Writer’s Relief is proud to introduce featured client C.W. Emerson! A well-established poet whose pieces have appeared in such reputable journals as Forge and The MacGuffin, Emerson’s style successfully blends poetic musicality and social commentary. On top of it all, he is a warm person who is always a pleasure to work with. Read on to learn more about his craft and his experience with Writer’s Relief. (Click to watch his video.)

In His Own Words

Poetry is one of my primary means of self-expression. It’s a fundamental way of exploring what it is I feel, and helps me figure out the things I think I know and the things I feel.

Writing poetry offers potentialities for discovery and creativity that rarely, if ever, present themselves in the ways we use language in our day-to-day lives. The process is filled with paradox: I want and need my own voice to be left intact within each piece of work, but I want input, reactions, revisions. I want the work to be technically sound and to fall within certain agreed-upon conventions, but I don’t want to change a thing. I want an audience, and I want privacy.

With all of these complexities and more, I can’t manage the pragmatic daily grind of submitting my poetry in a public arena—like many us, I work to extremes, have family obligations, and still convince myself that I’ve achieved some balance between work and play. I rely on Writer’s Relief to get my written work out, and since we’ve started our collaboration, I have been published in more journals that I could have ever accomplished on my own. And it’s all just beginning.

About C.W. Emerson

I earned a B.A. in psychology from Antioch University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Fielding Graduate University. I work as a licensed clinical psychologist in California and have been actively writing poetry for the past twenty years.

My personal and clinical interests are incorporated into many of my poems and include notions of time, space, and embodiment, and the existential concerns of love, death, freedom, and will. I write under the pen name C.W. Emerson. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Assisi, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Forge, G.W. Review, The MacGuffin, Poetry East, and Quiddity.