A Transfer of Energy

The backstory of "Lake Letters" and this month's poem

Before I get to today’s poem for paid subscribers, I wanted to share a bit of the history of Lake Letters. This newsletter, delivered weekly via Substack or your email inbox, is the most recent iteration of a writing project that spans nearly a decade. Some of you have been around since the very beginning, and some of you have just begun following this week, so it feels like a good time to revisit this project’s evolution. I am grateful to each and every one of you for being here.

The first formalized version of the project that would eventually become Lake Letters began in 2018, and was initially titled “Letters to Lake Michigan.” For years prior to 2018, I had written little love notes to the lake on Instagram. These were sentences and sometimes poems that spilled out of me when I was by the water.

The first post under the hashtag (#letterstolakemichigan) was written nearly a decade ago, as I prepared to move to California. I ended up spending just over a year living in California full-time before moving back east, first to Brooklyn, NY. It took only a few months for me to move back to “my center”.

When I moved to Empire in January of 2017, it was with the goal to become more serious about my writing practice. I had written my whole life–journals, poems, essays, romance novels with heavy Christian themes (in 8th grade, and yes I still have them)–but upon graduating with a BFA in writing, I set aside any practice I had built for a few years. When I was living alone in Empire, I hung a timecard on my refrigerator, forcing myself to clock-in for at least thirty minutes of writing each day.

It was here that my #letterstolakemichigan morphed into something that felt different. Maybe it was more formal, maybe it just felt more intentional. Either way, I was writing poems every day to Lake Michigan. While I was writing everyday, I wasn’t sharing those words much at all, and I felt very hesitant to do so. What if people told me my writing was awful? What if it was awful?

In February 2018, I took an online poetry course through Interlochen Center for the Arts with Holly Wren Spaulding. This course not only encouraged me to write more frequently, but also introduced me to the idea of “micro-publishing.” I realized, I was already doing this to some degree with my Instagram posts, but I wanted something that felt more purposeful and consistent. And I wanted something that didn’t only live on a screen.

The idea that was presented to me during this writing course was to send short poems on postcards, and here is where my “Letters to Lake Michigan” project truly came to life. I spent three months during 2018 writing a poem everyday to be mailed to 30+ individuals who had signed up to receive them. I printed 12 different postcards with photos I had taken of Lake Michigan, and wrote, edited, and mailed a poem off each day. It was a major endeavor, and required me to set time limits so that I didn’t spend my whole day writing these poems.

A postcard poem from 2021

The beauty of a postcard poem is that it didn’t require perfection. I could play with the poem for an hour or so, get it to a place that felt good enough, then send it off into the world in a casual way. After the poems were mailed to their recipients, I continued working with my favorites, ultimately compiling them into a self-published book, Lake Letters, in 2019.

There are so many things I love about poem postcards, but one of them is the personal connection they create. The joy of opening your mailbox to receive a handwritten postcard never gets old. There is something important about tangible items, about holding something in your hand. It slows us down, it forces us to absorb information with multiple senses.

I am still writing postcard poems, though not quite as frequently as I did in 2018. My founding subscribers get a postcard each month with a handwritten, original poem, and you can also purchase poem subscriptions on my website.

Most of my “micro-published” poems these days are shared here in my newsletter. I send one poem per month to paid subscribers. Keep reading for this month’s!

I hope to compile another collection of poems from the last five years (five years!) since my first book, Lake Letters, was self-published, so keep an eye out for information about that. I have a (very) soft goal that it will be released this fall, and pre-orders will be available this summer. Stay tuned for updates!

A Transfer of Energy

An electric current
moved through sun-soaked sand,
the waves drumming off-shore, like thunderclaps,
signaling its release. Stormy waves
on a clear blue winter’s day call to us,
and our response:
stripping into swimsuits,
screaming into the surf.
Turning our hips
to push through icy waves.
We laugh and emerge electrified,
carrying wild lake energy
into the rest of our day.

Thank you so much for reading and subscribing. May the Lake’s energy find you this week, wherever you are.

Cheers,
Mae