"permission to wander"
poet and arts educator Tiffany Melanson on re-building a creative practice, walking without a destination, and the "extraordinary" power of poetry
This is a Beginner’s Mind interview, a series that explores the intersection of mindfulness and creative practice. Zen master Shunryū Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.” This series shines a light on the practices that sustain people in their daily lives and open the path to new possibilities. If you know (or are) a writer, creative person, teacher, or practitioner with practices you’d like to share, just reply to this newsletter to be in touch with me. ✨✨
Tiffany Melanson is a brilliant poet and teacher whose work I’ve been excited to share with you for a long time. We were in grad school together at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and we’ve stayed in touch since then—bonding through Instagram over the intensity of trying to write while working as a high school teacher (her IG stories are a lyric essay in and of themselves).
Besides having a whip smart sense of humor and a deep sense of why poetry matters, Tiffany’s own poems are resonant, lyrical, and cut close to the bone. Her poems gaze directly at what is difficult and enact what Galway Kinnell says poems should do (a line she has quoted to me before): “Go so deep into yourself you speak for everyone.”
I think you’ll love what Tiffany shares in this interview about her creative and mindfulness practices, especially if you’re a bit skeptical of spiritual practices and mindfulness, but value rituals that help you be more embodied and present. Now I’m off to try Tiffany’s prompt and give myself “permission to wander.” 🛤️
What is your writing practice like? Do you have any writing rituals?
This answer is evolving for me in real time. For the past 13 years I’ve been a creative writing teacher at a public magnet high school for the arts. I directed the Creative Writing department and developed curriculum, taught creative writing courses at the beginning and advanced level, and was the faculty advisor for our student literary magazine, Élan. The job was all-encompassing and in almost every aspect of my life it ruled me, including my writing life. It was incredibly inspiring but also led to such extreme daily burnout that I rarely had time to write during the school year. Instead I would spend my school year applying to writing residencies and fellowships in the hope that I would be able to get away from my life for weeks at a time and finally do the work in the summer months.
For a long time that was the cycle: write in the summer, revise during the school year. But recently I left my job, in many ways my dream job, because the rigors and daily censorship in Florida public schools started stripping the work of its joy. I had to fight even harder to do the work I knew the students needed and it took even more of my emotional and intellectual energy each year to the point where there was very little left for me.
I’m just a month out of that world and I’m now working for a nonprofit organization that deals with arts education, but doesn’t have any connection to creative writing. What I’m finding is that all of that creative energy I was giving away for years is having trouble landing in my own hands. But I have hope that I’ll figure it out. I’m trying to create a writing practice now that includes daily free writing and a once a week purposeful writing session where I use prompts to unleash my creativity in a different way. I can feel myself slowly finding a new rhythm.
What kind of writing are you working on? Are you working on specific projects or journaling or something else?
I finished the 3rd iteration of my poetry manuscript this summer, something I’ve been working on off and on for ten years. I’m embarking on what I know will be a lengthy and difficult submission period. One way I’m trying to see some of that work into the world in alternate forms until, fingers crossed, it gets picked up, is through an exhibit and visual art collaboration with a local gallery and social justice space in my community. It uses a section of my manuscript that deals with the reconciliation between myself and one of my older brothers who has been incarcerated since I was 16 years old. At the heart of the work is a desire to be understood and to understand and I’m working to collaborate with him through our correspondence on his own poetic work to include alongside mine in the exhibit space. I want to give him a space to be seen and heard as an artist. We’ve both written poetry our whole lives and this collaboration means so much to me.
Otherwise, I’m completing weekly writing prompts and simple exploratory exercises to see what kind of poetry comes next for me. Some of the work has been a continuation of prior themes tied to confinement and motherhood, but new work tied to life as a caregiver to others and the sacrifices of a life in teaching are also coming through. I don’t really know yet what to make of it, but I’m okay with that.
What helps you when you get stuck with your writing?
Reading poems I love helps me more than anything else. I also use resources like Poem a Day to introduce me to new voices and ways of speaking that can serve as a catalyst to my own ideas.
Outside of that, my biggest creative inspiration comes from works of visual art. When I am most stuck and reading isn’t enough, I go to a local gallery and look for the emotional ideas that emerge from my responses to the art of others. Ekphrasis is such an amazing tool to get yourself unstuck.
What are your mindfulness practices?
I eschewed any form of rigid spirituality in my adult life because of a very tumultuous relationship with religion in my childhood. It’s hard for me to develop anything that resembles a practice that is overly structured.
That said, the closest thing I do to a mindfulness practice is my daily evening walk. I live in a huge suburban neighborhood with concrete block homes built in the 50s, 60s and 70s (very Florida) and I love midcentury architecture. I often take 2-3 mile walks around my neighborhood in silence, no music, no headphones, and imagine the past and current lives of the homes and buildings along the way.
I let my mind work through all of the possibilities, cycle through my anxiety checklist, then settle itself. Now that I write this out, I suppose I do have a mindfulness practice. I consider that time alone with myself pretty sacred.
One of my absolute favorite memories involved taking afternoon trail walks in the Florida scrub with my grandmother, mother, aunts, uncles and cousins when we all visited my grandparents during holiday and summer breaks. We’d just set out on a dirt road and walk, or we’d follow a creek line until the water disappeared. I remember the smell of orange blossom in the air and the wildflowers kicking up pollen. I remember the heat rising off the sweet tea colored water. I remember getting scraped by the wire fence and thorns on the blackberry vines hanging off them and shoving my hand in for another one anyway.
I think simple walks in nature without a destination in mind are the closest thing to spirituality, other than poetry, that I believe in.
How often do you practice mindfulness and when/where?
The other way I do so is when I teach poetry. I consider that exchange a sacred act and the many years I’ve had the privilege to do so have given me a deep sense of self and the importance of others.
What do you do when a mindfulness practice doesn’t seem to be working?
I quit. I’m a quitter (haha)! What I mean by that is I don’t waste a lot of time trying to make something that doesn’t feel right fit. Some of my best friends swear by their yoga practice. Many of my friends meditate. I have friends who are big hikers and runners. None of that ever worked for me because it always felt like I was falling into someone else’s prescriptive practice and the confines of that feel stifling.
If I try it and it doesn’t click, I don’t bother beating myself up over it.
Do you see your writing and mindfulness practices as connected? In what ways?
I do see them as connected. That story of walking with my family as a little kid still sticks with me for a lot of reasons. No one asked me to slow down or yelled at me to keep up. If I became a dirty mess in the process, I was never scolded for it. That’s why walking feels so freeing to me and I think the time I spend not assigning my brain a task and just letting it wander leads to freedom of thought on the page.
I tend to be overly serious and driven in other parts of my life. The feeling I had as a child on those walks is very similar to how I feel drafting poetry if it’s working.
How do you see your writing/mindfulness practices related to your teaching work?
Now that I’m not teaching daily I can see how much my teaching practice drove my creative goals. I would say I was not very mindful of myself or my own needs when I was teaching. I gave it all to them, and they knew it. But I couldn’t help myself. I would get so overwhelmed with the instructive work that a few of my students described my lessons as sermons. I still find that pretty wild given how little I care for organized religious practice.
But I do remember that at the heart of what I do value about spirituality is its ability to give you language for the unknowable, and isn’t that what poetry does too? So teaching poetry reminds me of its extraordinary power to transform your inner sight. I already miss it, but I’ll go back to it. For now, it’s time to heal.
A prompt from Tiffany
My tip involves giving yourself permission to wander.
Take one solid hour to walk aimlessly without a destination. Make sure you’re in an environment that allows for lots of visual stimulation, but not too much sonic stimulation, like a museum or a nature trail.
Don’t write as you go, just be.
Once you get back to your home or your creative space, open up your document or notebook and write what you saw, not as a catalog of things, but as a description of what moved you. Set a timer for 15 minutes and stop when it sounds.
Let 3-5 of these sessions with yourself pile up before you read them and try to figure out what they have the potential to be.
Tiffany Melanson is a poet and arts educator. She is the author of the audio chapbook What Happens (EAT Poems), and her work has recently appeared in Eco-Theo Review, Cutleaf Journal, POETRY Magazine, and Compose Journal, among others. She was named a 2023 NEA Poetry Fellow, a Bennington Writing Seminars Teaching Fellow, a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop and received a Tin House writing residency. She was the Director of Creative Writing at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts for fourteen years where she was also the faculty sponsor of the student journal, Élan, and co-director of the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival. She currently works as a Program Director at a non-profit devoted to arts education.
For more from Tiffany
Check out her website and follow her on Instagram: @theothertiffany
Read two poems at Poetry Foundation and four poems at Cutleaf
Tiffany wanted to highlight the work of YELLOW HOUSE: “I have partnered as a poet and an art educator with this exceptional local organization whose mission is to uplift the voices of underserved communities and provoke community conversation. Their founder, Hope McMath, is one of the most authentic individuals I have had the pleasure to create art with and one of my personal heroes.” Yellow House is a place where art + action creates change. The space serves as a catalyst for personal and collective growth by displaying thought-provoking exhibitions, hosting public events, and promoting community dialogue. Yellow House will explore topics as varied as racial and gender equity, universal human rights, environmental sustainability, and the untold stories of people and neighborhoods that have shaped our history. Yellow House is more than a physical space; it is a hub for educational outreach and collaborations among artists, writers, organizations, and communities.
Élan, an International Student Literary Magazine: “As a teen I was the EIC of this student publication and as an adult I had the privilege of being the faculty advisor. Ushering the publication into its current era is one of my proudest achievements as an educator. The kids are amazing and we should be listening.” Élan is an international student literary magazine published by the Creative Writing department at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida. Originally created as a grassroots publication of the English Department in 1986, Élan found its permanent home upon the creation of the Douglas Anderson Creative Writing Department in 1990. Now, Élan sees work from students globally, including Japan, Korea, India, and France. Publishing three times a year, a staff of passionate high school juniors and seniors continues Élan’s legacy of creating a world-class literary publication and opening opportunities for the diverse and talented young writers of the world. Read the work of these incredible young writers HERE!
Catching up with Be Where You Are contributors
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza has a fantastic interview at The Long Pause with (& be sure to read her guest essay “The Life-Changing Magic of Singing Along” on this site if you haven’t yet!)
has a rich community discussion going on about holiday stress over at A Wonderful Mess. And, check out Kathryn’s wonderful interview for Be Where You Are here!
just published the second annual good creatures gift guide—& be sure to read her guest essay “Thinking Work” here! Aaaand, be sure to pre-order her new book The Good Mother Myth if you haven’t yet!
Clicking the heart to “like” this post or adding a comment is a great and free way to support this newsletter, and help Tiffany’s work and wisdom find readers.
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to stop and live more fully where you are. If you value this work, please text or email this to a friend, and consider a paid subscription at any level to help me keep it going. 🩵 You can also find me on Instagram or Facebook or find more info at my website. Thank you for reading!⚡⚡
I'm so sorry to hear about the censorship in Florida, it's too bad that it's pushing out great teachers like Tiffany.
I also do mindful walking in order to write! I just wrote a chapter of my pirate book on a walk. I turn my phone to "airplane" mode and walk for about an hour to let my mind get out all it's grumblings, then I start to tune into the character. Tonight I found myself on a cobbled path up a mountain and I wrote about what I was seeing from the character's point of view.
I think walking until you are able to write is great advice, it's how I write most things now.
<3 Tiffany