The dreaded inner editor.

It is something that a writer must learn to tame, to ignore, to kick out the door. So when a friend alerted me to the annual Postcard Poetry Fest run by Paul Nelson, I jumped right in. It is an exercise in excising that viscous voice whispering to, no, screaming at the writer that her writing sucks.

The goal is to write a poem on the back of the postcard, one a day during the month of August. Your name is put on a list and you send your cards to the thirty people listed below your name. You are not to edit your writing at all. This is difficult for writers. We want perfection, listening to that inner voice coaxing us not to let anyone see anything until it is “good.”

Luckily, I began a little early in late July at the suggestion of the those running the fest. I was able to write and mail about twelve unedited, truly spontaneous poems, before an illness in my family forced my attention elsewhere. We promised not to post our poems until thirty days after we mailed them.

Well, here we are at the end of the month and I will be sharing the postcards and poems that I completed. Keep in mind that these are spontaneous poems that have not been edited, at all. I did make a mistake writing on one of them and “whited-out” the error, but I stayed true to the project.

I purchased special postcards at Amazon titled 52 Weeks of Peace by Patricia Saxon and used her wonderful artwork and/or the quote on the card as a prompt for the poems. The postcards are lovely and fun and I have framed many of them and hung them in my first grade classroom this year for inspiration.

As for my words, and this is my inner editor speaking, I like a few. Some I feel I want to work on. Others are just to be forgotten. Over the next few days I will post them all.