Dear Jenna

how "Love and other Mysteries" came to be

Hello, Poetry Friend (yes, you, Jenna)

When you called to say congratulations about my new poetry collection, Love and other Mysteries, I found myself wanting to pour out the story behind the story.

How, a decade ago, a friend held a retreat about writing-life dreams. And I wanted to go because she’d be there, along with all my writing friends. But I had no dreams, writing or otherwise. I didn’t know how to dream. The idea of an entire weekend under wide Nebraska skies, where dreams could play, terrified me. I stayed home.

Ten years later, early January 2024, I gave myself a DIY retreat weekend while my husband was at his own retreat. And I dreamed.

I wanted a poetry collection. I wanted to tell all I couldn’t say about these last fourteen years. I wanted to write it as as if these were my last words.

From the dream emerged a goal: I need to publish more poems. I made notes and a plan with wings and got serious about submitting. Many of the poems that were accepted ended up in Love and other Mysteries. They knew where I was going before I did.

As I began to gather poems, I got distracted by what I wanted to hide (there be dragons!). Then I remembered some advice from L.L. Barkat, as I rewrote The Joy of Poetry. There were things I couldn’t say then either. “But you can write about your mom,” she said. “Oh yes!,” I replied. She helped me pour all my overwhelming feelings into what I could talk about. And so, following the same advice as as before, the collection became structured around a theme: longing.

Then came the index cards, four evolving stacks of DayGlo yellow, green, orange, and pink. I laid out, crossed out, wrote on the back, wrote out whole new cards. (It’s so much easier to rearrange cards than files.) One poem, “Writer’s Block in the Key of G Minor,” has literally been every color under this neon rainbow.

When I decided to add my eight Song of Solomon poems, written during a DIY writer’s retreat while visiting family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the stacks changed even more. I’d thought those poems were lovely but worthless. Adding them and adapting them meant eliminating other poems that were good, but not for this collection.

At this point it was almost Easter. The project was still baking. I sent it to a friend, who took my underdone collection to the beach. She loved them, but not my organization. “Too obscure,” she said, which is literally the writing critique I’ve been getting my entire writing life. I tell people now my poems went on vacation and came back with demands.

But how to satisfy them?

So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do: I went to the chapel, the Marienkirche (from the poem with the same name). I didn’t lay out all forty-eight cards, but I stacked the stacks on the pew in front me and said, “Well? What now? “I’ve prayed the Rosary in that chapel countless times. That’s when it comes to me: four sections, four Mysteries.

Then the whole thing got FUN. What poem went with which Mystery? Could some of the Songs poems do double duty? How should I revise now that I knew what I had? What new poems needed to be written to fill in the gaps?

I realized I needed to have fourteen poems in the Sorrowful Mysteries section because of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Joyful Mysteries seemed to want to be a novena, nine poems. Most of the poems published elsewhere this year fit into the Glorious section. Luminous lighted itself.

One of the poems I learned by heart this year was Rilke’s “Entrance,” translated by Dana Gioia. It contains these lines:

Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

from “Entrance” by Ranier Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Dana Gioia

That’s what happened, Jenna. And now I need a nap. No one told me what hard work dreaming can be. And what it is like to wake up to Lost Prayers found.

Happy poeming!

Megan

P.S. My poem “Lost Prayers” was inspired by a line in a poem by Jody L. Collins titled “What Had Been Lost,” from her collection Mining the Bright Birds.