Heather Stewart Poetry

It’s always an interesting thing, to decide that a project has gone in a completey wrong direction and the only course left is to scrub the whole thing and start again.

I had done this with my debut poetry collection several times back when I thought I was writing a memoir. It still is, in that way that poetry still tells the story of what I remember. It’s just in the way that I remember it feeling and less in the way of how I remember events happening. I don’t think I’ll ever know which is better, but I do know that Madelein L’Engle was right.

I spent a lot of time trying to write the book I wanted to read. It all came together when I realized the book that needed to be written. I had never been great at putting together long stories, nor had I realized that I was meant to be a poet rather than a novelist. I can tell a great sea story, though. A requirement for the trade.

That said, my collection went through many iterations, most of them with a completely different title. For years, I thought I would write a memoir titled “The Odd Squid” since squid is a nickname for sailors and my career was quite odd. I tried several times to write it like a traditional memoir. A part of me still hopes to write that one day. It’s a pretty small part though. As things spiralled out of control at the end of my career, I also considered “Confessions of a Mermaid in Recovery” which ended up the title of one of my poems after all.

I’ve found myself starting over again with my lessons learned poems that were posted a while back. We will see if this is the final iteration, but I am far from done.

All of that to encourage you to start again from scratch if you feel like things are just not coming together. Don’t delete everything. Don’t get rid of it. But start over and keep the other stuff for a reminder or a rainy day. I definitely took pieces and parts from the old versions to inspire my poetry. Mostly, they helped me remember the beginning. There is something truly cathartic about scrapping a project and starting over when it all feels like chaos.