We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelly Michelle Thomas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kelly Michelle, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

From 2017-2020, I was working as a shift manager at an arts and crafts store. At first, I loved my job because I was surrounded by my love for creating art, but over the years, I began to loathe it as new management was taking over. It started to become a nightmare. While working I would paint in my free time in my home based studio, called MICHESHART, and sell my art. When the pandemic hit it was a life changing moment for me. I couldn’t work from home and my job was demanding more and more from me. I was living with my mother at the time who is disabled and was among the high risk. I felt torn going to a job I loathed, leaving my mom knowing she needed my help, and not having anymore time to create art. In September of 2020, I wrote up my two weeks resignation with a plan to focus and invest in myself as well as being there for my mother in aid. Leaving the job was an exhilarating feeling, imagine taking that first big breath after being under water for the period of time. I finally felt peace knowing I could focus on my art and this is when things actually took a twist.

To give more context, lets rewind back a few years. In 2015, I challenged myself to write every single day for 125 days and post it on my blog every night. This was after I left an unhealthy, abusive 5 year relationship. I challenged myself to be as vulnerable and as creative as I possibly could be. Everyday I was a mad woman in my room writing away to post at night. Once I completed the challenge, I archived the poems away to never be seen or read again. Now fast forward, remember I said things took a twist? Well after I quite my job, I was fiddling with my blog site and was going through the archived poems. I decided to take them off the site and put them in a word document so I had all the poems on my hard drive and wouldn’t lose them. As I was copying each poem one by one putting them in this document, it automatically started to take the form of a book along with chapters. I suddenly thought to myself “Well I guess it’s time for these to go out into the world.”

I never intended on publishing these poems because of how vulnerable I got with them, but over the course of 4 months I spent every waking hour formatting, creating illustrations, designing the cover, editing, and re-reading my poems over hundreds of times. I wouldn’t fall asleep until 4-5 in the morning and get back up and doing it over again until I felt in was perfect. Finally after many samples and revisions, in March of 2021 I self published my first book titled “125 Days: Book One” which consisted of days 1-60 followed by “125 Days: Book Two” in 2022 which consisted of days 61-125. Of all of the works of art I have created in my life, my poetry collection 125 Days has become my pride and joy that I will never stop talking about.

Looking back had I not taken the risk of quitting my job, my poetry collection wouldn’t have been born. I probably wouldn’t have rediscovered my passion for writing and poetry. I probably wouldn’t have become an author. I probably wouldn’t be attending open mics or be a featured reader sharing my poetry. I wouldn’t be writing this story for you. I still find it fascinating how I had one plan and God/The Universe made another one happen. It makes me think about this one dream I had that I will never forget. The dream being that I saw myself at my own funeral, it was an older version of me. Then suddenly I see the words 125 Days and the walls start fading away reveling a beautiful paradise. When I had that dream, I didn’t quite understand but now as the days go on, it’s becoming more clear. These books were always supposed to come into fruition and now that they have, wonderful things have been happening gradually in my life and I never would have known this could happen had I not taken that risk.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Kelly Michelle Thomas and I am a poet, visual artist, and an author. I have always considered myself an artist. Ever since I was a young child, I was always drawing on any piece of paper I could find or painting. I would also write short stories and poetry when I was younger too, but I never considered myself a writer and I certainly never imagined I would ever write a book. I mostly focused on my passion for drawing/painting and my passion for writing kind of took a back burner. I would still write, but I treated it more like a secret. I guess my reasoning for doing that was because with my art, people can make up their own perception of what they’re looking at. With my words, people will know exactly how I’m feeling or thinking and that scares me.

Now a days, since self publishing my poetry collection, I have been devoting a lot of my attention to my writing. Giving myself permission to share my words and read my poetry out loud at open mics has given me a lot of confidence and courage. Over time I’ve realized that when I share my words I may also be impacting someone else. There have been many times people have come up to me after I’ve read my poem to tell me “thank you” because my words spoke to them or I’ve told their story. Sometimes people will take a picture of a poem from my books and send them to me with wonderful messages of how much the poem affected them. It’s a surreal and emotional feeling to know my words can have that type of profound affect on people.

When people read or hear me recite my poetry, I often hear how melodic it is, how much detail there is, or that I’m a great story teller. I’m heavily inspired by music that is ambient/atmospheric so I tend to write a lot with that genre of music playing in the background. It really gets my imagination going. Aside from writing about my experiences, I also tend to write a lot of narrative poetry which is a style of poetry that tells a story complete with characters and a plot. Couple of my favorite narrative poems are “The Lady of Shallot” by Alfred Tennyson and “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. I’m very inspired by classic poetry and since I rarely see narrative poetry around like that anymore, I try to give the public something fresh and new. When people read my poetry I want it to feel like an escape so I use a lot of details to trigger the five senses. I don’t want you to just read what I write, I want you to feel it and experience it.

I still create art and offer a lot of abstract works through my art studio and website, MICHESHART, but right now I’m having a lot of fun with my writing and exploring that further since I’ve kind of neglected that part of me for so long. One day, I would like to write an epic like “The Odyssey” for the modern day. I would also like to write children’s books and maybe explore playwriting based of one of my narrative poems. I have quite a few projects and goals I want to accomplish and eventually I hope to have a good healthy balance between my art and writing.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There is so much I could say, but the one word that keeps ringing in my head is “Joy”. When a creative becomes suppressed and are unable to create due to a job or anything it can feel like a part of our soul is dying. At least that’s what it felt like for me. But, making it my intention to live out my life authentically doing what I love most by writing and creating art has brought me so much joy. I experience joy while I’m in the process, I experience joy once I’m done and I’m looking over what came out of me saying to myself “I did that!” I experience joy when people reach out to me telling me how my work has impacted them. Even when I’m going through something and I channel that energy to create something from my pain there is still an underlying amount of joy I feel. Even though there are times when things can be a struggle, it still doesn’t measure up to the amount of joy I experience and I always keep my faith. My father always tells me “Don’t let anyone steal your joy” and I have made that my daily mantra.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I want to inspire as many people as I can. I want my work to be timeless, have generations after generations still reading and sharing my work. When the time comes where I am no longer a part of this mortal realm, I don’t want my stories to be buried along with me. I want people in the future to know my name, know I lived, know I impacted people, and made some kind change.      

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kellymichellethomas.com
• Instagram: im.miche
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kellymichellethomas
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kellymichellethomas
• My Art Portfolio Site: https://www.micheshart.com
• My Poetry Blog Site: https://www.prettypoesy.com