It is no secret that I’m a summer gal. I adore the bevy and bounty of stone fruit and sun-drenched gardens, pool splashes from my teen sons, so much green and bloom and chirp in the thick canopy of trees arched above me. But in a season of shorter days and dark nights when I, too, want to overwinter like bumblebees, brown bears, and wood frogs—I look to my favorite summer creature, the firefly, to help guide the way to a path of renewed inspiration. Electrified, even. I seek out inspiration in gleams and glimmers, in small acts of play and experiment that let some of the light back in.
For me—with six books and another on the way—revision is where the fun and experimentation live, so much so that it doesn’t even feel like work at this point but more like play. However, writing or drafting is the hard part. I still very much fear the blank page, the blank screen, the blinking cursor taunting me. I’m sure that’s part of why I prefer drafting everything by pencil: The shhh-shhh-shhh of the lead on the page and the satisfying scritch of crossing out feels like I’m making something—while the click of the keyboard sounds like high heels walking in circles to nowhere in particular.
As a poet and essayist I have varying ways of trying to bring light into my work, depending on genre (even as slippery as I love genre to be). When I am home in the winter, I light a candle at my desk (these days I’m favoring ocean-scented ones) to signal a bit of calm and call back to summer. It’s a kind of grounding that tells my brain, We are going to make something with words now.
And if and when I feel stuck in a poem—like my “shield,” or scutellum (the hard, triangle-shaped covering on a firefly’s body where the wings begin), is at its most rigid and I’m feeling guarded and overly protective of my work—I might try a new version from the bottom up: I start a second draft with the last line or sentence of my first draft, and it almost always pushes me in strange and new directions.
These directions—no matter how ethereal, like a firefly’s lantern, which emits all of the energy it generates as light—can, however, sometimes turn into prose that feels too heavy or flat. Much like a light bulb, which gives off just 10 percent of the energy it receives in the form of light; the rest is all heat. In revision I always try to dial up the music and soundplay a bit more. So when the music of a sentence seems to be nonexistent, I worry. One easy fix to maintain some surprising music is to simply record myself reading my work on my phone or laptop. Playing it back usually proves illuminating (no matter how much it makes me cringe to hear my own voice), because I can instantly tell where I need to speed up, slow down, use words with staccato sounds, or choose more mellifluous ones.
But one thing to remember is that it is also totally normal to be in a quiet season in your writing. Maybe you are reading or taking in research for later. Fireflies spend most of their brief life as larvae after all, covered up on the ground in leaf litter, gathering food during the winter to gain strength later. Don’t worry if this is not your writing season quite yet. It will come. I am certain of it. During this quiet time in the world of fireflies, in this season of gathering—even though it is considered the “larval” stage—the most important thing to remember is that even then, the larvae actually glow.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four poetry books and two essay collections, most recently, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco, 2024). She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family, and is a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Thumbnail credit: Helen Friel