by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author
For my creative writing minor, my college required that I take a poetry workshop. Not going to lie, I dreaded it. I’d never been good at poetry. In fact, the only poetry I’d ever been able to write had been limericks. Light, fluffy, funny, usually irreverent. I’d been told that a person’s skill at poetry was a measurement of the depth of their soul, and that seemed to ring true quite honestly. (Even as a teenager, I wore mismatched socks, dreamed of fantasy civilizations, and choreographed my own lightsaber battles in the back pasture of our farm.)
The poetry workshop actually turned out to be fun, and, God bless her, my poor beleaguered professor extended me such grace and patience. I struggled under the weight of the tiny word count and the expectation of descriptive vocabulary that superseded anything I’d attempted previously. In that semester-long workshop, I confirmed that I was not, nor would I ever be, a poet, but I learned something else too. Something more important.
I learned that I wasn’t a poet. I learned that many of the other students in the room were. And I learned that the creative world was big enough for all of us to not only coexist but to partner alongside each other.
