Ben Fowlkes is a writer whose work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Best American Short Stories, FailBetter, and elsewhere. In his day job, he works as a sports writer for Yahoo Sports. He primarily covers fight sports, and has previously written for outlets such as USA Today, The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, and others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and lives with his two daughters and one dog in Missoula, Montana.
You can read The Day You Lost a Job You Never Liked in the April 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
So I had this job writing content for sports gambling websites. It was fine as a job, but it was very much just a job. Which is to say, I didn’t really care about or feel very invested in it, and that was actually pretty refreshing for me after so many years of letting my work bleed into my sense of self and dictate my self-worth. I knew one day this job would disappear, and probably very suddenly. It was one of those companies that starts doing “layoffs” in batches, each time insisting it’s the last time, so it wasn’t hard to see where that was going.
But when it was my turn to be in one of the batches, it somehow still felt like a shock. Being positive is not something that comes naturally or easily to me, but it’s something I’m always trying to do better at. Writing poetry is, for me, entirely therapeutic. So this poem was my way of trying to work through some of these feelings and look for a positive angle, while also sort of providing myself with a bird’s-eye view of me in the process of doing that. Like, hey, this is you right here trying to be positive. And even if it doesn’t work, at least I got the poem out of it.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Poetry is probably the only form of writing I do where my only barometer of success is the actual doing of the thing. Everything else, I’m trying to get somewhere with it. It’s for money or attention or external validation. It gets to be exhausting. Poetry is the only thing that I do purely for me. As a result, I think I enjoy it a lot more. It’s the only type of writing that I feel like I can’t wait to get back to. When it’s a Saturday morning and I’ve got some free time, I get excited to go upstairs to my office and spend some time with drafts of poems I’m working on. That right there – just that feeling alone – is really the only success I need out of it.
What are you working on now?
I’m trying to come up with enough poems I’m happy with that I can put in a book of some kind. The problem is that I love to tinker with them. One of the reasons I send them out to be published is because that seems to be the only way I can stop revising them and move on. I figure maybe if I put a bunch of these into book form it will make me stop messing with them and write more new ones.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Sometimes it’s a phrase or a sentence that I happen to read or overhear. Other times it’s a fleeting, momentary observation or a sudden spark of memory. I feel like I’m writing things down in poems just as a way of holding onto them. You get all these moments in your life – even people in your life – that sort of flutter in one open window of your brain and out another. Putting them in a poem is my way of keeping a piece of them for myself.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
When I started it was basically what I did instead of keeping a journal. I’ve never been able to maintain a diary or anything like that. It always felt forced to me, and I guess I didn’t see the point. Poetry was a way of essentially doing some of the same things, but in a way that was more interesting and challenging and fun for me. I did it for years thinking I’d never show it to anyone. Then I finally did and it wasn’t as mortifying as I thought it would be.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
I think of my poetry as my ongoing attempt to understand my own life. It’s so confusing sometimes, just being alive and being a person. I find that I can work through some stuff with poetry that I can’t quite get to any other way. I want to be the kind of person who stops to appreciate the beauty of this strange life, even when he has no clue what it’s about or what any of it might mean. I sometimes fear that I am not naturally wired to be that kind of person, so it requires a very intentional effort. Poetry is my record of my own attempts at that.