Sparks & Starts: "Deer Field"

A poem's initial inspiration & early drafts

Hi, Friend.

Spark & Starts is a series of posts for paid subscribers where I share my process, from early drafts to published poem or essay. My hope is that it’s helpful—maybe even reassuring—to see how a piece of writing begins in chaos on a few pages of a legal pad or in a notebook, and eventually coalesces into the final version. That transformation sometime happens quickly, over a few days, or it can take years of working a bit, setting it aside, coming back to it with fresh eyes, working a bit more, setting it aside…you get the picture. If there’s a fast track, I haven’t found it.

Today I’m sharing the first handwritten drafts of “Deer Field,” a poem in my third book, Good Bones.