We were lucky to catch up with Adina Kopinsky recently and have shared our conversation below.

Adina, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I was always interested in words and writing, but as an audience and not a creator. I read voraciously as a child, had a deep and invigorating imagination, and got a BA in English Lit to deepen my critical skills. I thought I would teach English but instead I got married young and chose to stay at home with my kids. I was afraid of my own creative voice. I bought into some kind of “prodigy” theory of the artist and believed I wasn’t good enough to create.

Then my husband’s cousin was murdered and we were left shattered.

Richard Wilbur, a poet whose work emerged from his experience as a soldier in WWII, wrote “one does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.” I think this happened to me. My world had to get entirely out of hand, had to make no sense, before I could realize I needed those words to organize myself and I could make those words help others organize their experiences too.

That week I wrote a longform essay about her death and enrolled in a creative writing class.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a poet who focuses my voice on motherhood, contemplative living, and spirituality. I’m a religious Jew and my relationship with God is as fundamental to me as my experience as a mother; in fact the two experiences are inextricably intertwined. I write about maternal experience, birth, breastfeeding, children, God as mother, truth as motherhood, as unbounded love, and words as life-giving milk.

When I teach poetry classes, which are an invigorating way for me to expose myself to new poems and new perspectives, I am always amazed at how people who don’t think they can write poetry find themselves writing wellsprings of verse when I give them enough constraints in a prompt. They first panic when I suggest they use words x,y, and z in a specific form or a specific pattern, and then they find that their best work emerges and surprises them.

It reminds me of why I find my religious life so meaningful: that having all the options in the world is paralyzing. Sitting down to write a poem “about a flower” has too little structure to help most writers focus and begin. Writing a poem about a “daffodil, on a hilltop, in sunset, using an image for yellow that references food” is an easier and more focused way to enter a poem. Knowing the constraints of my Judaism and living within them gives me the ability to move deeper into my own spirituality.

I also work as a lactation consultant, which means I support families in their breastfeeding and infant feeding goals. This might seem like a totally different kind of job but in many ways it provides the same meaning to my poetry as my mothering does. Babies are incredibly inspirational for me and holding life in its earliest living potential invigorates me with the spirit of creation that leads me to writing.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Sometimes I think people assume poets are a depressed lot. I do deal with heavy feelings and topics in my poetry but that doesn’t mean I feel heavy and depressed in my lived life. In fact, the poetry is a pressure valve where I can find space and meaning to explore my deeper feelings in a contained and productive manner, where I can turn that heaviness into meaning and beauty that in turn, I hope, will help others who feel similarly.

I try to engage with universal human topics and use that universality to connect to my readers and audience in a deep way that heals both me and them. It’s a cliche to say that art might heal the world, but that is actually my goal as a writer.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The world used to be a place where creative expression was commonplace. Before recorded music, most people played an instrument or sang. During the Golden Age of Span, letters of invitation and acceptance were composed in a specific form of metrical verse.

I think nowadays the Western world labors under the misconception that creative expression is reserved for the special few, the born “artist.” I write out of a very commonplace lived experience of motherhood because I want the world to know that each person’s individual life is worthy of art and that they are capable of being the artist that immortalizes it.

Digging deep inside of ourselves gives us the privilege of realizing both how unique we are and how universal our human experience is. It gives us the confidence to be ourselves and bonds us to the rest of humanity at the same time. That knowledge is one of my greatest rewards.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: mompoetlife
• Facebook: Adina Kopinsky

Image Credits
Liron Kopinsky