Local Boston area poet Nadia Colburn debuted her latest book of poetry, “I Say The Sky,” earlier this year. The collection explores themes of personal growth, spirituality, trauma, and other topics. This new volume comes from a place of emotional exploration, partly facilitated by Colburn’s meaningful yoga and meditation practices.
“I think that new book is looking towards the poetics of openness, poetics of acceptance and more spaciousness,” says Colburn. “I often wrote after meditating, sometimes I wrote after doing yoga…so the poems took the shape more of meditative practices.”
Utilizing meditation to facilitate her writing has been a groundbreaking discovery for Colburn, one that she now shares with other artists. In her work as an online creative writing coach, Colburn uses a structure where she guides students through a meditation or yoga practice first and ends with a loose prompt for writing inspiration. From there, students put pen to paper, often with much more success than before meditation.
“When I started to share with my students the meditation writing practices, students who were having such a hard time writing all of a sudden would write incredibly powerful work in like five minutes of writing after meditation,” says Colburn. The results were so consistent that she realized she was onto something.
When “I Say The Sky” was published, Colburn began to incorporate that into her teaching strategy. She released a seven-day meditation series related to the book, during which she led a short, guided meditation, read one of her poems, and offered a prompt drawn from the theme of the poem to inspire others to write or create.
Even for readers who aren’t also writers, this allows for a deeper rumination on Colburn’s poems, an opportunity rarely given in our fast-paced world. Deep thought and quiet reflection can have a significant impact, regardless of a reader’s personal creative life.
Colburn lives in Cambridge and often draws inspiration from the many natural spaces the city offers. Nature, like meditation and yoga, offers space for the mind to quiet and rest. She finds Walden Pond in Concord and the Mass Audubon Habitat in Belmont particularly restorative. She hopes her book has a similar restful effect on its readers.
“I hope that a reader will think of it as a kind of companion, a place that they feel a resonance,” says Colburn. “The way you do when you talk to a friend. Your friend is different from you, but you understand each other.”
“I Say The Sky” is available through Colburn’s website, Brookline Booksmith, and other local bookstores.