How I Wrote Drifter Sister
One of my mottoes as a writer is that what doesn't kill you is potential writing inspiration. Yet sometimes writers can be an awfully finicky bunch. If we're faced with writer's block, we tend to complain that if we could just find the perfect conditions for writing, we'd be able to craft a masterpiece. But because it's the wrong time of day, or our chair is uncomfortable, or people keep walking into the room and trying to talk to us, we can't write anything.
This kind of thinking is comforting but blatantly false. Drifter Sister, my newly-released poetry book (which you can buy here!) is the best thing I've ever written. I wrote it under about the furthest thing you could imagine from ideal writing conditions.
I'm a grocery cashier. When I'm at work, there's an invisible ball and chain binding me to my checkstand. I can only wander so far without getting in trouble. At the same time, sometimes there are no customers for several minutes on end. So I end up just... standing there, feeling useless. What better to do during these times than write poetry? That's exactly what I've done. Several of the poems from The Sense of Non-cents, along with the majority of Drifter Sister, were scribbled at my checkstand, on the backs of yellow rain checks or pink EBT decline receipts.
When I was on break, I would transcribe the handwritten poems onto the "notes" utility on my early-2000s Palm Pixi cell phone, so that I didn't have to carry so many junky loose papers around. Other times, I saved my poetry ideas until break time, when I could use the phone's tiny plastic keyboard to type them directly onto those digital sticky notes.
On getting home from work, I'd transcribe the poems from the rain checks or my phone into a Word document on my computer. Even after doing this, I kept the poems on my phone. This was especially helpful when I was writing Drifter Sister, since it's one continuous poem. I kept each section on a separate "sticky note" so that I could work on them separately, but I could also read through the entire poem if I wanted to. That way, I didn't lose the forest for the trees, and I got a good feeling for the work as a whole.
When I first started writing poetry at work, I was irritated by the inconvenience of it all. Sometimes a customer would walk up to the register when I was in the middle of writing a line, and I had to drop what I was doing instantly. But as I persisted, the unusual circumstances seemed to become an inspiration for me. It was almost as though the obstacles in my way made writing easier, and I began to genuinely enjoy the unique process I'd created for myself.
Sadly, I'll probably never write a poetry book the way that I wrote Drifter Sister again. After 10+ years of faithful service, my Palm Pixi went completely kaput, taking with it a poem I hadn't written anywhere else. And today is my last day of working at the grocery store. But I'm not going to pretend that the specifics of the situation were responsible for Drifter Sister turning out so well. That poem truly was a gift from God, for one thing, something I never could have done by myself. At the same time, I think my unique circumstances did make my creativity more fertile than it is when I'm just sitting at my desk day after day. So I hope that some day I'll find myself in another unusual situation where seeming obstacles in the way of my writing actually prompt me to create something beautiful.
