Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Becoming a Poet

 

A younger Maria beginning her career as a poet

"My mother gave me a gift of a typewriter and the way she saved for it for a year gave me courage. Although I know she thought I was insane for wanting to do something so impractical as becoming a poet, she was saying without saying it, “Try! Go ahead see if you can find a way!” 

I always wrote poetry before she got me that typewriter, but I wrote by hand. I would still write by hand, but her gift enabled me to type it neatly and send out my poems to magazines. The typewriter opened the door for me to get published and to win contests. 

That’s what I did, I just found a way even though my route was perhaps not the most direct way to becoming a poet, it was the way that allowed me to find other things that I loved. Those included teaching, organizing poetry programs, and creating other cultural programs. 

I had a cousin that was very conservative, and he thought that no woman could succeed as a poet. Of course, he also thought no poor person could succeed as a poet because he said it was the most impractical ambition he’d ever heard. When he said that, it made me want to prove him wrong. Of course, I understood that as a woman and as a poet I would have to forge my own way as I had no class connections and no Ivy League degree. I knew I would have to find a way to make my work heard, but I would also have to find some way to support myself while I did that.  

I couldn’t support myself as a poet where I came from - a poor immigrant neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey. Yet, I was able to find things I loved to do, and I could support myself doing them. When I first started teaching at Caldwell College, I discovered how much I loved teaching and how much pleasure it gave me to watch my students grow as writers and as people. I always wrote during that time, often late at night. I found myself constantly jotting down things - even while dangerously driving the car - but sometimes I needed to get the words immediately on paper.  

From a need to support myself, and my growing family I fortunately found something I loved doing in the process. "

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.