A Writing Tip by Eileen Toomey
PREP WORK
It’s spring, which means it’s time to repaint the fence—again. I couldn’t bring myself to do it last year; there’s the scraping, the bleach solution for the mold that crept in over the past (okay, five) winters. It will take two seasons, maybe more—the fence, the trim around the front door—before the whole thing is done. It will look beautiful.
This is also how a poetry collection gets made.
I’ve been returning to the same poems for years. The Canaryville poems, rooted in my working-class Chicago childhood, were written in one form, set aside, revised when I understood something new about the neighborhood, set aside again, revised once more when I finally understood what haiku was actually supposed to do—two worlds in one breath and then silence. I couldn’t have known that the first time around. Or the second. Or ever, without a deep dive into the masters of the form.
Last year I had the chance to study with Maggie Smith (the poet, not the wizard) in a weeklong workshop. Months later, I noticed she was judging a full manuscript contest. What the heck, I still had notes. I went back to every poem I’d ever written—those Canaryville ones again and others—and in assembling them, I discovered the organizing thread running through all of it. That process of distillation revealed the bones of a chapbook. I sent those poems to a publisher. Much to my delight, they were accepted. My chapbook, How to Make an Espresso Martini, is not the end of that process. It’s a section of the fence—a really good one. You should probably order it. The full collection? I still have to paint the front door.
Don’t rush the scraping. The prep is the work. The mold has to come off before anything new can hold. And when you step back, it will look beautiful! At least for a couple of years.
Eileen Toomey
has been published in The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and various literary magazines. Her poem “Immunotherapy” won second prize in Cleaver’s Form & Form-Breaking Competition and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. Her creative nonfiction piece “Canaryville Girls” won second prize in Cleaver’s 2024 Duality Competition. Eileen is a book inc writer and an instructor at Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing organization, located in Red Bank, NJ. She is currently working on a memoir about her childhood in the working-class neighborhood, Canaryville, on Chicago’s south side. You can find links to her publications and social media accounts at https://bookinc.org/member/etoomey. Read more from Eileen Toomey here.
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