In the time between graduation and becoming employed, I developed a draft of my first poetry collection. It was meant to be a Christmas gift idea for my family. The first draft included all the poems shown up to this point and more. When I asked for someone to review it, the response was not what I was expecting: There were some grammar errors, but the real problem was that it was too dark. The person who reviewed it said “After reading it, I look at the gun on the wall”. It was the opinion of just one person, but it was an opinion I valued because it was an outsider perspective. Even my own mother who got a copy of the first draft said it made her sad.
I then began the mass weeding of poems in the first collection to make it more reader friendly. I went through each poem. When I came across something that could be taken out, I said to myself “Too dark”, “Too personal”, or “Too bizarre”. I ended up whittling it down to less than fifty pages of content.