, I meandered back toward passionately plotting countless novels that would live in my head entirely rent-free (and have finally begun to see this side of reality.)

I joined a writing group. We met at a pub on campus. We drank murky coffee and IPAs and joked about awful story tropes. When it was my turn to bare a short for them to butcher, something confounding happened. “This is going to sound odd, but I feel like this should be a poem,” an interloping member mentioned. Naturally, I was frustrated. How could a two thousand word story about a dystopian winterscape possibly be a poem? Alone that night with a jar of wine, I hunched over my marked copy interrogating it for secrets. And there it was, a resonating truth:

Poetry never left me.

Instead of replacing my fiction like I feared, poetry breathed life into my story. I never figured the rawness, the movement, and the purples of poems could belong there. But somehow, effortlessly, accidentally, it did. An art I thought would idle dormant like the boxes of unfinished crafts in my closet had manifested as the flowing, delicious honey gluing my words together.

But I still didn’t feel like a poet.

Instead of flourishing, my poetry joined the same covenant of secrecy as my fiction, revealed only drunkenly to lovers or my mother when I felt entirely lost. Poetry became my therapy, the quickest way to unearth my deepest troubles and set them free.

Sometime in 2021, I haphazardly published a few of my old poems online. I’m certain there are numerous reasons I finally let them fly the coop. I won’t brood over all the ruminations, just one: Somewhere, a brilliantly honest soul tore down their walls, sat bare upon their chaos, and wrote about it. And that poem, in the emptiest moments, made me feel like I wasn’t a stranger anymore. So, like some sort of cosmic agreement, I kept publishing my poetry in the chance that another wanderer might discover them and feel seen, if even for a moment. So why then, four years, a debut collection, and over a hundred poems deep, did the designation “poet” feel entirely wrong?

I didn’t seek it.

I was convinced everything I did, everything I became was entirely purposeful. Even since those cherished evenings, recounting unending tales to my patient mother, I thought I had it figured out. I was a storyteller, determined to craft compelling narratives, captivating worlds, and complex characters.

And for over a decade, I did exactly that. Eventually, dozens of unfinished manuscripts deep, I questioned if I was even a writer at all. Then, poetry fell into my lap randomly, comically, without permission. It soothed my confusion, offered me the courage to keep pushing forward.

And I finally let it.

Now, in the cluttered chaos of my storytelling mind, there is a vibrant neighborhood where poetic impressions live. My works flow freely between fiction and poetry, some ongoing collections flourishing into their own worlds. And I cannot dream of changing it. Although I would have certainly been a storyteller without poetry, I could not have become this storyteller without it.

So if, like me, you ever feel as if an imposter at your own craft, please consider the best things that happen to us are often by accident.

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You can read Queen of the Gulls here:

And the story that could have been a poem here:

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Hello, wanderer,

I don't always write about my life. Thanks for reading. The photo I took is from a once in a life time kind of roll while playing a dice game called Bones. Like poetry, it was a totally unexpected, happy little surprise.

xoxo, for now,

-your friend, accidentally rhyming