Renato Gandia

I woke at 4:30 a.m., before the light, to a bird singing into the breaking day.

I wasn’t even in the sunroom yet.

For several minutes, I simply listened. Curious, I opened the bird identification app on my phone. It told me the singer outside my window was an American robin. Soon another joined in, then another, until the morning filled with their chorus while the yard was still only beginning to emerge from the darkness.

It struck me that my poems are about to do the same.

A couple of weeks ago, Frontenac House officially accepted Eating Rice on Our Feet for publication. Friends sent messages. Fellow writers celebrated with me. I announced the news on social media and allowed myself, perhaps for the first time, to imagine the book sitting on a shelf where someone I have never met might one day pull it down.

Since then, something unexpected has happened.

The excitement has given way to a peculiar silence.

For years, these poems belonged only to me. They lived in folders on my computer, in notebooks, in countless revisions that no one else saw. I could change a line whenever I wanted. Replace an image. Delete an entire poem because it no longer felt true. The manuscript remained unfinished for as long as I needed it to be.

There was comfort in that.

An unpublished manuscript is a private country. You know every path through it because you built them yourself. No one arrives there unless you invite them.

Publication changes that.

Soon, an editor will read the poems with fresh eyes. A designer will imagine what the book should look like before anyone opens it. Advance readers will underline lines that I never expected them to notice. Some poems will become favourites. Others will quietly pass by. Readers will discover meanings I never consciously intended, while overlooking the ones I thought were obvious.

That realization is both exhilarating and unsettling.

For much of my writing life, revision has been my way of postponing goodbye.

There was always another adjective to consider, another stanza to rearrange, another week to let a poem rest before returning with sharper eyes. Revision was never only about making the work better. It was also about keeping it close.

Now I find myself learning a different discipline.

Not how to write.

How to let go.

I don’t mean that the editorial process is over. In many ways, it is only beginning. There will still be conversations about sequencing, punctuation, perhaps even a line that needs to be reconsidered. A cover must be chosen. Proofs will arrive. Lots of work to do.

But the fundamental act of writing these poems is complete.

That sentence feels strange to type.

For years, I measured my progress by what remained unfinished. There was always another poem to write, another draft to chase. Now I have to learn to measure something else: trust.

Trust the editor who believed in the manuscript enough to publish it.

Trust the designer who will give it a face.

Trust the readers who will bring their own lives to the poems.

Most of all, trust the version of myself who decided, after countless revisions, that these poems were ready to leave home.

I wonder if every debut author experiences this quiet season.

The celebrations are over. The launch is still months away. The book exists, but only in a kind of in-between state. It has one foot in my office and another in the future.

Perhaps this is the real beginning of publication, not the contract or the announcement, but the slow acceptance that the work no longer belongs entirely to its writer.

Books are curious things.

We spend years making them as personal as we can. Then we ask complete strangers to make them their own.

I hope someone reads these poems and sees a little of themselves in them. I hope a Filipino immigrant recognizes a memory that feels familiar. I hope a queer reader finds companionship. I hope someone who has never shared any of my experiences discovers that the distance between our lives is smaller than either of us imagined.

If that happens, the poems will have done what they were always meant to do.

By the time I finally walked into the sunroom, the robins had already flown. They had left only their songs behind.

Perhaps that is what books are meant to do. They leave us, but something of them continues to echo long after they’ve gone.

The rest was never mine to keep.