Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Poets & Writers. Originally from Austin, Texas, she received an MFA from New York University and currently serves as the communications manager at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses INTRODUCTION If I could go back ten years and tell myself one thing about writing, it might be this: You can continue believing in a poem while also questioning and pushing it into a wilder and more emotionally precise version of itself. (Have I learned this yet? I’m trying.) Muriel Rukeyser might have said it best in her 1949 essay collection The Life of Poetry: “We are poets; we can make the words. The emotional obstacle is the real one.” To me these sentences speak to the writer’s experience in two related ways. First: the hard part of being a writer isn’t just the actual writing—it’s also the emotional obstacles, the anxiety and the self-doubt, that arise along the journey from idea to notes to draft to revision to revision to revision. And second: the hard part of writing isn’t just the actual laying down of words that sound right—it’s also the crafting of an emotional complexity and accuracy behind them.