by Carolyn Givens
Some weeks this summer, we’ll be sharing some “flashback” posts—highlights from past years’ newsletters. We hope you’ll enjoy them again, or catch them for the first time. This post was first published in April 2024.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a coach about how I feed my creativity. I’ve been in a season for a couple years now where most of my output has been functional rather than beautiful. But I am motivated by beauty, and he was pushing me to think of what I take in that feeds that side of me.
“Think back to a time when you felt creative,” he prompted me. “What sort of things were you doing?”
In the course of the conversation, I remembered that I used to go to a lot more concerts. COVID lockdowns interrupted them, of course. In the past year or so, my opportunities to hear live music have increased, but it has often seemed like too much effort to get out of the house and go take in a concert.
If you ask me what inspires me to write, however, I’d answer by pointing you to songwriters and poets. Poets can wrap whole worlds into short lines and phrases, and I don’t know how they do it, but those words bring stories to life inside my mind.
I went to hear one of my favorite bands, The Gray Havens, perform on their 10-year Anniversary Tour last week and was reminded that the very first time I saw them was almost exactly 10 years ago, at a house concert barely a month after I started a new job in Charlotte, North Carolina. I walked away with copies of their albums for each of my friends and took them back with me to Pennsylvania the following week when I returned to finish clearing out my apartment and moving my things down.
I remember, somewhere along the route in Virginia, singing along to their song “Sirens” in full voice, “Hold on. Hold on, my heart / You once were full and sang of grace / Hold on. Hold on, my heart / You’ve tasted joy that’s more than this.” Christine, my old roommate who was driving down with me, had fallen asleep and woke to my singing. I apologized, and she smiled and said, “No, I like it.”
I captured a video of The Gray Havens at the concert, singing “See You Again,” and sent it to my friend Ned, who had just shared the song a few days earlier, honoring the anniversary of his wife’s death. I remember her post about that song as she was fighting cancer. She said something to the effect that she loved it, even though it was a little too upbeat for her feelings some of the days.
Songs carry stories.
They tell us tales in just a few minutes, and they hold for us the stories of the moments they accompanied in our lives.
Poetry is the same.
I remember reading the manuscript for Mari in the Margins the first time and wondering how on earth Rebecca J. Gomez told a novel-sized story in just 15,000 words. As we’re about to release that book into the world, Rebecca has been writing about her process over at Snippets & Sketches, and she wrote recently, “I love poetry as means of storytelling. I love how concise the verse format can be when used to its full effect. It’s like the Ant-man of the literary world—everything about a good story condensed into a small package that packs a big punch.”
The words of poems and songs are just small buckets, but they carry deep and winding rivers of story—even if the full length of the river is only in the reader’s imagination.
In my own writing, it is often lines of a poem or a song that become the seed which sprouts into a story. “Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave,” I read in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. But who was the old man? And how were the roses consumed by fire? Those questions started me in a story that eventually became my novel Rosefire.
Eliot’s poem had walked with me through many years by the time I started that novel, its words carrying my own stories of grief and joy over a decade. Still today, it holds the freight of my self-exploration, reminding me, “And the end of all our exploring /
Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
If I had to make an argument for reading poetry and listening to singer-songwriters’ music, that would be it: try to imagine what stories could be carried by these small buckets—whether that be the stories they will spark in your imagination, taking you forward into some creative endeavor; or the stories they carry of your memory, bringing you back to moments of beauty or agony; or the stories they hold for you that you have yet to explore, offering you an opportunity to arrive just where you started and know the place for the first time.
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Forgive me for eavesdropping,
but your joy was so loud.
–Jen Rose Yokel, “To the Girls on the Metro North Train” in Beneath the Flood
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