A dream I had of George Strait inspired me to write a poem many years ago. Finally, I am in the finally stages of publishing it in my first book in a four-book series named Navigating Life’s Journey Through Poetry. The title of this book is Was It a Dream?.

To sample the flavor of this book, here’s the introduction to it, explaining its inception.

Introduction

“Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

~Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”[1]

“A poet?” I questioned.

“Yes, you’re a poet!” Lin, my husband, responded enthusiastically.

While lounging in our hot tub one beautiful New Mexico evening last year, Lin asked me what word I’d use to describe myself in my writing. I mulled it over in my mind. Did he mean genre? Author? Writer? I don’t even remember what I said, but his answer floored me—”Poet!”

I thought, Four of my seven published books feature my poetry. I’ve written a lot of poems, but I’m not Shakespeare or Milton. I don’t rhyme and have meter in my poetry. Could I be a poet?

Even though it was something so familiar and deep-seated in me that came to light, I had needed someone else to identify it, to identify who I really was—a poet!

After this refreshing discovery, I ran to our storage shed to find all my old poems. I knew exactly where my journals were. I made a beeline to the box, and there they were! After dusting them off, I marveled at the work I hadn’t looked at in years, in decades. That joyous revelation—that I was not just a writer but also a poet—changed my life as an author.

As I mused over Mary Oliver’s poetic “Instructions for living a life,” I realized that, yes, I have “paid attention” by retelling my life’s journey through poetry for years, yet really didn’t realize it until I put this poetry series together. This first book begins with a solitary poem written in 1986 that starts with a trip to the Mayan ruin in Cobá, Mexico and ends with me in Spokane, Washington doing laundry in a laundromat, “paying attention” to a child’s first steps.

While that first poem focuses on a travel adventure, this whole book will take you on a journey through my life in the 80s and 90s, when I was in my late thirties and early forties, an unsettled time in my life. I reveal a variety of my vulnerable “heart hurts,” like being childless at forty. That was monumental for me, a big piece of my pain.

Looking back at these poems, I am astonished at how deeply vulnerable I am. When I wrote these poems, it was to process my life at that specific moment, not to share my innermost thoughts with the world.

Because of that, there are so many different key elements throughout: the pain, the celebration, the wonder, the astonishment, as Mary Oliver says. So, if you’re looking for a central theme, my collection may upset you because I share a hodgepodge of life events, but it is my story.

My first wedding was September 9, 1973, and at that point in my life, I did not see myself as a writer much less a poet. I wrote nothing—poetry or prose. I was still in pain from some past traumas, so I couldn’t see the trees for the forest.

Because of that, I struggled through that relationship, and we ended up divorcing in 1980. For eight years, I actively struggled with alcoholism. That sounds like a short span of time, but for women, the average length of their drinking years is seven years, so I was right there. During those years, I didn’t write any poetry.

From 1982 to 1986, I attended Colorado State University—forty years ago! After a false start for my freshman year in Occupational Therapy, I switched my major to English with a teaching concentration two weeks into the semester and walked into a class with the professor reading Beowulf in Old English. It felt like a foreign language, but I persevered. I was twenty-eight years old when I went to the university for the first time, so I had forgotten anything I had learned in high school, not that I had a very strong background in literature to begin with.

At the beginning of that first semester, I remember sitting in an English literature class and the professor asked a probing question about sirens. Having no clue what a siren was, I sat with my hand firmly not raised, but because of my good-student-mindset, I almost responded anyway. When a student spouted off the answer sought for, my mouth dropped! My only reference to a siren was a noisy alarm on emergency equipment. Sirens on the rocks, warning sailors. I had no idea, and apparently, I hadn’t studied the passage for the class that day enough.

From then on, I knuckled down and prepared for each class thoroughly, realizing I almost had an embarrassing moment in front of my peers ten years younger than me.

It was in those English and American literature classes that I found a poetry. I stumbled through the poetry sections of my classes, in awe of the meaning the professors gleaned from the words lined up in stanzas.

In my upper-level classes, I eagerly absorbed the Shakespeare and Milton tomes and internalized their influence, unknowingly preparing to embrace my own inner poet years later.

There at the university, I started writing for my education classes and realized through good grades and positive comments made by different professors that I certainly did have the ability to write an educational paper. Though I never thought I’d be publishing not only one, but four poetry books in this series, and more.

In 1986, I graduated in the top four percent of my class with a B.A. in Education, a minor in Spanish, and concentration in Education.

I got sober on December 22, 1988. I’ve often thought that my poetry writing paralleled my recovery, but it was in 1986 that I wrote that first poem about Cobá, which I find so rich. Writing that poem and graduating ignited something in me that year, and that was the first glimmer I had that I was a poet.

I can see now that already I was starting to see myself as a poet and noting life.  

Four of my seven published books feature poetry and prose, so it’s not a new genre for me. While teaching middle school language arts and literature, I taught a poetry unit every year, but I didn’t take myself seriously as a poet. I was a middle school teacher, but I only dabbled in poetry.

I also participated as a fellow in the Rio Grande Writing Project, an affiliate of the National Writing Project, a professional development program for teachers. It promoted writing “across the curriculum”—in math, social studies, science, and electives, as well as language arts and literature classes.

During this time, I followed the training of Nancy Atwell’s book, In the Middle, where I learned about “Writing and Reading Workshop,” her successful plan for teaching writing and reading to middle school students. This book changed my classroom. I wrote daily with my students at the beginning of class. I would write a prompt on the board before class so the students knew to sit down, open their writing notebooks, copy the prompt, and respond. Each day, I timed it for seven minutes. When I finished my daily teacher chores, like attendance, I grabbed my writing journal and a chair near a student and wrote. I wanted them to see me as a writer and often I chose poetry to express myself.

By focusing on the writing process, I grounded this writing time in Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, and introduced my students to her preferred writing practice, a timed free write. She listed seven things to consider for this time:

• 1.  Keep your hand moving. No matter what, don’t stop . . .
• 2.  Don’t cross out.
• 3.  Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar.
• 4.  Lose control. Let it rip . . .
• 5.  Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
• 6.  Go for the jugular[2]
• 7.  You are free to write the worst junk in the world (I added, “in the universe!”)

Can you imagine a writing teacher telling her students not to worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar? My students loved it, and their writing blossomed. Then when the poetry unit came up, I guided them through haikus, free verse, and self-expression. It became a favorite of theirs and mine.

Yet at this time, it was a nominal gesture! I didn’t feel like a writer, much less a poet. That identity came years later.

Then something happened! Poetry became the genre I ran to when life tilted in ways I had no control over, good or bad—my mom’s death, the coronavirus pandemic, life!

Almost forty years after writing my first poem, I gathered all my poems together and realized I had written enough poetry to fill at least four poetry books. After taking Natalie Goldberg’s writing practice class during the pandemic and reading her book, Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, I’ve currently moved to haikus to express my life, yet I still write free verse occasionally.

 Today I write poetry when I’m happy; I write poetry when I’m sad. I write about what’s important and about what’s trivial.

This collection of poetry, spanning the first fifteen years of my poetry writing, takes a peek into me and my world. From the luscious green jungles of Mexico to the beautiful purple orange sunsets of New Mexico. From losing my dad and my second and third husbands to living a life without my own child.

Today, several famous poets influence me: contemporaries Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, classics William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, and Native Americans Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich.

Some of those influences are evident in my poems. Magical realism from my Spanish literature classes seeped into my poem on Cobá, for instance. George Strait, my country and western hero, shows up in the title poem (“Was it a Dream?”), doing what I love to do besides write—dance! His advice became my motto for life.

But it was when I found Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life” in her poem, “Sometimes” that I realized I had followed her directions in my poetry to the tee. She was an influence without my even knowing!

So please, step into my world of poetry and walk through my journey with me in this first book as I look at personal growth, reflection, and the twists and turns life can make.

Larada Horner-Miller, Was It A Dream?: Navigating My Life Through Poetry, (Horner Publishing Company, 2024): ix-xv.

Finally,

So many of my books sat for years on a shelf, in a folder on my computer, unpublished. I wrote them then put the notebooks away. As life unfolded, I faced joys and sorrows and wrote poetry. That’s how I navigated my life—with words. With Lin’s prompting, I knew I had to publish this book and this series. Let me know what you think.

[1] Mary Oliver, Devotions, (Penguin Press, 2017), 105.

[2] Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1986), 8.

• Listen to an interview released Wednesday, August 7, 2024 on Hump Days Calls podcast
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