One has to have a bit of a thick skin as a poet—you have to accept that your books will likely never make money and that only a handful of people might come to your readings or read your work in literary journals. That’s why hearing from a reader out of the blue is all the more delightful for a poet.
This actually happened to me back in 2022, shortly after I had published a poem called “Philatelist,” in Burningword Literary Journal. The poem was all about my love of stamp collecting when I was a lonely, geeky 10-year-old whose parents had just gotten a divorce and who found herself rather stranded in a new town where she didn’t feel especially welcome. The stamps became a literal window to the world for me and gave me a place for my dreams when reality was not quite as attractive as the colored bits of paper in my collector albums.
I received a wonderful email from someone who had heard about my poem on Instagram on a stamp collectors’ site and had known me peripherally through our shared congregation and tracked me down at my work email at George Mason. He wrote, “Your poem really resonated with me. Growing up I was an only child, an introvert, and the ‘smart’ kid in school who was not good at sports which left me rather isolated. Stamps were my outlet and a window to exciting stories from the past and a window to future possibilities. The US stamps you mention in the poem are all ones I started with in my Harris Independence album and then I moved up to the Harris Liberty album.”
This note of course made my whole week. To feel that one’s writing has touched another soul and resonated with their experience in some way is just magical. It also goes to show that there is almost no experience too narrow to write about—you never know who may have traveled the same path in life and whose heart you might touch with your words.
This is lovely. It's nice to get a "like" or a "Beautiful!" on something you've written, but how wonderful to get a real story of connection!