Inspiring through Poetry

Today, I thought I’d share a guest post I wrote for the blog of local author, Cindy Keen Reynders, who’s written both a mystery and paranormal series.

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen a link to this post when it first came out, but I hadn’t posted it here, until now.

In this guest post, I discuss overcoming my fear of public speaking to create a poetry night in my community, and the transformation it’s made in my life and the pleasure of watching it impact other poets. I often share with others that I’m an introvert with a fear of public speaking to show others with the same fears that when I ask them to get up and read their poetry, I understand how difficult that is to do.

I’ll share a story from the last poetry night I hosted before I turn you over to the guest post. There’s a gentleman who has come to two of these events over several months. I can see how nervous he is, and how difficult is for him to even attend this event. Both times, he was too nervous to read his own work but he’d brought his poems, so I read a few to the crowd for him. This last month, he said that attending the event had flipped a switch for him. He hadn’t written a poem in a long time. But after attending the first poetry event, he started writing poetry again. He then pulled out groups of pages clipped together with handwriting all over them. Stack after stack, he pulled these pages from his bag. I was so shocked about all the poems he’d written in the few months since I’d last seen him. Over the last eight months or so that I’ve been doing this, I’ve heard a handful of other stories just like his. It’s one of the most rewarding things to hear. To know that this gathering of poets inspires others to write is immeasurably meaningful to me.

Now that I’ve practically written a post on top of the one I wanted to share, please enjoy this piece called Inspiring through Poetry.