Poetry and the Stories that Raised Us

I’m in Oregon after spending time with my daughter’s father in Los Angeles, who is in some stage of memory loss, as if he’s looking through a rain soaked window at the world. When Mike and I met, our common language was poetry. When we broke up, our common language was poetry. Thirty years later, we still speak poetry.

Poetry saved me as a child on a road trip across six states, squeezed into the middle seat between my older brothers while my parents chain-smoked across America. My mother had bought me a poetry book for the journey , deceptively packaged as a children’s poetry anthology. It disguised Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Bishop behind cheerful seventies illustrations, but the words fed my hungry ten-year old soul.

Putting my next course together - The Hundred Acre Heart, I realized children’s books were never about children. They were about humanity. Those stories spoon-fed us the reality of a complex world through bears, wolves, rabbits and little girls, teaching us about grief, courage, friendship and imagination before we were old enough to name those things. I remember reading Walt Whitman’s Miracles over and over as billboards promising perfect summer vacations sped by our imperfect family.

Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.

When I was five years old, my kindergarten teacher’s five-year old son died riding his bicycle. I carried grief in a lunchbox back and forth from school, and shut the scary feelings away. When I was ten years old author Barbara Corcoran explained grief through her book Sasha, My Friend, and now when I write about grief, my own stories are shaped by the myriad of stories that shaped me.

Those piles of books in my childhood bedroom were preparing me for being human.

Before we knew the words for wonder, memory, forgiveness or grief, someone handed us books - a little prince, a boy with a purple crayon.

A bear who loved honey and a girl who got lost in imagination.

We thought we were being entertained, but we were being prepared for being human.

That is the heart of our upcoming writing series, The Hundred Acre Heart, now open to new and returning students.

Tomorrow I’m taking my grandchildren to the library in Oregon to write poetry with a rap artist.

Tonight I read my granddaughter a poetry book I found in a used bookstore. At the end we learned the poet had written it when she was ten years old. We looked at each other in astonishment.

It reminded me that it’s never too early, and it’s never too late.

Our stories are always right on time.

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Laura Lentz is the founder of LITerati Academy, an international online writing community, where writers creating new poems and stories weekly in small live groups, and read the work generated in class out loud in a supportive environment. She is the author of Freeing the Turkeys and STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey.