Lisa Young

It's almost the holidays and I'm on the threshold of that crucial pre-Christmas time where anything and everything feels possible. The world is all shiny and pretty (okay it is very dull and grey out there, but still) and in a few short days I'll have nothing but a beautiful holiday gleaming in front of me  –  a whole two weeks off. But what usually happens to all this time? The days just go poof and disappear. How can two weeks disappear into thin air? This year I'm determined not to let the days go by without carving out some creative time. So I need a plan, a simple plan, not too ambitious or too daunting. I need doable. And I need it to be fun. These are my holidays! Reading poetry every night is a great way to stay inspired. I have one writing workshop planned  –  just to keep me focused, and every night from 7-9 p.m. I'm going to be doing poetry-related work  –  whether editing or sending off poems to magazines. (Exceptions: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day

I knew I was experiencing an emotional hangover when I woke up the day after a friend’s birthday party, and I couldn’t stop replaying all the awkward moments of the night before. I worried that I’d come off as a super weirdo (the opposite of a superhero), and I cringed over and over again. This was not an unfamiliar scenario. The only difference was that I was fed up with feeling this way. I wondered why I felt it necessary to waste my time and energy fretting about the normal, albeit awkward moments, that came along with social interaction. But at the core of it was a deeper question: Why did I find it so hard to make a real connection with other people? Whenever I was at a social gathering, I tended to hover around the edges of the party, or I liked to escape to the kitchen. I was ineffectively trying to hide in plain sight. I deeply wanted to connect with others, but I found the landscape of socializing so full of pitfalls, it was almost too excruciating to bear. Even

There's a certain urgency to share my work as soon as I've written it. My first reader is my husband, Mike. I'm looking to see whether he thinks it works overall. He'll point out any weak spots and do a quick proofread for me too. Sometimes I read my work aloud to him in the kitchen while dinner is cooking. The work I show Mike might still be in its early stages, but it feels complete in some way – enough that I think I have something. I need to have a first reader who appreciates that it's still a work in progress. Mike and I are a team. If something's off – I'll go back and fix it up and then have him read it again. We'll go back and forth this way. A first reader should have good judgment. Is a first reader a kind of gatekeeper? I think so. They're the ones who stop you from going forward when you're headed for disaster. Who isn't a good first reader? Someone who can't articulate what's wrong with a certain phrase or

Everyone has a different writing process. Over time, of course, some methods grow stale and new "systems" take over. Poetry I like to write first drafts of poems in the company of other poets. We read our favourite poems and then dive in and write for 45 minutes or so, and then we share what we've written. It also helps that these writing sessions take place early in the morning, before the inner critic is awake. I usually write whatever I feel attracted to write about...and I don't worry too much about the result. That comes later when I transcribe what I've written and have a look to see what material I have. Sometimes the very things that I thought were working during the writing process are flat, while other bits and pieces that I wrote that I thought weren't working become the actual material that seems to have some energy in it. In terms of editing, sometimes it doesn't work to just keep moving the original words around. I have to basicall