#404 Backstory of the Poem “Magritte’s Apple Explains It All” from the chapbook poetry collection FEATHERS ON STONE by Joan Leotta.

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? I belong to a Creativity group curated by Chris Norcross–One week she posted a Magritte painting, as the prompt. The picture is of a giant green apple in a tiny classroom. Suddenly I saw the painting as an answer to a question I had about my mother–everyone I love comes to me in my dreams–the dead as well as the living–everyone except for my mother. And the picture revealed the answer to me.

It’s not that she was or is absent from my life, it is that she is still very present in my daily life, my awake self still revels in her presence. She does not need to come to me in dreams. And I knew I had to share it, my insight, on paper in a poem.

Click on the below link to visit Crisitna M.R. Norcross

http://www.bookthatpoet.com/poets/norcross.html

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.

I was at home. And I wrote this poem in a short period of time. I do not recall if I read the first draft of the poem at one of our meetings (the Norcross group) although I may have. But I do know I read it aloud. Even if it was just to myself.

After reading it, I redid it and then decided to send it to one of my favorite journals, The Ekphrastic Review.

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/magrittes-apple-explains-it-all-by-joan-leotta

After a couple of weeks, Lorette C. Luzajic, the editor, wrote to me that the poem was accepted. It ran and I received many compliments on it. I decided to include it in the chapbook I was assembling. Then, later in 2022, just before my book came out, I received the news that Lorette had nominated it for Best of The Net 2023.

Click on the below link to visit Lorette C. Luzajic’s Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/lorette.c.luzajic

What month and year did you start writing this poem? Sometime in the spring of 2021. is when I started to write it. Sent it to The Ekprhastic Review several months later–I do not keep a strict timeline on poems anymore and it is hard to reconstruct them because I no longer keep paper copies of drafts

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? Sometimes, but not with this poem, I find myself writing long introductions and usually the final version clips these out –I prefer to start poems and stories with more action , then come in with narrative that should be followed with an arc that lets the reader inside my emotions, my thinking and wind it up with something that is beyond myself, a place the reader can insert him or herself.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? The closeness of my relationship with my mother and how such close relationships transcend death.

Which part of this poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? The part about admitting that I felt guilty, perhaps I was not a good daughter.