Marie Gauthier

March is now more than halfway through — NaPoWriMo will be here in a mere 13 days! I’m a little light-headed just thinking about it.

Last year, with one child & a full-time job, I managed 12 days / 12 poems before I petered out. Of those 12 poems, 11 were keepers (and 10 will appear in my first chapbook, Hunger All Inside, which has been accepted by Finishing Line Press and will be out this fall — I’ll post more information as it becomes available). To my mind, that’s a pretty successful ratio.

This year, no job, but the family has grown by one, and he’s little, needy, & unpredictable. Plus Vincent is home with me full-time. So I’ve been trying to formulate a game plan to help me commit to another go at NaPoWriMo. Because there’s something about joining with an entire community of poets to write a poem a day, all these poets who have lives just as full, getting those drafts done, every day, that’s tremendously energizing, and also makes the prospect less daunting.

One thing that would help would be for me to rethink my concept of a draft. As I’ve mentioned, my rough drafts aren’t all that rough — I revise line by line, incorporating those revisions while I write, so by the time I finish a first draft, it could be considered more like a 10th or 20th draft! And it’s not a speedy process, which makes coming up with a draft a day a big challenge.

But on a purely practical level, getting Vincent back into daycare for a few hours a couple days a week would be a positive thing for both of us — he really misses his friends. So that is the #1 destination of my Dorothy Prize money! I figure that paying for Vincent to be taken care of so that I can have time to write should be a big enough inducement to using that time well, because I’ve never had that opportunity before. NaPoWriMo? Bring it on!