Heather Stewart Poetry

It’s been a crazy road but I was definitely blessed in many ways along it.

It was the waiting that was the worst. I don’t know how some people stay on this road so long with the long times between query and response, offer to publish and preorder.

Now that I’m in the preorder stage, it’s a little frantic. Final edits and planning release events and posting everywhere I can think of. I have no idea what possessed me to be a writer.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not really a thing that one chooses. Once I realized that I must write, then publishing seemed like the next thing to do with the output.

Much like Michelangelo and David, the poems are in there, they just need liberated. They are in there somewhere, and it is such a release to get them out.

My debut poetry collection, Shapeshifting, releases on September 24, 2024 and I can’t wait to see it in someone’s hands. It’s exciting but also terrifying. What if people don’t like it? What if they criticize my experience?

They did enough of that when I was still experiencing it, though, so I can’t imagine it’s much worse. But what if it is?

I’ll muddle through that too. So, to all the other writers out there, how do you cope with it?