three lanterns, one hallway.
Every writer has a small council of ghosts. Mine happens to be sharp, quiet, and allergic to performative optimism.
Sylvia Plath
Patron saint of precision. She could hold a scalpel and a metaphor in the same hand and still file your emotional paperwork correctly.
Cool facts (because joy is allowed):
- Her poems don’t just confess—they inventory.
- She proved you can be lyrical and ruthless without apologizing for either.
- She makes people uncomfortable, which is often the first sign the work is doing its job.
Emily Dickinson
The introvert’s blueprint. If a sentence can be a locked door, she built the whole house and still remembered to label the keys.
- Master of compression: whole universes tucked into a dash.
- Soft voice, sharp edge—like velvet over a blade.
- Proof that you can stay home and still haunt literature.
Virginia Woolf
Time, memory, and the strange physics of a thought. She wrote consciousness like it was weather: unavoidable, beautiful, and a little rude.
- She makes interiority look like architecture.
- She understood that the ordinary is where the sharpest knives live.
- She taught me that a paragraph can be a tide.
How it shows up here
Plath gives me the nerve. Dickinson gives me the restraint. Woolf gives me the long hallway where the nerve and the restraint can pace back and forth until they become a poem.
Together they form a small, unpaid committee that sits in the corner of every draft going, “yes… but say it cleaner.”