Song of Myself Lydia Lord

I, now 17, still fondly remember sitting on the beach as a little girl with my grandmother. Half-asleep and warm, we, the introverted outcasts of family vacations, would read and chat for hours. I discovered the art of poetry through our conversations on these sun-spotted afternoons. My grandmother was a poet, and although she’d never been published, having an artist for a relative turned poetry from something abstract and theoretical—elitist, even—to something tangible. If my grandmother, whom I adored, was a real-life poet, then maybe I could be as well.

I started writing on one such trip: “Gigi,” I cried, breathless and drunk on my newfound passion. “Read this one.” My sixth-grade writings were always lacking, of course, but she would congratulate me without fail.

“Lydia, this is wonderful,” she would tell me, then call my family to look. Everyone oohed and aahed, but approval from my grandmother, the real-life poet, was akin to a good review from Mary Oliver herself. I always felt like a poet laureate.

When she died, I stopped writing completely. It was as if the words had dried up. There was a gaping hole inside my lungs where the poetry had been, and suddenly I had nothing to fill it with. Even after the initial...