Through Finding Voice

By: Sophia Lee

It is with no intentional exaggeration intended that I make this statement—Eucalyptus was somewhat of a major stepping stone for me into the teenage literary world. In fact, my periodic knowledge of and experience with the poetry dimension could either be categorized as before Eucalyptus or after Eucalyptus. 

Before Eucalyptus, I had always written from a private, individual basis. I’d rarely associated with other teenage writers with collaboration with mind, so my exposure was limited. Many of my freshman poetry drafts were rip-offs of the works I archived from nameless writers in online magazines. Most notably, my English tutor had even told me once that my writing could benefit from a less clinical tone and that I needed to find my own stylistic niche, which was a goal I couldn’t comprehend for ages.

So in a sense, I was stuck: I was writing, and I was passionate, but I wasn’t sending my work out to the world nor did I know anyone who could share this process. And this feeling of stagnancy was only 1) amplified by the fact that my school is demographically STEM-heavy, so there weren’t many literary lovers, and 2) our English curriculum was so bare it wasn’t even inspiring. Because of this, I felt like nothing about the writing process was developing for me, and that included my voice. Looking back, my freshman and sophomore self neglected a lot of the organic parts of poetry that make the genre precious. I would force my works to impersonally adhere to the structures and themes of other poems I liked. There was even a point in time in which I physically could not resist adding melancholic motifs to my poems because I thought that was the only way to make an emotional impact.

And yet, in a broad sense of things, I found all of those aspects to somehow change drastically when I joined the Eucalyptus Lit team.

It had taken months of unsatisfactory drafts and deliberation that I realized there was, in fact, a profitable way I could spin my drive for writing into, and that was through literary magazines. Interactions with a lot of literary magazines. I ultimately found joining a magazine in its relatively “early stages” (with only a few issues published) to be a major learning curve for me—with one undeniably influenced product being the formation of my own voice. During the first few months as an editor, I very vividly remember being inspired by the variety of works people were submitting. Working with Eucalyptus gave me unbridled exposure to the spectrum on which people expressed their poetic voices. For me, it was through gauging submitters’ works and experiencing something tonally new each time that helped shape my perception of literary style. 

Working on Eucalyptus Lit made me realize that voices in poetry operate on a never-ending range; they encompass so many elements that can only co-exist while staying beautifully contradictory in a medium like writing. Constantly reading poems from other individuals gave me the drive to continue developing my own voice, to decide if I’d prefer my writing to still or fluctuate, to go bare-bones or imagery-heavy, and more. And as someone who had struggled with harnessing her emotions and poetic voice together, someone who had felt like her writing was meant to stay confined, that it wouldn’t be good if it wasn’t written from an emotionally fabricated viewpoint, I was grateful for that opportunity.