WHAT ADOPTING A KITTEN TAUGHT ME ABOUT DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE, by Evita Arakelian • Cleaver Magazine

A Writing Tip by Evita Arakelian
WHAT ADOPTING A KITTEN TAUGHT ME ABOUT DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

“How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?”
—Pliny the Elder

The morning started as most fateful mornings do: pretending to be an ordinary one. We had our coffee while looking at the five kittens outside, playing their usual “I’m-gonna-wrestle-you-till-we-both-fall-asleep” game. Until an adult cat jumped unseen into our yard and attacked a kitten. It was over in seconds, and the palm-sized brownish-gray and white tabby was crying in pain, a ten-centimeter gash on her thigh. We rushed her to the vet and, seven stitches later, learned she’d need a long recovery indoors. And, unusually small as she was, a permanent indoor home afterwards.

We had just finished training Pippa, a thirty-kilogram dog, who lived indoors with Pixie, our smaller dog, and our three-year-old cat, Mochi. We were already short not just on space, but on sheer human resources. In fact, the coffee we’d enjoyed that morning had been our third or fourth relatively peaceful breakfast in months. Bringing a fourth pet home was, to use Pliny the Elder’s words, “quite impossible.” After all, we’d fed the technically stray kitten and her family because we didn’t want them to go hungry, but asking us to adopt her was like asking us to run headfirst into cast-iron grillwork.

No one else would take her, though, and so she was dubbed “Soph-Soph,” the fourth household pet. Her thigh healed well, and she was soon playing the “I’m-gonna-wrestle-you-till-we-both-fall-asleep” game with Mochi—whose eyes still gleam like a pair of tiny disco balls whenever he’s with her. She purred herself into our hearts until we realized adopting her was one of the best decisions we ever made. Pliny the Elder won: what we had “looked upon as quite impossible” was “actually effected.”

Isn’t this what poetic experimentation can be like, too?

A short while after Soph-Soph became family, I spoke with one of my poetry students who was struggling to experiment, no matter how much discomfort she was prepared to handle. She would use enjambments she rarely used, write in forms she hadn’t incorporated before, use imagery that was outside her comfort zone. Yet, her poems would end up close to the patterns she had eased into and wanted to break out of. I gave her many activities to do, even asking her to cut copies of her drafts into stanzas, lines, sentences, clauses, phrases, words, and syllables, and then collage the pieces to see what she could get. I realized after our class, though, as Soph-Soph tugged at my jeans, that my actual goal in suggesting such extreme revision activities hadn’t been to get her to do something even “more unhinged” (to use her words) with her poetry. My goal had been to encourage her to start doing exactly what my family and I had done: whatever seemed impossible, not just uncomfortable.

The sense of discomfort when we’re trying to push boundaries in our writing can be a trickster of a feeling. It has a knack for convincing us to stop the experiment there. If a poet usually writes in longer lines, writing a two-word line can cause enough discomfort to convince them they’ve taken the experimentation as far as possible. If a poet is prone to using nature imagery, setting a poem in a power plant could make them so uneasy they assume they have reached the limits of what they can attempt. However, mistaking the uncomfortable for the absolute limits of experimentation would leave, say, single-syllable lines unexplored in the former poet’s work. It would also potentially keep the latter poet from envisioning a poem with underwater and power plant imagery. Trial and error would stop before new ground is broken.

Since realizing the distinction between the “uncomfortable” and the “impossible” in poetic experimentation, I myself have become more productive in revising stale poems. Shaking off familiar patterns in my writing is easier, too. I consider the poem I’m working on and ask myself what feels impossible in it. I start by making a list (e.g., make the speaker a clothes hanger, cut all pronouns, break lines mid-word). I then try each idea to see whether I can find a more evocative, imaginative, and memorable way of communicating with the reader.

Of course, not all such ideas are fruitful, and I am not encouraging experimentation for the sake of it. Nevertheless, the experiments that do ultimately lead to stronger poems are quite often the ones that initially feel like running headfirst into cast-iron grillwork—the ones that are “quite impossible until they have been actually effected.”

Evita Arakelian‘s work has been published in anthologies such as Smitten with the Written (Arcana Poetry Press), Rebirth (The Selkie), and Dislocation (WestWord), as well as in several literary journals, including Talon Review, Eunoia Review, and A New Ulster. Her poem “Child” was shortlisted for the Hemlock Journal Poetry Competition in 2025 and subsequently published in a special edition. Her poem “The Memory of a Star” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology in 2022. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing and serves as a volunteer reader for Palette Poetry. Her craft essay, “On Poems That Won’t Let Go of Us Just Yet,” was published in January 2026 in Palette Poetry, where another one of her craft essays will appear in early 2027. When she is not writing or teaching, she can be found playing with her pets, cuddling stray cats, or taking long walks in Yerevan, Armenia, where she lives.