First Light: For Emerging Artists

If your intention is to explore, then to delight or startle with your poetry, then you need only a work ethic and this book. No need to go it alone. This guide provides direction, support and the awareness required to move you quickly through your apprenticeship. Former students have published prolifically and won national awards. If you yearn for creative gratification First Light is your sunrise, its method and models will serve as both map and mentor. It will help you to

• Locate your own voice, expand your skills, range and confidence; you will learn to sing your own quirky song with the help of a menu of self-selected strategies.

• Combine the practical and the aesthetic as you gain insight through the practice of spontaneous free writes coupled with step by step instructional checklists.

• Integrate all phases of the poetic process from first draft through revision. Utilize both your right and left-brained abilities. Enjoy a safe place for practice and play as you discard the cliched and discouraging "art-as-suffering myth."

• Identify the differences between therapy or cathartic journaling and making art, as you locate your own compass using the Naylor Method, a process that helps you implement strategies derived from models based on published poetry..

Historically, poets have sought inspiration in seances, one laid in a coffin, Poe wrote with a black cat draped over his shoulder. First Light provides a contemporary and reliable jump-start for ambitious poets, minus the mumbo jumbo and the morose. This workbook grew out of a desire to help emerging poets create both a generative psychic landscape and to share the models that simplify challenges and reduce struggle. The Naylor Method with its mindset and models, its checklists and revision recipes, will get you there. Where? That place where you will feel confidence in your work and ready for publication.