A Journey Back Home
By: Brandee Maldonado
My writing journey
is one that I’ve embarked on for over ten years now, although there were many years where I was not doing it consistently. When I was a kid I read all the time and wrote nothing but fiction stories, hoping to create something as enticing as the imaginary worlds I would escape to. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I took a poetry class for the first time on a whim and it changed everything for me. I loved the challenge of trying to tell a story in shorter, fragmented sentences, but with a lyrical spin. What started as a spontaneous decision turned into a creativity inside of me that I had no idea even existed. Poetry became an emotional outlet that I never knew I needed until the words were already on the page.
After graduating
in 2016 and immediately getting a full-time job, I found that I had less time to write and I stopped working on my craft. Despite the many poem drafts I had on my notes app and the plethora of words circling in my head, I never took the time to sit down and actually put those words to use. Quarantine presented itself as the perfect opportunity to revisit that part of myself that had always been there but hadn’t been worked on in a long time. I wrote a poem a week every week for eight weeks and created this collection which was inspired by raw emotions I had been bottling up for a year.
The words came back to me
as though they had never left and it feels amazing to have rediscovered my craft. I’m extremely proud of every single poem I produced during these past months and I believe it’s some of the best work I’ve written in my life. Writing has always been cathartic for me and I’m thankful that I came back to it when I truly needed it the most.
