One Stop Spotlight - Terresa Wellborn & her Poetry

Each time, I visit Terresa at "The Chocolate Chip Waffle", I'm spellbound by the way she weaves words into poetry. I told her that sometimes I picture her as the "Queen of words", wielding a magic wand, the words tumbling across the page, willingly submitting to what flows out of her pen with tremendous ease and obediently falling into their perfect places. She seems to write effortlessly - lightweight - naturally and to read her works often feels like bathing in moonlight to me. I asked her to not only share one of her poems, but also to tell us a bit of the writing process and of what writing means to her.
~ Claudia 


Enjoy what she's written for us...

Ideas reach my shore and I write. I consider the place I draw my inspiration from an ocean, ebbing, flowing, unfathomable, refracting light while containing great depths. I dive for words, draw them out and set them into the landscape of my writing, float them across a page.

In a New York Times essay, Maryanne Wolf, in an attempt to answer the question, “Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?” responded, “You are the sum of it all.” I approach writing that way: everything I read, see, doubt, and dream feeds into it. My writing, in a way, is the sum of my experience.

Quoting Thoreau, “I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.” This is how I write, taking from nature and life, wrenching sky and earth and everything in between. It is exhausting, it is work, it is play.  I also like to make up words when I write, and as Baudelaire said, "If the word doesn't exist, invent it."  And I do.
I appreciate the creativity poetry allows me. I would forfeit everything I have in order to write, to stay constantly in that creative zone, but it's not possible. Instead, I rise with so much to love, to read, to share, and as ideas reach my shore in waves, I write.



The Guests

I drove, a solitary sail into the mouth of the night,
to the Wasatch edge where I saw her, a deer,
head bent to a pool of green,
and you, a flung star.
How we wanted her, like a hooked dream, awash
in our own brine. We poured,
paired cups of disbelief and tremulous now,
gathered guests at a table only she knew how to give.
We took her in, a blur of tan and heaving life,
her heart written out in hoof and tail twitch,
and us, captured on the deck of that dark night,
fish, even,
swallowed.

--Terresa Wellborn

© 2010 by Terresa Wellborn. All rights reserved.


Terresa Wellborn has a BA in English Literature from Brigham Young University, an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her poem, “A Different Leaving,” was recently highlighted on Nic Sebastian's Whale Sound, and her essay, “Seeing” will be published in the journal, Segullah, spring 2011. She blogs at "The Chocolate Chip Waffle"