Why I Wrote Raised by Wind

 There are places that don’t just hold your memories.

They shape them.

For me, that place was the stretch of Wyoming prairie between the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills. Wide-open space. Hard weather. Dust in the corners. Chores before comfort. Wind that never seemed to rest. It was a place of beauty, yes, but not the soft kind. The kind that got under your skin. The kind you didn’t always understand while you were living inside it.

Raised by Wind came from that place.

At first glance, this poetry collection may look like a book about Wyoming, prairie life, childhood, or rural memory. And in many ways, it is. The poems carry fence lines, gardens, chores, dirt roads, storms, seasons, and the kind of silence that only exists where the sky has room to stretch.

But the deeper I worked with these poems, the more I realized this book was never only about the land.

It was about what moved through it.

The wind.

The Place That Raised Me

I grew up in a landscape where the weather was never background noise.

It mattered.

The wind decided how cold the walk felt, how hard the door slammed, how dust settled into everything, and how long you could stand outside before your face stung. The seasons had weight. Spring brought mud and work. Summer brought heat, insects, gardens, and long days. Fall came with a shift in the air. Winter asked more of everyone.

There were chores. There was dust. There were fences, fields, animals, weathered buildings, and the ordinary demands of rural life.

As a child, I didn’t always have language for what that kind of place was teaching me. I only knew it was big. Open. Harsh sometimes. Beautiful sometimes. Lonely sometimes. Freeing sometimes.

I knew the wind was always there.

It rattled windows. Bent grass. Pushed against doors. Carried dust across the yard. Moved through everything like it had somewhere to be.

Looking back now, I can see how much of me was formed in that movement.

Why the Wind Matters

The heart of Raised by Wind is this:

It is less about the land and more about the thing that connects everything.

The wind.

The wind moves across memory the same way it moves across the prairie. It touches everything. It doesn’t ask permission. It carries what came before and pushes against what comes next.

In these poems, the wind became more than weather. It became a thread between childhood and adulthood, between hardship and beauty, between who I was and who I am still becoming.

It connects the seasons of the book.

It connects the younger version of me to the woman writing these poems now.

It connects place to memory, memory to growth, and growth to voice.

I didn’t set out to make the wind a character in this collection, but in many ways, that is what happened. The wind became the presence moving through every section. Sometimes gentle. Sometimes relentless. Sometimes comforting. Sometimes impossible to ignore.

Much like memory itself.

Writing Memory Without Romanticizing It

One of the hardest parts of writing Raised by Wind was learning how to tell the truth without polishing the past into something prettier than it was.

Prairie life can be beautiful. It can also be hard.

Childhood can hold wonder. It can also hold loneliness, labor, confusion, and questions we don’t know how to ask yet.

I didn’t want this collection to become a postcard version of where I came from. I didn’t want to write only about sunsets, tall grass, and open skies. Those things are real, but they are not the whole truth.

The truth also includes dust. Work. Cold. Silence. Responsibility. The ache of growing up. The way a place can both shelter you and shape your rough edges.

That honesty mattered to me.

I wanted these poems to hold beauty without denying hardship.

I wanted them to remember childhood without pretending it was simple.

I wanted them to show how a place can form you even when you don’t fully understand its influence until much later.

Because sometimes we don’t know what raised us until we leave it, grow older, and hear its echo in our own voice.

Why Now

I came to writing seriously later in life.

For a long time, these memories lived in pieces. A smell. A sound. A line of weathered fence. The feel of wind against my face. The shape of the horizon. The rhythm of chores. The way certain seasons carried certain emotions.

I don’t think I could have written Raised by Wind when I was younger.

I needed time.

I needed distance.

I needed enough life behind me to understand that memory is not just about what happened. It is about what stayed. What shaped us. What we carry forward, even when we don’t realize we are carrying it.

Becoming a writer later in life has taught me that stories and poems do not expire. They wait. They gather meaning. They become ready when we become ready.

This collection gave those memories a home.

It gave me a way to honor where I came from without being trapped inside it. It let me look back with honesty, tenderness, and a little more understanding than I had before.

Giving the Wind a Voice

Raised by Wind is a poetry collection about place, yes.

But more than that, it is about being shaped by something you couldn’t hold in your hands.

It is about the invisible forces that form us.

The weather we survived. The landscapes we loved. The work we were given. The seasons we moved through. The memories that return years later with more meaning than they had at the time.

It is about realizing that the wind was never just blowing around me.

In many ways, it was helping raise me.

Raised by Wind releases July 1, 2026.