Playing with Prose

After an in-class challenge to experiment with flash non-fiction, I found myself writing these breathless lists that started to feel like poetry—I’m not sure what else to call them. If I’m honest, I’m not sure what else to call myself if I’m asked to get any more specific than writer.

When I went back to school and began to declare my dreams of writing full time, I pictured myself in the world of non-fiction. I’ve always felt drawn to narrative essays, and assumed that would be where I'd find and hone my voice; but I took a class in the Fall that gave me permission to explore the vehicle of the novel and I found that fiction actually gives me room to be even more honest in the stories I want to tell, and then a narrative non-fiction class this semester nudged me toward poetry.

For the last month, when someone has asked me what I’m working on, they have gotten an answer so jumbled it’s made me second guess myself—a novel, and some flash fiction, and then I’m dabbling in poetry, and, and, and. How convincing, I think to myself sarcastically each time.

But last week I went to my parents' place and stumbled upon a book I wrote and printed my senior year of high school. Forgive to Forget: The Early Works of Kayci Baldwin was a collection of short stories, poems, essays, and even a one act play that felt a bit like a premonition. I told the stories of characters I invented and took a few swings at telling my own.

There are a lot of things in the pages of this book that struck me: that there is poetry in it at all is a reminder of a part of me that I’ve been neglecting for far too long.

The seventh piece in the book is a poem called Things That Won’t Let Me Forget. An insanely simple list of individual words that became anchors to the summer that robbed me of my naivety, I cried when I read this nostalgic little poem because I recognize the same artistic instincts I am still trying to sharpen today.

Below, check out the 2009 poem alongside the piece I have been working on lately, things men say when they don’t want anything serious by Kayci Baldwin, novelist, poet, essayist, and, and, and...