Celebrating IMPERFECT with Tabatha Yeatts

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! HOORAY IT'S MAY! Be sure to visit Linda at Write Time for Roundup.

I am away from my desk, but I wanted to pop in a share a bit about IMPERFECT: Poems about Mistakes: an Anthology for Middle Schoolers, edited by Tabatha Yeatts.

I love the theme of this anthology, and it makes me so happy to see so many Poetry Friday friends' poems included! Could there be a better opener than Ruth's "Syllabus for Eighth Grade"?? I am honored that two poems I wrote for Scholastic were selected for inclusion: "Titanic Remember April 16, 1912" and "Anaconda Surprise." Nice to see these reach a new readership! More importantly, the book contains all kinds of wonderful poems about making mistakes... and in a world where images are photoshopped and Instagram and Twitter are filled with all the seemingly-perfect moments of life (yet none of the rest), it can feel awfully lonely to be walking around in your human skin... we NEED these reminders that we aren't perfect, that no one is, and that's what makes us beautiful.

Tabatha YeattsSpeaking of beautiful, Tabatha happens to be one of my favorite people in the universe. I'm so grateful the universe brought us together! And so it is with great pleasure that I welcome Tab to Live Your Poem to answer a few questions about this new beautiful anthology.

Welcome, Tabatha!

The delicious:
There's been a lot of delicious along the way...from the excitement and enthusiasm of the IMPERFECT poets who really believed in this project from day one to the way that Vivien and I "clicked" with our ideas for the visuals. My family and the IMPERFECT Selection Committee were incredibly helpful. I think that giving so much thought to how to help young people deal with their mistakes has been a growing experience for me too. I feel like our acceptance of ourselves as fallible creatures leads to generosity, both for ourselves and others. Once we really forgive ourselves for our mistakes, can opening your heart to others be far behind?

The difficult:
The unexpected:
The difficult and unexpected have a bit of overlap because I was generally surprised by how difficult some aspects were! For instance, I expected selecting poems to be hard, but I didn't think about the layout. The person doing the formatting was in a very different time zone and there was a lot of back-and-forth to get it right.

wee reader Tab!Anything else:
As a child, I did NOT want to make mistakes. I wanted to do everything right the first time.I think being a writer helped me so much with accepting making mistakes. When you write, you really have to understand that your first draft is just that -- a draft. You expect that it's not going to be perfect and you will have to fix it up. It's the same for people who are writing music or putting on plays. You rehearse -- you don't just go out and perform without working out the kinks. You expect to start out making mistakes and working through them. It's the same with scientists and inventors. You try something, then you see where you need to change it, and try again.Once you have accepted that, it's easier to accept fallibility in other ways.

Last bit: The Team Imperfect blog has "all things imperfect" on it -- please check it out!