Poetry Book Announcement!

This is a secret project that I feel like isn't that much of a secret. I've tweeted about it a few times, updated my website, and I feel like every person I have spoken to in the last few months has heard about this. Still, I wanted to make a formal announcement! I wrote a poetry book titled Three by Three, which is set to release on October 8th, 2020!

I absolutely love this book. I hope I will say that about every book I ever write, but seeing as this is my first poetry book, it really does hold a special place in my heart. There are twenty-nine poems and thirteen small drawings I did to go along with some of the poems. You may have thought there would be 33 poems, since the book is called Three by Three, but there isn't.

Poetry and I have always had a tense relationship. I absolutely love spoken-word poetry (shout out to Button Poetry's Youtube channel), and I actually can recite a few poems word-for-word, but somehow I was never terribly interested in writing poetry myself. It just wasn't something that spoke to me. Obviously, that has changed.

What got me interested in poetry was finding an old Word document with poetry that I had written for a creative writing project in high school. I read through the poems (the first of which was a poem about how much I hated writing poetry) and found that I actually really liked some of what I wrote. It was like reading a diary. I read certain lines and, years later, remembered exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote that.

Writing is one of the ways that I process things. For me, that always took the form of longer stories, whether it be 30K word novellas or 100K plus novels. This short form, very fluffy and often indirect format was not something I was interested in. I loved other people's poems, but not mine.

Once I found this old Word document, the editor in me jumped out. I switched some of the wording around. I made that last line a bit different. I moved the order of the poems. A few days later, I changed the line back. I read them all again, out loud. I started another poem, as a response to the one I had already written.

A few weeks later of playing around, I realized I had written almost 20 new poems and edited the previous few that remained into much better pieces. I read through all of the poems, one last time, and realized that I liked my poems. I thought they were good.

Like all of my writing, there were jokes to myself, references only I would get, and clues that only I would know. I felt like I had written a secret code. Some of it is probably more secret than other parts, but that's okay.

In short, poetry has not always been my thing, but I found it was a great way to express myself and shed some emotional baggage during lockdown. I love this silly little book of poems, and I am really proud of how this book turned out. Three by Three, out October 8th, 2020.