Rebecca Wood lives with her plants and craft supplies in Toronto, Canada. She has been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Corporeal, Wishbone Words and The Blood Project. She has graduate degrees in Early Childhood Studies and Women and Gender Studies and currently works in the Disability sector. Her writing explores her experience as a multiply chronically ill woman with an episodic disability through themes of bodies, identity, hope, magic and grief.
You can read Small Screen Safety in the July 2024 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?
This poem is an exploration of what it means to engage with intimacy and connection when closeness to another person holds an impossible amount of risk. I wrote this piece while undergoing an extremely immunocompromising MS treatment a few years into an ongoing pandemic. These words came together while thinking about how my desire and perceived desirability can only exist in ways that prioritizes my safety and how that complicates wanting.
How do you revise your work?
Taking breaks and playing with words and structure are important parts of my revision process. For me, the first draft of a poem often comes out in a rush, and usually all in one sitting. I will re-read it immediately and maybe make some initial edits or notice the places that I want to revisit, but then I will intentionally leave it alone. If I think about revisions or word possibilities before I am ready to sit down and fully revise, I will make some notes to remind myself later. When I come back to the poem, I read through while focusing on removing any unnecessary words. I check for repetition and make sure any repetition left in is intentional. I also read it out loud and make changes to line breaks, stanzas and word choice based on how it feels and sounds.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
For a long time, poetry felt like something I wrote in secret. There was an overwhelming fear that my poetry was “bad poetry” and that any words I put out in the world risked being mocked. Creative success over the last few years has felt like embracing myself as a poet. Shifting from fear to an understanding that not all poems are for all people, and that is okay. My poems are going to keep coming and I am proud of the way I play with words. I get joy and satisfaction from writing and revising and sharing what I have written. It is a bonus if others find meaning in my work. I am now the person who will send poems to friends with reckless abandon. It is a creative achievement to say, “Yes, I am a poet.”
What are you working on now?
I am currently working on my debut chapbook, “Multimorbid,” a collection of poems reflecting on the overwhelming experience of navigating multiple diagnoses, multiple doctors, and multiple medications all while immunocompromised and isolated. I am also finishing my first full-length work, a creative non-fiction memoir project.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me, a poem begins with noticing. A moment, a combination of syllable sounds, a detail or movement or unexpected behaviour of something out in the wild. Some noticing will catch my attention, and I will think “there is a poem in that.”
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Don’t be afraid to rewrite the same poem experimenting while with different forms and constraints. This kind of playing with form helps me to find the right iteration of a poetic idea. Exploring forms like pantoums, viators, and sestinas pushes my creative thinking choices to places I may not have been able to access in the flow of a first draft. I may not stick with the version that follows the rules of a particular form, but I often find that unexpected words and images appear when I experiment in this way.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
It has been lovely to find virtual writing workshops over the last few years as spaces for community, feedback and creative connection. I have been quite active in these spaces and written with several groups including Toronto-based Firefly Creative Writing, Rigamarole Writing Workshops and Carmel Futures, and I have found several amazing one-off virtual poetry workshops to join as well. It has also been wonderful to both discover and host workshops focused on supporting and connecting disabled and chronically ill writers.