Happy IWSG Day!
Many thanks to Alex J. Cavanauh, our founder, and for those helping this month: Shannon Lawrence, Olga Godim, Jean Davis, and Jacqui Murray!
If you would like to join, the sign up page is open for all HERE
Optional Question this month: Is there anything in your writing plans for 2026 that you are going to do that you couldn't get done in 2025?
Yes! I am publishing To Speak: Poems of Inspired Courage, Wild Grace, and Sacred Ordinary on my Payhip store in late January, and for wide release in the first week of February.
If you could help with that release, please comment below or send me an email tyrean (at) tyreanstales.com
Short Book Description for To Speak:
When your voices feels more embers than flame...
To Speak is a poetry collection about courage, creativity, and learning to find your voice—especially when it feels quiet, fragile, or unsure.
Through lyrical reflections, narrative moments, and gentle faith-filled poems, To Speak explores identity, vulnerability, and the grace that meets us in our imperfections. These poems offer companionship for writers, artists, and anyone longing to express their truth with hope and honesty.
If you're searching for encouragement to step into your calling, this book invites you to breathe, believe, and speak again. And if you've ever held back your words because they felt too small or too fragile, these pages offer a gentle reminder:
Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And even an ember can light the dark.
PRE-ORDER AVAILABLE ON DRAFT2DIGITAL EBOOK STORE – good for any ebook reading platform
If you haven’t written poetry, before, I invite you to consider trying it, today’s episode of my podcast is all about that. What follows here is the essential beats of that podcast (but not the whole episode).
Podcast Notes:
Instead of an empty page, a poem offers us a small invitation into a world of wonder and reflection.
Some poems invite us into a moment or an emotion, while others invite us into a story. Each holds a mighty theme within its small structure.
At least that’s the way modern poetry feels to me.
Whether the poet chooses a particular form or constructs a poem in a more free, wandering style, the poem invites us to consider something large within a small container.
A container that begins before the words do and ends after the words end.
At least, that’s how it seems to me.
Some poems are meant for spoken performance. Some are meant as visual poems, shape poems that stretch across the page, slowing us down, inviting us to see words not only as language, but as symbols of something more.
I’ve heard people talk about poetry and what sets it apart from prose. I’ve heard experts speak on the matter, and poets I respect. And yet, I’m not always sure what truly separates a poem from prose, or prose from poetry.
Once upon a time, most stories were told in poetic form. Mighty themes were carried inside poems and ballads, ways of sharing imagination, memory, and meaning. Then came the novel, and stories stretched into longer forms.
And yet, each novel still needs a mighty theme, just like a poem. Each needs a core of emotion and metaphor. So how different are they, really? I’m not always sure.
What I do know is that some days I feel called to write poetry. Some days poems come more easily than anything else. Some days a phrase sticks with me, and I turn it over and over, wondering how it might look on the page, or how it might change if I shape it another way.
Sometimes a poem comes all at once, flowing out of a walk or a drive or a moment of wonder.
It’s rare that a poem comes from an assignment, but once in college I wrote a poem I was particularly proud of—one that came from an assignment I resisted and twisted into something my own. People loved it, and they took it seriously. That amused me, and also unsettled me a little.
Most of the time, poems come from emotions I can’t quite name. I circle them with words, sometimes overexplaining, sometimes realizing fewer words are better. Ideas circle, phrases linger.
In a podcast just before Christmas day, Damien Larkin mentioned how he feels some of his drafts are Franken-drafts. That phrase stuck with me, and I’ve noticed it showing up in other places.
Recently, I took up knitting again after many years. I didn’t start small—I decided to make a scarf. Then another. Then one with sections of different lengths and colors. When I laid the pieces out before joining them, I realized it was a kind of Franken-scarf.
That idea carried over into other places. I made a pot of chicken soup while I was sick—apples, sweet potato, carrots, chickpeas, chicken, spices. It was a little bit of everything. A Franken-soup. Not wrong, just assembled from what I had.
Maybe someday I’ll write a poem about that scarf or that soup.
Sometimes I sit with a poem for a long time before writing it. Other times it arrives all at once.
A poem holds a current, a movement, and invites others into the conversation.
That’s why I love poetry and the open space around it. It invites us to create, to reflect, to take part. Even angry poems often carry an invitation, to look, to listen, to imagine peace or possibility.
Poetry holds story, emotion, reflection, and meaning all at once. It may not always have a clear ending. It may be hard to understand. And still, I love it.
There was a time when I didn’t know I loved poetry. It took a teacher assigning it for me to see it. The first poems I loved were shape poems, poems that lived on the page as much as in sound. And while I love spoken poetry and open mics, there’s something powerful about a visual poem unfolding across the page.
I think there is power in all of it. Spoken poems, visual poems, poems of movement and silence. I even wonder what a poem would look like in sign language. What it would mean to shape a poem with hands and motion, like a kind of living sculpture.
Poetry holds all of that: music, story, emotion, thought, and meaning.
That’s why I write poetry. And that’s why I invite you to consider writing poetry too, any kind of poetry.
