Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? This poem is part of my collection Balancing: Poems of the Female Immigrant Experience, in the Upper Midwest, 1830-1930. I worked on the collection for perhaps twenty years, so I remember some details better than others!
The inspiration for this poem came during a visit to the Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska. Many single women took out homestead claims. It was hard work, and not everyone succeeded. Still, can you imagine what an opportunity this was for them? I imagined a young woman who’d never been able to make a decision for herself suddenly alone on the prairie, in charge of her life. Having the ability to make the choice to enjoy a leisurely cup of coffee, and savor her surroundings, would have felt monumental.
My first step was to establish the story with her mother’s philosophy of plunging into chores and scurrying through the day. Then I imagined the landscape—what my homesteader might have seen and heard while sitting on her front step.
https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/index.htm
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I always carry a notebook with me and started jotting ideas while at the national park. Every homesteader’s situation was unique, of course, but the park’s Heritage Center includes some wonderful exhibits that made it easy to get a broad sense of the experience. The photographs and artifacts provided glimpses of lives long gone. I also visited a restored homesteader’s cabin, and spent time wandering through prairie remnants.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I wrote the first draft of the poem in 2014.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) Once I captured the basic poem on paper, I tinkered with it more times than I could count. Because this was part of a larger collection, it had over six years to percolate. Periodically I’d take it out and do some fine-tuning.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I don’t save my iterations, so I don’t know how the first draft compared with the final poem.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope readers will realize that the experience of homesteading was liberating to some women, and that the sometimes-brutal challenges came with unexpected rewards.
https://history.nebraska.gov/collections/chrisman-sisters-women-homesteaders
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I wanted the final line to clearly reject the maternal admonition that opened the poem. This fictional homesteader’s quiet rebellion was about more than drinking coffee, and I hope the final word—“beguiling”—reveals how profoundly this young woman’s life and worldview are changing.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? “Joy in the Morning” appears in Balancing: Poems of the Female Immigrant Experience, in the Upper Midwest, 1830-1930 (Little Creek Press, 2021.)
