#2: Grains of Sand
A series of eight blogs about my process of publishing every grain of sand.
After having the realization that now was the right time to pursue this seemingly unattainable, life-long creative dream, I sat with over three hundred pieces of my writing and a big question. What exactly was I going to create with them?
Should the book only have poetry? I didn’t want to give up the haiku. Or the short stories. And why should I have to? There are many diverse collections out there—and if my book was going to honor 24 years of my writings, I wanted it to reflect many different facets of my work. So, it would be a hybrid work and depending on which pieces made the cut, I would see how they fit together.
Each piece sang to me in a different, beautiful voice. I went to work re-reading, editing, revising, and getting clear on which actually belonged together in a collection. As I refined my search and released poems that felt like they didn’t belong, I could feel the book magically finding its way. Like Marie Kondo’s directive for tidying up, I could feel the works I chose spark joy in me. Ultimately, I felt content with 72 little gems - 44 poems, 8 short stories, and 21 haiku.
The next question was how to present them? Shuffle them up? Lay them out chronologically? Sort them thematically?
In the end, I decided to organize the book into three parts: poetry, short stories, and haiku. Each section is compiled in chronological order, from pieces that I wrote in high school to poems I wrote only last month. In a way, you can sense different phases of my life as you read the poems: pieces that consider impulsivity and identity from my teenage years, some that navigate the ups and downs of relationships in my twenties, and those that experiment with curiosity about the human experience in my thirties, where I leaned more into storytelling and oddly, sometimes, the banality of suburbia. In the short stories, I found myself drawn to pieces that address fear and loss and others that stir up sadness and confusion. I examine the blurriness that comes with grief, lost loves, dreams deferred, and a very unwise tattoo. I found that I love writing very short pieces that plop the reader directly into the lap of the characters and allow them an intimate look into their hurt, but also surprise us and leave us wondering what happens next. I hope that those of you who read the entire collection can sense my compassion for the people I write about.
I also think it’s important to share that as I edited the collection, I discovered parallels between the stories I had spent years writing and personal moments in my life that I had been wrestling with. It was healing for me to observe my work from the outside and connect the dots of what I faced, what fueled my characters, and where I led them (and myself) through the book. I hope that in some way, something in the collection offers readers a second look that leads them to some sort of understanding too.
