I had 24 days to write 87 poems. It changed everything.

“You don’t become a writer, you discover that you are one....and once you realize you can do something, it would be very difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.” – James Baldwin.

It’s been a month since I submitted my poetry manuscript. I’m brewing my third cup of coffee, crisp winds of fall blowing through the kitchen. I haven’t written in weeks—I thought I’d take a break from using my pen to fence with my demons and pick up some hobbies. Learn the violin, surf, take a ballet class.

God had a chuckle at my plans.

The phone rings.

“Where’s the other half of your book?” My manager asks, the subway blaring in the background. She talks on 10x speed—if New York City were a person, it would be her.

“What do you mean the other half?” I say absent-mindedly, stirring the creamer with a steak knife (I can never be bothered to hunt for a spoon).

“It says in the contract you owe two hundred poems. Where are they?” She presses.

My heart races, palms sweating. Two hundred poems. The phrase echoes in my mind. Two hundred. Two hundred. It took three years to write one hundred and thirteen.

“You have twenty-four days to write the other eighty-seven pieces,” She says.

The publisher’s extension is very gracious, but I start panicking.

“What if they lose their quality? How the hell am I going to—”

“Don’t ask how. Just write,” She says.

Twenty-four days to write eighty-seven poems.

She’s right. There is no time for Can I? or How? So I grab Limitation by the wrist, and drag Him out the front door, evicting Him from my head.

This month became the greatest gift of my creative life.

I sat down at my desk, prepared to lock myself away. But it felt wrong. This wasn’t a novel. This was poetry. And poetry only ever asks one thing: that we live, and report back the truth of our experience.

I gave my inner introvert the month off and said yes to every experience. And I do mean every experience.

Road trips to hidden valleys, art shows in the middle of the desert, dinners with strangers—there were poems for me to find. I just had to go out and live. It placed me in a month long flow state, an unexpected hero’s journey.

Writing, as it turns out, is not an occupation, but a way of living. The practice of paying attention, of catching the details other people miss with a butterfly net, of making a cathedral of the moment for others to visit and find solace in.

I had to stop echoing myself. Stop writing about the same old themes of love, death, and time. Stop using the same tone. It was time not just to toe the line of my edge, but fling myself over it.

Twenty-four days of total free fall—experimenting with my voice, my way of living.

And as I came alive, the poems shot out like a fire hose. As I worked on these pieces, they worked on me. Every edge I explored only deepened that creative well, until I realized it was bottomless. All my arbitrary rules about what I’m capable of as a writer—gone.

When I finally submitted the manuscript for real this time, a friend asked what I was going to do now.

“Write the next book,” I said.

Because I’m not just observing the world anymore. I’m not just the writer capturing a snapshot of time. My experiences are the ink to my quill (if my handwriting was legible and I used such tools).

I like the person writing turns me into—the way it makes me more present, compassionate, and willing to let the whole of life happen to me. I like the duty and honor of being an artist, the way every work of art is really saying the same thing: I understand.

And SOOONNNNNN…….we will be announcing the cover! I can’t wait to share this one with you.

Xx,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Scribe