We recently connected with Hannah Mitchell and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Hannah, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
I started writing stories and poems pretty much as soon as I could string words together. It was my love of writing and reading that led me to a career in education. As a teacher of English, I have spent almost fifteen years honing my understanding of the writing process. I don’t mean the one you get taught in middle school – brainstorm, rough draft, etc. Imagine the writing process as a physical thing, like processing wool for making fabric, processing wheat for making bread. With wool, you start with the rough hair of sheep and (through a long, arduous, complex process) end up with a warm, lovely garment. With bread, you start with humble seeds in the earth and (through a long, arduous, complex process) end up with something warm and delicious. Writing is alchemical in a similar way, beginning with something rough and simple, working it through an increasingly complicated unfolding progression. If you’re lucky, the end result works exactly like a fine garment or a good meal: it makes you feel a certain way, like it grew on you, like it nourishes you. I really learned writing as a craft once I started teaching it. The things I wrote in my youth were entertaining, but had only a purgative nature: I was dumping everything in my head out onto paper and then never continuing the process. Once I had to teach others how to write, I started following my own instructions, sculpting my words into something with clarity instead of just raw emotion or scattered plot-points. There’s the old adage that the best way to really understand a topic is to teach it to someone who has no familiarity with it at all. I want to be clear, however, that I didn’t become a teacher because I was a bad writer; I became a teacher because I am deeply excited about literature and one of my greatest joys is sharing that excitement with others. After years of writing as a hobby, it’s thrilling now to be in the early stages of a writing career. The skills I’ve gained working with students (mostly deeply antagonistic) cannot be overstated. I have built up resilience, determination, and a confidence in my own voice that I would never had earned without years in the trenches with an incredibly hostile audience. Having a student throw a chair at you and call you the C-word really makes rejection-letters feel a lot less serious!
The primary obstacle I have faced in my journey has been simple exhaustion, distraction, a lack of hours in the day. Again, I am enthusiastic by nature, almost to a fault. I eagerly take on new responsibilities and projects, consistently putting myself last on my list. I try to justify this by asserting another old saying to myself: “though I grind slowly, I grind exceedingly fine.” I will sit on a single poem for months, chewing on the details and crafting it words or even syllables at a time, working in random ten-minute windows between more immediate projects. It’s not an efficient system by any means. I’m still struggling with balancing my day job (which I love) with my family (also beloved) and the writing career I am trying to build. Luckily, I am content to work slowly.
Hannah, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a writer, but I cannot separate my abilities with a pen from my experiences as an educator. Both are fully intertwined in my craft. Teaching informs the writing; writing informs the teaching. I have been a teacher of English for almost 15 years and I’ve always called myself a teacher first…even though I have been a writer and artist for much longer than that. My primary medium is poetry: lyric, free-verse, although I dabble in the occasional sonnet or other metered/rhymed style. I have some experience writing those small-town items that people commission and then quickly forget: epigraphs, elegies, poems for wedding invitations, you know. I have only started really writing for myself in the past five years, since the birth of my second child. Suffering from post-partum anxiety and depression, I found myself drowning in feelings and thoughts that I could not control. As I said, I had written poetry for most of my life, but I had never really approached it as a craft, something I could hone and control. A sense of control was definitely something that served me well as I dealt with the upheavals in my brain. Deciding to begin publishing my work came almost as a surprise to me, like it suddenly occurred to me that my work might have merit (a sign that I was coming out of the tunnel of depression). It was after I had written my poem “Sonder” (as-yet-unpublished, funnily enough) that it really hit me. The term “sonder” describes the sudden intensely-clear understanding that everyone around you is living a life as unique and fraught and real as your own, with an internal life as vivid as yours. I think of it as the realization that everyone around you is the hero of their own story. That feeling has always been familiar to me, sort of empathetic background-noise in my mind, but it was only once I had put it into words on a page – brought it out into the light of day, into reality, this dimension – that I thought, “Oh, well. Someone else might need to hear this. Someone else might read this and feel seen, or might be able to see someone else more clearly.”
I have debates with students about this concept all the time. “Miss,” they say, “Poetry is so useless. We’ll never use this in real life.” I try to tell them that poetry IS real life – our loves, our desires, our fears and hurts and questions. All of these things have been felt before, and the poet survived it long enough to write about it, to hand it forward through time to our eyes. So even when our feelings and experiences are so big inside of us that we can’t find words for them, we can find those words through poetry – our own, or the words of others. That’s why I write. I’m just passing the baton forward.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
This will sound so much like a grasping, money-grabbing, capitalist answer, but…give us money. Support artists and creatives with money! I don’t mean handouts (although there’s nothing wrong with a tip jar), I mean commission work! Buy content! If you have an idea for a project but not the skill to do it yourself, reach out and start a conversation – most creatives are problem-solving types and would be delighted to work with you. The money you spend on small artisanal work generates so much more economic growth than spending your money at a more conventional big-box business, even if you’re paying more for the privilege. If you commission a poem from me for $30, that money might then go to the local organic bakery for cupcakes for a birthday party. The baker will then spend that $30 at the local apiary for honey. The beekeeper with then turn around and spend that on $30-worth of native wildflower seeds from the farmer trying to re-wild her property. Your $30 investment has now turned into $120, regenerating its value four-fold, instead of going into a mass-producer’s stock and staying put forever. Shop small!
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I lived for so long being incredibly selfish with my craft. If I was writing “real,” I was writing for myself. All I wrote for others were things that I was assigned or expected to write. For me, this was strychnine in the well of my creativity. I suffer from pervasive self-loathing, so if I wrote for myself, I inevitably hated it and rarely gave myself the dignity of sitting with my work and trying to improve it. I felt like a hack and a phoney, and knew in my rotten little heart that nothing I made was worth the time or effort it would take to improve. I almost looked at writing as blood-letting, as exorcism: get it all out, and now we can return to normal functionality for at least a little while. Learning to move beyond that? Priceless. It’s an uphill battle every day, fighting off my conviction that I will never be good enough. I’m learning to make peace with that. Will I ever feel good enough? For me, now, that’s the start of the conversation, not the end.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.stolenmorninglight.com
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