Inspiration: Jackie Ann
I wasn’t initially going to participate in this, as there are too many people who inspire me to just mention one. The thought of all the other inspirations I’ve been gifted with from such wonderful and amazing people, my own affectionate attachments to many of them, and not being able to mention them all, caused me concern.
I think maybe that statement above about such quality people might be questioning the very quality that I see in them, instead of trusting them to recognize their importance to me, so I’m going to trust as they deserve to be trusted.
That, combined with having just read another poem by Jackie that, per usual, takes me to a magical place, sometimes in pain, other times in joy, but always richly enthralling, made my decision this morning.
Of late I’ve had so little time to read on Medium. I’m still very active here, but between writing, Editor-ing four publications, and my obsessive compulsion to reply to every comment, my reading takes the form of spotting interesting mentions at the bottom of a page I just finished replying to. Of course, when anything by Jackie comes up, it’s as close to an insta-read as it gets.
The point being that lately my reading is done sort-of invisibly as I constantly hop from one thing to the next, and I feel a bit hollow spending 15 seconds thinking and writing a response to amazing writing.
Jackie’s writing, for example. I’ve run out of ways to express how impressed and enchanted I am without repeating myself like Rainman. So a lot of the time, lately, I’ve had to get by on a Recommend and a quick “Beautiful!” and I’m not really content with that.
I was around when Jackie wrote her first piece on here. I told her then how talented I thought she was. I could easily see it in her writing. I told her to never ever doubt that she was a true poet and an amazing writer.
Since then she has again and again proven I was 100% correct in that assessment. She writes in true beauty. Anything else I say is going to be an offshoot of that.
She and I often write in similar realms, and in that respect, she has caused me, multiple times, to reassess my own writing and sometimes even delete and start over. She inspires me to tear open my inner recesses and go deeper, write better, define my own beautiful, and, most of all, take the inner images that defy words and push my limits to reflect, as closely as possible in words, those images until they can be felt as more than just words to the reader.
Jackie, you inspire me. I wanted you to know that. You have something very special and I hope you never doubt it or put it aside.
