After my last creative update (this October 2025 blog post), I took my writing life, including my poetry manuscript, mostly underground. I didn’t post here in those 10 months, and I only mentioned my manuscript once or twice even on Instagram (as with this April post).
If the sole meanings of intentional are “planned” and “prepared,” this quiet period was not intentional. But if I allow other meanings — “deliberate attention” or “mindfulness,” for example — I did proceed with intention. At least in the day-to-day.
Moment to moment, I was being called to conserve and focus my energy. But toward what? Where was I being asked to go? I knew instinctively that I needed to dedicate the time to being in conversation with myself. To shush enough external noise that I could hear what I needed to hear.
What came — three answers in particular — took me by surprise with their swiftness, their clarity, their demands and the ways they’ve transformed me. For the purpose of this post, they are the three M’s: Maine, magic, and yes, my “Gertie” poetry manuscript.
Answer #1: Back home in Maine
I’ve been spending so much time in Maine recently people are asking if I’m moving back to my home state. I am not, but I did take eight or nine extended trips there in less than a year.
A few of these trips were recreational. A solo DIY writing retreat. My husband’s marathon. And two vacations: one for time with my sisters and one for time with my husband. Several trips, however, were focused on helping family members through serious health crises. (Thankfully, everyone’s on the mend. ❤️)
All of these journeys home were profound. The rocks, water, trees, soil, air, light and people spoke to me in ways I hadn’t been able to access in a long while.
I’ve struggled my entire life to know where I fit. I’ve found new and wonderful pieces of myself in so many places — West Virginia, PDX, the Adirondacks, Cape Cod and right here in Upstate NY where I’ve lived in exile* now for longer than I lived back home. But the messages coming from Maine insist: This place is in your bones.
And in the last year, as I remember that, I’ve felt a more intense and sustained sense of connection, peace and belonging than I’ve ever known. It doesn’t mean I have to live there. Whatever I’ve been granted access — a wisdom older than myself? an ancient source of energy? — it’s with me even now.
It’s remarkable how a place can show us so much and make us feel so deeply, and I’ve always believed in that power. I’ve even caught glimpses of it over the years, though they were fleeting. But now, it’s undeniable.
I’m still processing it and learning from it, but one thing I already know is that its timing cannot be coincidence. It’s tied, so clearly, to the second answer… buckle up for the woo woo! ✨
Answer #2: Magic abounds
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because it’s still in its infancy and feels very private. However, it’s earned its place on the list of What Came When I Put My Ear to the Ground: I’ve seen — and am learning to trust — my own magic.
You may be doing this, too, and calling it something else. Intuition. Instinct. Synchronicity. Flow. But it’s important for me, in my own life and where I am right now, to call it magic, and I’m building a relationship with it.
I’m practicing what it means to recognize the divine wisdom within and to understand that I can conduct my own energy to a degree. Similar to the stability that comes from knowing where home is, this magic feels like a way to be grounded, to trust that I have a highly personal — and uninterruptible — point of access to peace, knowledge and protection.
It may be nothing more than the power of the mind and its ability to manifest (or the brain’s love affair with seeking out patterns), and if magic makes you uncomfortable, feel free to set it inside those safer contexts. But as I age and as the material world continues to disappoint, I’m tired of playing it cool. I’m more interested in leaning into spirit and feral female energy. There’s more for me in mushrooms and shells and mist on the lake than in patriarchy, capitalism and the horrors du jour they ask us to accept as par for the course.
I’ve always seen my energy as a force, but I’d characterized it previously by its intensity, chaos, hard edges, ambition, combustibility. This current energy has a different quality. It’s gooey. It breathes from its belly. It smells like salt and rosemary and bread in the oven. It smiles and floats and stirs and digs. It nests.
There are many stories I could tell (and maybe I will at some point), but for now this is where I’ll leave it: Magic, especially now that I’ve named it, is everywhere.
Answer #3: The manuscript I was writing all along
An earlier version of Carolee would’ve been (at least slightly) irritated with so many whirlwind trips to Maine. She would’ve seen them as distractions from the current plot line: finishing her manuscript. Instead, at every turn, including (and especially) the difficult trips, those visits back home opened paths for me to go deeper into the manuscript. Similarly, the naming of magic (and its practice) did not take away from work on the Gertie manuscript. It helped me see writing this book as casting a spell.
A little background may be helpful here. Two years ago and four years ago — I’ve been working on Gertie for nearly seven years — I thought the manuscript was done. It was not. One year ago, I again thought it was done, taking myself to Ogunquit in August 2025 (one of those Maine trips) to celebrate the finishing touches.
I had no idea a complete and total revamp was coming.
In September 2025, I started working with Kelly Grace Thomas — a fellow poet (and poetry coach) — to hold me accountable to writing whatever came after Gertie. I was excited to start new projects and wanted to avoid the stagnation that can follow finishing a book. But as we got underway, I realized it would be foolish to have Kelly’s help and not use it to “polish” my most important project: the Gertie manuscript.
And that’s when the work got really difficult. It needed more than a spit-shine.
Kelly saw my vision for the manuscript and she also spotted how/where it was falling short. After having been immersed in it so long, I thought it was already “there,” and I resisted jumping back in with the time and energy required to actually get it “there.”
Thankfully, I got over that resistance, and after nine more months of intense writing and revising (and consistent, insightful and creative support from Kelly), I’m so glad I did. I’m so proud of this new version of Gertie. And of me. We became together, and I’m living out the final phase of my speaker’s transformation.
She stops playing it safe.
She learns to set doubt aside and cheer for herself.
She taps the women around her for strength and guidance.
She remembers who she is and reclaims her power.
Throughout this final (yes, final) round of revisions, Kelly and I had many impactful conversations, including many about my frustrations with the number of wild goose chases I’d sent myself on over the years, working and re-working the manuscript. It all seemed to me proof that I shouldn’t trust myself. I even feared it may be proof that the book wasn’t meant to be, that I’d wasted my time. (That’s something about me: I can take a small hiccup and blow it up into a catastrophe in the blink of an eye.)
Like so many of my writing friends — Jill! Sarah! Emily! Violeta! Carolyn! Linda! (& others!) — Kelly didn’t accept that. When we started doing the hardest work, she asked me to look closer: Why am I not trusting myself? What has trusting myself looked like before? What might it look like now? Maybe, she said, trusting myself looks like going back into the manuscript. Maybe daring to go even deeper and make it even leaner was the ultimate act of trust.
To push through this last year and this last set of revisions (yes, last set, the very last LOL) I had to realize I wrote this book for two reasons:
- The evolution of me
- The celebration of others who also dare to reclaim their power
That’s what I accomplished no matter what happens with manuscript contests and small press open reading periods.
It’s why I needed to write Gertie, and it’s why she needs to be in the world.
* When a person who was born and raised in Maine leaves the state, we call it “living in exile.” I don’t know why, but I kind of love it.
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