Searching Your Body to Write

Re-sharing a guest post by Jessica Finch

This week, I’m re-sharing a guest post by my best friend and my best poetry conspirator, Jessica Finch. In this post, she explores the concept of “Dailiness” - and as luck would have it, she’s guest hosting a workshop session for me this week on the same concept. We meet for “Through the Fairy Door” on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. EST. For our third session, Jessica will lead us to focus on the mundane so we can tighten our attention, language and imagery. If you’d like to join for just one session, it’s $20. If you’d like to join for the final two sessions, it’s $35. Sliding scale and payment plans are available (just ask!) and you can register here.

We made this pie together late into the night, as is the nature of post-prandial baking. It was so good it haunts us both.

One of the best side effects of having a writer friend is that I write and talk about writing a lot more than I used to! All this creation and discussion has made obvious my poetry proclivities. Though when I sit down to write I rarely have something specific in mind, my poems often end up being about tactile experiences. This makes sense, because I start most writing sessions by searching my body to see what I notice. What’s happening in my body underlies what’s happening in me emotionally, and that’s the most meaningful place for me to start.

I am a person who thinks about feelings a lot, but that’s very different from feeling your feelings. Feeling your feelings doesn’t mean discussing them or contextualizing them. Those are cognitive processes. To feel your feelings is a physical experience. You notice them in your body first, and then make sense of them with your brain. My favorite explanation of this process is an old school one from Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher who frequently collaborated with the famous clinician Carl Rogers. Here’s a description from his book “Focusing” on how to feel your feelings. If you’re interested in a scientific understanding of why and how feelings start in our body, you could read Antonio Damasio’s work. I like this interview with him.

As a result of my physical focus, my writing is often about very small moments. Let someone else pontificate about truth and beauty. I want to write and read about someone’s fingers getting cold on their walk to the mailbox. I happily connect this tendency in myself to a broader tradition of women poets. This convention was highlighted for me when reading the obituary of Eavan Boland, an Irish poet who died in 2020. Boland deliberately wrote about what she referred to as “dailiness.” This poem of hers is a prime example, where she weaves the ordinary experience of feeding a nighttime bottle to a baby with the vastness of time and nature.

So in the tradition of Eavan Boland, here’s a poem I wrote that began as a description of a blister and ended up being about how I dislike needing things or asking for help, especially when it seems to me I brought the situation upon myself (I know, I know). Until we find each other again on the internet, I’ll be out here reading tactile pieces by women poets and noticing how my feet feel. Happy writing til then!

New Shoes

A vague heat in my left heel, unnoticeable til I notice, 
or walk. An unimportant pain from new shoes worn eight 
hours of mostly sitting, rubbing just one foot the wrong way. 
At 5:30 I park, walk unevenly towards my yellow door, 
try to avoid sawing still-stiff fabric into the broken blister.
I don’t wear shoes the rest of the night, I don’t walk the dog, 
and I don’t mention my asinine, avoidable, unimportant, 
self inflicted pain to anyone.

Practices:

Does it feel unfamiliar to you to feel your feelings? Therapy is a great place to start, but it can be really confusing to start that process if it’s new to you. Here’s a great description of how to find a good therapist.

Therapy isn’t the only place to figure out your feelings! Try this meditation to notice and experience your emotions.

It’s especially difficult for people in marginalized communities to access therapy. If you have the means, think about donating to the Loveland Foundation, which provides financial support for black women and girls to access therapy.

Prompts:

Sit for 90 seconds and scan your body. What do you notice? What’s that about? Now write a poem about it.

Write a poem describing a tactile experience. What does it feel like to be sitting in front of a fan? To eat good food? To nick yourself shaving? How does it change to write about a positive tactile experience vs a negative one?

Write a poem about a very small moment. Start by describing what happened and see where you end up. When you write about sitting with your blinker on and waiting to turn at a stop light, what do you end up writing about? Dread? Impatience? The cycle gears of traffic lights?

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Jessica Finch is a social worker and therapist who grew up in New Hampshire and returned to raise her children. She has previously been published in magazines such as Touchstone, Smoky Quartz, and Corporeal Litmag. She was a finalist for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize. When not sitting with her clients or her children, she can be found brainstorming pie flavors with friends.