Our graduate Emilie Lygren is publishing her MFA thesis with Wayfarer Books.

From Emilie’s newsletter:

I wrote this set of poems largely in 2022. It feels like a deeply personal collection, one I’m both excited and nervous to share. The book delves into my experience of gender nonconformity rooted in the context of childhood and the natural world. The manuscript as a whole grapples with the complexities of selfhood, power, and loss, offering insight into our intricate relationship with Earth’s ecosystems.Some early reviews of Once I Was a Stone:

“Emilie Lygren’s poems are pulse and heartbeat! Their clear vision restores our own bigger sight. Remember when we felt connected to everything? Emilie’s poems are gravity, immediate ground, wide horizon, ashes pitched off a cliff, creek stones carried up a mountain. I love their endearing truthfulness, beauty and lack of fear!” – Naomi Shihab Nye

Through their deft and deceptive simplicity, Emilie Lygren’s poems gently urge us toward our own becoming, our own difficult transformations. This luminous and masterful new collection ushers us into a world where we can all feel safe and welcome, no matter who we are, or how far we’ve come on our journey. It is hard to put into words just how essential this book feels.” — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief

Emilie Lygren sings in the poetic ancestral lineage of Mary Oliver. This collection builds a world against the binary, and bends poems like a willow toward the interconnectedness of all.” – Kai Coggin, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms

The process of creating this book has been a true joy. Writing about my experiences and memories has always helped me understand myself better. The poem below (from my forthcoming collection) about my lifelong habit of looking rocks and stones, is a variation on that theme:

Gathering Stones

I.
As a child I gathered stones.
Black-flecked granite grown
orb-like in a stream under cottonwoods,
their durable stories,
shoved into the pockets
of my jean shorts or overalls.

When the other kids
looked at me sideways,
asked me why I didn’t like
wearing dresses,
I could touch the stone,
remember the trees,
who never asked me to
explain myself,
who understood
my silence perfectly.

I felt more like rock
than girl or boy,
more like sand than child,
something shaped slowly over years,
rubbed softly until smooth,
companion of tree roots,
young dragonflies.
the shimmer of fish.

When raised brows
said I didn’t fit in
I wanted to stare back
solid as the stones.
Eyes winking like flakes
of mica lodged between quartz.
Just as sure of myself
as something millions
of years old, just as
unconfused.

II.
My friend’s four-year-old
looks down at her new dress and says,
“This dress doesn’t have pockets . . . yet.”
She wants her mother to sew pockets
onto any garment that doesn’t have them
so she can gather stones and feathers,
acorns, tiny bird skeletons, leaves,
things she might find along a forest path.

“Yet” works like that:
a waiting pocket.
Placeholder for the number to be solved.
Orange flags to show the line of an unbuilt roof.

And gathering works like that, too:
looking around for what shines.
How everything I have ever picked up
helped me know myself a little better.

Like the stones I held tight,
not yet knowing how sure
I would someday become.

This collection features many poems of becoming–– poems I wrote with the hope of deepening my awareness of who I am and what has influenced my sense of self. Many of the poems in this collection are rooted in place and are closely tied to nature. Places have always been my teachers. Often, something I see around me gives a glimmer of wisdom, reflecting back some part of myself I hadn't yet recognized or considered.

Are there parts of yourself that you didn’t recognize when you were young but have now become known to you? Or, parts of yourself that are coming into being now, but are not yet fully formed? Take a look around you. Are there plants, landscape features, animals that echo back some part of yourself? Try writing about them, if you'd like.