I’ve never been an optimistic person. I can be cautiously optimistic at times, but I often default to pessimism when it concerns anything about me. But at the same time, I try to see the best in people, even though negativity comes naturally to me.

In spite of that, I try to be optimistic. I try to say “I can do this”. To say “We can do this”. To smile and look at the rising sun and say “Today’s a new day. Let’s make it a good one.”

One day in September 2019, I had the phrase “Wings of Hope” in my head, courtesy of the show Digimon. I let it form into ideas about hope and optimism, and about how hard I make my life. It’s not that I have a tough life, but I always try to do things the hard way.

I put these thoughts into a poem. Not as a reflection on my outlook on life, but as the outlook I wanted to have. To see bad things happen, let them roll off, and get back up again. To rise above the darkness and shadows of life and look to the light.

I wrote Wings of Hope that day, and refined it during the week. It’s still one of my favorite poems of those I’ve written. It reminds me that I can keep going forward, no matter what. No matter how bad life gets, no matter how dark the night looks, there’s always hope. I can rise above it and keep moving forward.

Flying on the wings of hope.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

At the end of 2019, I was still going to Open Mic at FBC. I’d long since become an expected feature of Open Mic, and at least one person asked if I had any poems for the holidays. I’d been tossing around poems in my head, but nothing had stuck yet.

One of my favorite songs to listen to during the holidays is Winter Wonderland. In middle school choir, it was the last song we’d sing for the winter concert. All the choirs would squeeze onto the stage and sing it together. That’s always been the way to start the holidays for me.

As I’ve written more poems, I’ve begun to notice that the words of other people don’t cut it anymore. They describe how they’re feeling or what they see, but not always what I feel or see. It might be close, but not exact. So I began to write.

I grew up celebrating Christmas, but not all of my friends do. So when I write poems for the winter holiday season, I focus on celebrating winter, not the holidays. A time to look out and see another layer of beauty in nature. To huddle together to fend off the cold. To put aside our differences and come together in a shared spirit of joy.

That’s what I focused on for Snowfall. Snow, winter, and happiness. Because to me, that’s what winter is all about.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I have always been a little odd. This makes itself obvious in many forms, but on this particular day in August 2019, it was pouring rain. While sitting in a cafe, what did I decide? “I’m going to go to the park”.

In my area, there’s a park called Highland Park. It’s beautiful at any time of year, and on this day, I decided I wanted to walk around in the rain. I found shelter under a tree, and began to think.

As I thought, a poem began to form. Thoughts of the rain, the trees, the flowers, everything swirled in my head, and under the branches of a tree, I wrote a poem.

That poem became The World of the Rain and Trees. I wrote of the comfort I found among those I know never judge me for being different. They offer me shelter and love, and ask for nothing in return. In my first years of college, whenever I’d get stressed out, I’d talk to the wind and trees. I found it relaxing to be away from people to clear my head.

People may call me odd, and I am. But I found a place of peace among the trees. When it’s raining, and no one else wants to be outside, that’s when I can be alone and at ease. I know that there’s always a place I can go to get away from the world when I need to. When life gets to be too much, it’s important that everyone can have a chance to get away from it for a while.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

In 2019, I was traveling for work a lot. During the summer, I was gone about every other week. I didn’t like it, and neither did my son. As much as he liked getting to stay with his grandparents, he hated it and wanted me to stay home.

I was still in college when he was born. I was there on the day (luckily he was born over the summer), but a few months later, I had to go back to school. I didn’t get to hear his first words. I didn’t get to see his first steps. And so being away from him again and missing more of his life, especially at the time when he still wanted me to be a part of it, was hard.

While I was traveling, I wrote Coming Home for You to express how I felt. When I got home one day and tucked him into bed, I read it for him. As hard as parenting gets, especially when I started so young, I still miss seeing him. I still want to be a part of his life, no matter what.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I’ve talked about Open Mic at Fairport Brewing Company before, and written a few poems about it. In 2019, I started bringing food with me, usually something I’d found at the farmer’s market. It started with blueberries, until they went out of season, then it turned into apple slices.

I didn’t keep them to myself. I’d offer some to anyone that wanted some, since I had more than I was going to eat. Every now and then I’d get takers, but I didn’t tend to move from my seat, as I’m not exactly a social butterfly.

During one writing workshop, we did an exercise where we described an object over and over again in ever more flowery ways. The goal was to get our imagination moving, to see an object differently. In this particular case, the object was an apple. The first thing that came to mind was sharing apple slices at Open Mic.

Later that day, I wrote Slice of Community based on that exercise. It was a nice little reminder of sharing something with my community, and a way to remember how nice my community can be. I know not everyone’s as lucky as I am, and I like taking the time to appreciate what I have. I hope other people will too.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

People who know me know I don’t use social media. There are many reasons behind that, but one of the big ones I discovered on Reddit.

While I was writing Girl in Red, I had little feedback from anyone apart from my beta reader. The best way I had to get a sense of what the broader fanfiction community wanted was to check Reddit. That was a mistake.

The problem was that when I saw enough people confirming my worst fears – original characters shouldn’t be main characters, Harry should be the only main character, magic should be handled in a certain way and I was doing it wrong – it was hard to stick with my current ideas. I became afraid that if I didn’t do it a certain way, no one would read or enjoy it.

That wasn’t the only time Reddit did that. After realizing how much time I was spending on Reddit, and the negative effect it was having on me, I left it. I’d left Facebook long before that, for different reasons, but I then had a new reason: I wasn’t strong enough to ignore so many dissenting voices.

I recently saw the movie Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams plays an English teacher at an elite prep school. For a sense of his teaching style, his first lesson involves the class tearing out pages from their textbook. This, and many of his lessons thereafter stuck with me. One in particular had him marching some of the students around the courtyard. After a time, they fell into step with one another. He tells them, “we all have a great need for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are unique”.

This reminded me of my time on Reddit, my time getting swept up with the herd. Thinking of this, I wrote Stampede of Conformity, hoping that others could learn from my experience.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

Ever since I was little, I’ve liked making gifts for other people. One of my favorite things to do when I was four was to make birthday cards for everyone.

As I got older, I learned origami. Without instructions, one had to use one’s imagination to see what I saw in the paper. That didn’t stop me from making cats, dogs, or flying monkeys for my family, my parents in particular.

While in college, a friend of mine showed me how to make a flower out of a napkin. It was easy enough that I taught my son’s classmates to do it when he was in kindergarten.

Now that I’m older, I don’t tend to make things anymore. My usual method for buying gifts is to wander around festivals, spot something that makes me think of a loved one, and get it for them. But still, taking the time to make something says “I care”.

I wrote Paper Flower with my thoughts on that. On making something for someone instead of simply buying something at the store. Some people might call it cheap, but I don’t. It takes work to make it, and it shows how much you care.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I've talked before about my struggles with depression, which goes hand in hand with my self-esteem issues. I often reflect back on my life, and I still see the times I leaned on other people too much.

For many years, I was unable to explain to other people why that was, nor to figure out how to fix it myself. Not only that, but it has been a constant struggle for me to overcome it, even for a moment.

This year, I've been doing work on my house, including weeding what was probably once a garden in my front yard. As many things do, it got me thinking.

The result of that was Garden of Me. While other people have raised me up, I never learned how to do so myself, something I've had to do over the past few years. In place of self-esteem, self-doubt grew, until it had taken root. Now, not only do I need to work on improving my self-esteem, I need to remove the weeds of self-doubt.

I'll keep working at it, until I've tended a beautiful garden.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I was recently cleaning out some old things from my parents’ house. To me, digging through old things is like digging through memories. I slipped from present to past, remembering the stories that each object held.

One memory that came up was one of a competition among middle-schoolers in my area. We were given a task and a programmable LEGO kit, and we were to create something to solve it. In this particular instance, there was a field with bottle tops, with the robot on one side, and the goal was to get the bottle tops to the other side as fast as we could.

I spent weeks working on it, programming it in my room, then running down to the garage where my dad and I had taped out the arena to test it. My entire February break that year was dedicated to getting it to work, and I thought I had it. The robot could get all the bottle tops to the other side. It didn’t move fast, but it was fast enough.

On the day of the competition, it was time. It pushed the first load of tops into the goal, then rolled back to get the next set. But it rolled off the side of the slab on which the arena was drawn, a dimension they never gave us. Because it was slow, it couldn’t get back up onto the arena, so it couldn’t finish.

I was devastated. All that work had been for nothing, all because of a small detail they’d never given us. I tried arguing that, but it didn’t matter.

As I remembered it, I wondered what I’d say to myself back then. Nowadays, that’s part of my job, dealing with other contractors that forgot to mention some small, important detail and causing me problems. So I could say “It’s going to be good practice for the future, you’ll see”, but that wouldn’t make me feel better.

Then I asked myself “Why must we suffer? Why must we endure so much hardship?” My thoughts turned to the present, and the people suffering now. I wondered again, “Why must we suffer?”

I sat down and wrote Why Must Suffering Exist? as a response to that question. I don’t think I knew where it was going, but I had to write it. In the end, I came up with an answer: “So we may overcome it”. Shared suffering brings with it a shared understanding of others’ troubles. That’s why it exists. It makes us stronger and brings us together.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I have a very affectionate dog. He just turned 14 (although you couldn’t tell by either his size or energy level), so I wanted to write a poem for him. The difficult part was figuring out what to write.

There’s a lot I can say about him. He fluffs pillows when he gets ready to lie down. He likes to snuggle with my son’s stuffed animals. He stares at me unblinking for several minutes when he wants something. He holds still when I have my phone out so I can take a picture. I could go into the long story of how he came into our family.

But the first thing most people learn about him is that he loves to give kisses. He’s always happy to see people, especially my family, and makes sure we all know how much he loves us.

I wrote One Hundred Kisses to celebrate my little dog with a big personality, and how much we all love him.

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© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA