Making Apple Pie

And Carving out Space for Writing

Dear Friends
One of the pitfalls of working professionally as an editor and research assistant is the lack of writing- or cognitive-energy I have after a day of work. Most often I wrap work and want immediately to eschew my computer and do something with my hands. Make a pot. Make a pie. Work in the Garden.

I’ve found it necessary, if I’m to accomplish creative writing of my own, to take regular short writing retreats where I spend long hours on my own work. The focus of my retreats over the past year has been poetry, as I work on a second collection (my first poetry collection being published in early 2025 by Fernwood Press).

This week, on one of these retreats, I experimented with a couple of new forms. One was a didactic or instructional poem—in this case, instructions for creating a garden. Since, in a former life, I worked professionally as a garden designer, this was a fun merging of two identities—garden designer and poet.

I also experimented with a form called the “shape poem,” or concrete poem. In this case, I stumbled onto the form accidentally. Lately Ed and I have been making pies together, using some of the farm’s copious summer fruit; and I decided to make this the topic of a poem. But after I wrote the poem, and as I was tinkering with line breaks, I began to see an apple. My first shape poem was born. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’re living fully the waning days of summer.

Love, Tricia