Poetry is, for me, a practice of learning to say yes to the world as it is.

Never was this practice more difficult—or more valuable—than after the death of my son, Finn, who chose to take his life just before his seventeenth birthday.

I believe poetry can help us meet the most difficult moments of our lives. It doesn’t make things easier. It offers no answers. It fixes nothing. But it does offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to find solace in community, to express our heartache and to explore the complex landscape of our hearts.

I have witnessed firsthand how essential the arts can be for showing up in a time when everything in us wants to shut down. I know how reading and writing poetry has helped me to open, to grow, to find beauty in a landscape of heartbreak and devastation, to mourn my son and to honor my husband and daughter.

Part of my work with Evermore will be to support the addition of poetry in their written and oral communications. And part of my work will be to offer opportunities for those in the Evermore community to write their own expressions of loss and love, bereavement and beauty, rage and surrender, heartache and grace.

I cannot wait to meet you, hear your stories, and work together in our poetry workshops.