When my grandmother died in 2018, at the age of 98, my family was left with the task of selling her home. It was a modest house that my grandfather had built after WWII, a house that was the center of my family’s life. My last time in the there, finding it hard to let go, I started taking pictures. I took pictures of every empty room, the rusting clothesline, the peony and gardenia bushes. I had no idea why, it was just something I was moved to do.
A few days later, a friend asked me how things were going. I told her about the house and found myself saying, “I’m going to write about it.” Now, I hadn’t given this proclamation any previous thought. Other than my daily journal and papers in college school, I had never been moved to write anything more substantial. But as the words left my mouth that day, I felt the truth of it in my whole body, and honestly it was terrifying. At that moment, I just knew I needed to write about the house. No thought as to when or how, just that it was something I was going to do.
Although I had no idea at the time, this was the beginning of a Wildly Impossible Dream.
A few years later, in the middle of COVID, I came across an email with course descriptions of online writing classes through the Great Smokies Writing Program. As I skimmed the catalog, I came across one about prose poetry. I had never really written poetry before, but prose poetry in my mind seemed less intimidating than other forms, and seemed to have less rules than regular poetry, so I signed up. I finally started writing about my grandparent’s house. Each week I submitted three poems and revised them with other participants. After the class was over, a few of us continued to meet, and I continued to write. At first my poems were all about the house, but over time, I began to write about myself, my childhood, parenthood, empty nesting and midlife. Poetry was becoming a way for me to process and find a home for the huge amount of grief I didn’t even know I had.
In my coach training, we learn about techniques to help clients find what we call WIGs, Wildly Improbable Goals, although I like to think of them as Wildly Improbable Dreams. What makes these different from regular goals, is that WIGs seem to come from beyond thought. They bubble up from a deep place of yearning you don’t even know exists, which is why coaching can help you uncover and breathe life into them. The day we learned about this in training, we were asked to share one of our Wildly Improbable Goals, and what came up for me was, “I want to publish a book full of the poems I’ve been working on. I want it to be an actual book, with a beautiful cover and my name on the front of it.” As I said it out loud, it felt impossible. In fact, I may have even laughed. But now it was out there, this big idea. I had spoken it out loud, my Wildly Improbable Dream, in front of a group of people. Now I had to own it.
A year later, I finally worked up the courage to put the poems together and submit them to a few small publishers. Three months later, the email came. My manuscript had been accepted and my poetry book would be published. I read it three times, and then of course, I laughed. My collection was going to get published. Five years from my first spark of an idea.
WIGs can feel magical, but they can also feel terrifying. They unfold in their own time and won’t be forced. They ride the energy of flowing, not grinding, and this is completely countercultural. Culture will tell you to not even write a damn poem unless you have a degree in poetry writing, and rest assured, this voice creeped into my head more times than I can count, almost every time I sat down to write.
WIGs can feel effortless, but they’re also damn hard and take a tremendous amount of effort. The whole process of writing and revising, staring off into space (an integral part of writing I think), reading more poems than I ever had before (Ada Limón is now my hero), meeting up with newfound poetry friends (Nicole and Josephine, I wouldn’t have kept going without you), all of this took tremendous effort, but it was a flowing effort and not forcing one. Wildly Improbable Dreams are magical and mysterious, and yes, they can come to life if you give them time and space and reverence to grow.
Is there one you might be holding in your heart? Are you ready to speak it out loud?
Soul Geography 