Big Magic

If we are connected on Facebook and/or LinkedIn, you know that I have posted from time to time about Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. She writes about people having a genius (not being a genius) as well as the fact that ideas have a life and go searching for someone to write them, make them or do whatever the idea wishes. She recounts having an idea for a novel that she set aside for a few years. She met Ann Patchett at an event where they were on a panel together. Gilbert tried to work on the novel but it just wasn't happening. It turns out that Ann Patchett started to write that novel (a few details were different). Gilbert and Patchett figured out that the idea left Gilbert and went to Patchett at the time they met. 

Gilbert also tells the story of a poet she met who would physically run after poems when she was a child. The poet could feel them coming and would run home from working in the fields so that she could write them down. Sometimes she wasn't fast enough. 

So, what does this have to do with me? Occasionally I have a poem pop into my head and I have no clue where it came from. The poem insists on being written down. The one below even insisted that it be named what it wanted to be named, not what I was going to name it. 

This is it:

Mapped 

I am glad

that I was

the one along

with you on

the drive that

was mapped

by a hard

winter and

the things

that you said.

©2016 Kathryn Samuelson

This poem had nothing to do with my life at the time or even in the past. But, it was insistent that it be written down. 

I have had ideas for novels show up, keep me awake and not want to leave. I now politely ask them to move along, and I will suggest an author if I know that story fits that author's genre. Sometimes I just have to explain that I will not be writing the story, that it can rest a bit, but that it needs to find a different home.

What shape does big magic take for you?