by Lawrence F. Farrar

It takes patience to be a writer. Of course, it takes imagination, a way with words, familiarity with syntax and grammar, and lots more. But it also takes patience, an ability to hang in there and to endure the vagaries of the writing life. Whether defined as virtue or necessity, it doesn’t matter: if you have it, it works to your advantage; if you don’t, life is not always beautiful. It has something to do with emotional well-being.

by Bill Meissner

—After hearing that if a literary agent didn’t recognize your name in her e-mail inbox, she would “delete your query unread.”

Once upon an ancient time, I was in love with paper. I was in love with words, with the way they pressed themselves, just so, like close friends, on the page. Words mattered, once upon a very different time.

Once I was in love with trees. The years of my life equaled the rings on a medium-sized oak tree—each ring another imprint of a dry year, or a rainy year, or something in between—and I wrote about each one. I used to slide my arms around trees and whisper to them, knowing someday they would cradle my words in their pulpy palms.

by Michael Fedo

Fifty years ago, as a college sophomore, I enrolled in a short story writing course taught by Harry Collins (not his real name). It was the only creative writing class I ever took and I got a C in it. According to Dr. Collins, my stories lacked verisimilitude and were weak in character development. Heedless of my instructor, over the subsequent decades I’ve published eight books—including one novel—and scores of articles, essays, short stories, and poems, each one a refutation of Prof. Collins’s discouraging words. I may have become a writer to dispel his perception that I wasn’t one.

by Elizabeth Bourque Johnson and Ted Bowman
editors of The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets

Smile.
Love what you love.
Take a deep breath.
Walk in the other’s shoes—poems, that is. ~Elizabeth Bourque Johnson

At a conference of the National Association for Poetry Therapy some years ago, we (Ted and Elizabeth) just happened to sit next to each other at lunch, and in the course of the conversation—where are you from? what do you do?—we learned that we were both from the Twin Cities, wrote poetry, and shared an experience with writing and grief. Before the luncheon was over, Ted said, “I’m going to find a project for us to do together.”