You’re Not Doing It Wrong — You’re Just at the Beginning

For those of you who aren’t aware, I’ve recently been given the opportunity to start as a reader for Thirty West Publishing House. It has been a lot of fun and an overall eye-opening experience as I get to see what people submit, what works in a chapbook, and what absolutely doesn’t. Most of the time it has been easy to decide what moves forward, what doesn’t, and what requires another look.

Today, however, I saw a submission that hit differently. The author was writing about some very real, very raw trauma. I could see the emotion in the submission — how they were trying so hard to make meaning out of pain. I saw myself in that writer, and for the first time I really wished I was able to send personalized feedback.

The craft was nowhere near where it needed to be to move forward, but it was clear this person bled their heart and pain onto the page. They were in the very early stages of trauma writing.

I don’t mean “stages” in any formal or clinical way — more like a loose pattern I’ve noticed in my own work and in the work of other trauma writers. There’s a kind of evolution that happens over time, not linear or fixed, just a way of thinking about how raw pain becomes shaped art.

Here’s how I’ve come to understand that arc:

Stage 1 — Bleeding on the page.
Raw. Literal. Unfiltered.
Writing to survive, not to communicate.
This is where many of us begin.

Stage 2 — Understanding the wound.
Beginning to form shape.
Beginning to see patterns.
Beginning to name the experience rather than reenact it.
Many people hover here for years.

Stage 3 — Making meaning.
Finding metaphor.
Finding structure.
Learning how to create distance without detachment.
The work becomes legible to others without losing its truth.

Stage 4 — Transmutation.
Turning trauma into architecture.
Using restraint instead of reactivity.
Using image instead of reenactment.
Letting silence speak.
Holding the reader with intention.
Seeing the universal inside the deeply personal.
This is where writing stops being survival and becomes art.

The submission I read today was firmly in Stage 1 — which is not a failing. It’s an essential beginning. But it made me wish I could send this to them:

The Rejection I Wish I Could Send:

Thank you so much for trusting us with this work.

It’s clear that these poems came from a deep emotional place, and that matters. Emotion is the first, most essential ingredient in poetry. Without it, nothing else can happen.

Right now, the poems feel like they are written inside the experience — inside the wound, inside the moment of harm. That is such an important stage of writing, and it’s often the first step toward transforming trauma into art. But the work isn’t quite ready yet, because it hasn’t moved beyond the immediacy of pain into the lens that art requires.

With time, practice, and reflection, you’ll learn how to shape the same truths from a place that isn’t lived-in or raw, but crafted. That shift — moving from reenactment into re-seeing — is what allows a poem to hold the weight of trauma without being overtaken by it.

You absolutely have the emotion, which is the hardest part. The rest — distance, form, metaphor, architecture — comes with revising, reading widely, and returning to your own work with new eyes.

Please keep writing.
Please keep revising.
Please keep going.
There is something real here, and with time and craft, it will come through beautifully.

I hope you’ll keep submitting.

With care,
✦