How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world.

Seamus Heaney

I attended the Ellmann Lectures at Emory University this past weekend. Distinguished poet Natasha Trethewey was the invited speaker. To say I question my writing life would be an understatement. To say it feels completely comfortable calling myself a writer would be to ignore the imposter syndrome that plagues every pitch I send, blog I post, and essay I publish. To say that reading and writing daily makes me a writer does not satisfy me either. Yesterday was about breaking through a bit of that noise and remembering why I write. I came across Natasha Trethewey’s work when she was named United States Poet Laureate. (I read a ton of poetry, so her work was and is front and center in the poetry conversation.) I immediately fell in love with — and wrote about — her poem, Theories of Time and Space.

Her talk, House of Being: Why I Write, situated me in something beyond angst and fear. She talked about her grandmother’s World Books, her mother’s unwavering belief in her desire to be a writer, and her father’s love for classic myths. She wove Blues, a history lesson, her biographical account of life at the Crossroads, and verse into the afternoon sun of the chapelesque space. She took us to church. The talk fits into my day because the sermon at church yesterday morning reminded me we are the house of God in the world. Her talk suggested writing as a house of being — a scared act of naming, claiming, righting, storytelling, healing, comforting, building, and bridging. I left the lecture thinking of my grandmother’s hands, the fossils at the Falls of the Ohio, the Lewis and Clark expedition, bluegrass music, and the calliope sound. I did not remember the noise.