My birthday gift to myself this year was a six week one-on-one workshop with Megan Falley. Last week, I had my last workshop with her and we walked through four of the poems I’d written over the course of the workshop and edited and fine tuned them. I wrote far more than four poems during that time, I probably wrote thirty or forty poems during that time, but we only workshopped and edited the main ones I’d been working on. The result is four, publication ready poems.

I can honestly say that the workshop with Megan Falley was perhaps the best birthday gift I’ve given myself. Considering I went on a 10-day vacation to Hawaii for my 30th birthday, that’s really saying a lot. During the weeks I spent in this workshop I have written more poems and better poems than I ever had. Megan taught me, sometimes forced me, to dig deeper, to get dirtier, to really reach past the easy poems and work on the hard ones. To write the stuff that scared me. To write the stuff that I don’t even like to admit to myself.

After every workshop I would feel elated and exhausted. I felt like I needed a drink and then a nap. It was a wonderful feeling, to literally be spent from writing poetry. And so my goal is to keep pushing myself, to keep writing the poetry that scares me, to write the stuff can be hard for a person to hear or read – because really, isn’t that what it’s about sometimes?