Spitting Image by Kara Van de Graaf

Poetry is hard to summarize; it is too individual, it takes time to understand. So I will not try to summarize the poetry I read in Kara Van de Graaf's "Spitting Image". Todays post is not simply about the book, this post is a love letter to the woman that taught me to love poetry and gave me permission to write my stories.

I took Kara's Intro to Creative Writing class the semester I fell out of love with dance and back in love with writing. She showed us beautiful poems, stories, and essays that taught me a wider expanse of what I could do with words. It was in that class that I first started to write about my assault, and it was through that writing that I came to understand the scope of what had been done to me. Kara gave me the space to write my story, she handed me tissues and empathized with me when I cried in her office, and she invited me into her Intermediate Nonfiction class that I wouldn't have been able to take without her permission. The essays I wrote in that class became the basis of my undergraduate thesis, and I have started to return to those essays to remind myself of how much I have grown. 

I took two more classes from Kara before I graduated, both of them poetry classes. Those classes taught me how to enjoy poetry after so many years of hating it for no real reason. Kara gave us poems that have made me cry and laugh and mourn and celebrate through the power of just a few words. Kara taught me how to see that there was a purpose behind each word, each space, and how to create that with my own writing. 

I would not be the person I am today if it were not for Kara Van de Graaf and I will always be grateful that I registered for her Intro to Creative Writing class. Thank you for teaching me, thank you for sharing your words so I can still feel close to you even though I am no longer in school, thank you for helping me understand poetry.

Please read "Spitting Image". It is beautiful. I hope you love it as much as I do and even though I just finished it I already can't wait to read it again.

XO, Ellen