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Outside, Inside

© Kara L.C. Jones

Sometime the art of using poetry therapy to help yourself is more about reading, going outside yourself to read other people's work than it is about writing. In the past, I've played a balancing act with the amount of reading and writing I was doing. If my writing was really on a roll and going strong, I might not read so much. Reading the work of others would sometimes make me second guess my own writing.

But you know, sometime the writing really goes awry! I'll look down and in the places where I had been going strong, really great pieces of writing falling from my fingertips, metaphors coming from some higher power-- in those places, suddenly, there is all this whining. Some alternate form of my very being has emerged and is writing all this gobbelty gock and feeling sorry for herself and just all those "whoa is me" stories flowing from every pen in the house. It's awful. And when it starts happening in my poetry, chances are that it's happening in all my writing-- journals, fiction, and non-fiction alike. Just pitiful, icky stuff everywhere.

Recently while writing in my online diary, I had begun that awful pattern. Other journal writers were reading my works and leaving very kind notes, trying to inspire me, trying to support me. And then one day there was a note from a wonderful woman asking if I had ever read the diaries, letters, and poetry of the women who lived thru the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, WWII. She thought maybe I would identify with those women in some way, find ideas there, some support, and maybe some perspective on my own situation. She was very nice and never once wrote to tell me to snap out of it (smile).

And so this idea sparked something interesting for me. I first read Victor Villasenor's book "Rain Of Gold"-- mostly I picked this first because my book club was reading it. But quickly I realized that this was the kind of book the other journal writer had mentioned. It was the story of two families who survive the Mexican Revolution, starvation, immigration, prejudices, and more. The women in this story, Dona Guadalupe and Dona Margarita, both lose children, husbands, homes, land, fortunes, country, everything. And yet these

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