trash to treasure literary
for the writers who may not believe in their abilities but deserve to
for the writers who have lost faith in their words
for the writers who self-reject their work before it’s given a chance
every writer has a piece of ‘trash’ we can treasure
“Before my dad died in 2008, he generously gave me permission to write about him. He knew I was asking to share a story laden with stigma and shame. His close and troubled relationship with alcohol had been with him throughout his life. His time on earth was rounded off by a five-year, whiskey-fuelled, health and safety adventure. Trying to make sense of the experience, the psychology professor that I am, the first piece that I wrote was for a medical journal (Dorrian J, 2010. Alcoholism: disease or symptom? The challenges of managing advanced alcoholism and chronic illness. Medical Journal of Australia, 192,11: 661-662). I also wrote several poems that became songs. I ‘trashed’ them because I wasn’t clear on whether I was telling dad’s story, or mine. More than a decade later, I find myself engaging in more sense-making. I have rediscovered these poems in the process. I wonder whether they will resonate with others.”
“This poem was inspired by the odd account of seeing a rogue egg cracked open on the sidewalk with a cigarette butted in the yolk. As a newly initated city girl, I have seen a lot of strange things. However the egg and cigarette on the sidewalk really sparked some sort of inspiration. So, “Uncooked” was born as a bizarre city-centric poem. It has been submitted to multiple magazines, and after a while, I decided to trash this piece as I felt it only existed in a space of spontaneous creativity with no room to be anything truly literary.”
“I feel like these poems maybe are written in a style not seen much today. I love nature much like Robert Frost and try to capture that same love of nature. But maybe this doesn't work anymore. I don't give a lot of my poems a chance because of this.”
“I didn’t give ‘Have Mercy’ a chance because sometimes you just start to doubt yourself when you have collected a stack of emails that rejected pieces that you took pride in and wanted to put out into the world to teach people something. It makes you question if your lessons are worth teaching. That’s why I was hesitant in putting “Have Mercy” out there. It’s personal and my heart and soul is written in it. It hurts more when you take a huge risk and put yourself out there and then get rejected. You begin to think your own story isn’t worth telling.”
“I scrapped ‘I think love is a sphere’ due to the fact that I think the metaphor is not cohesive with the theme presented. I don’t really bring up any references to depth, surface, diameter, or circumference after the first stanza. I kind of got lost in the idea of love leaving scars and marks so that we can all remember how each other felt, instead of comparing love to a sphere.
I got a lot of feedback on ‘Farmer’s Market’ which was generally discouraging. Many didn’t understand what I meant when I wrote, “And with that, she bid me a good day.” This frustrated me because that sentence meant a lot to me in comparison to the rest of the piece, so my stubborn self just gave up on it and scrapped it. If you are curious, it is a way of saying that the deceased girl is telling the woman good-bye, and to have a good day. It is supposed to tie back to when the flower shop man wishes the woman a good day.”
“‘Parked’ is exactly what it appears to be on the surface: a poem I wrote in my car while waiting for my son to finish an appointment. Maybe it was due to my pensive mood at the time, but I felt like there was so much to observe in the small details around me. The lit magazines I’ve submitted it to didn’t appreciate the reflections on both nature and the passage of time. Maybe I tried to tackle too many subjects here. This piece also doesn’t quite know what genre it is. In the end, I reluctantly shelved it.”