Finding Language in the Woods
White Rabbit Poetry Society Monday Featured Poet More Than Poetry
Note from the editor(s):
White Rabbit Poetry Society is thrilled to presentMore Than Poetry as our Monday Featured Poet this week. Joyce Enzor Maust is Poet Laureate of the Delaware House of Representatives and a recipient of the 2024 Delaware Individual Artist Fellowship for Emerging Poets. Raised on a dairy farm in southwest Pennsylvania as the daughter of a Conservative Mennonite pastor, her work is rooted in land, lineage, faith, and survival. With degrees in English and physics, she brings both lyric intuition and structural clarity to her poetry. Please take a moment to visit More Than Poetry subscribe and read her amazing work.
Finding Language in the Woods
My life and my writing are inseparable. Poetry was woven into my bones through nursery rhymes long before I could speak it aloud.
I grew up a bishop’s daughter in a Plain-dressing community on the Maust family farm. I wore homemade dresses, darned tights, and boys’ shoes because my feet were too wide for the pretty Mary Janes I admired. Baths and hair washing happened only on Saturday nights. One pigtail was always chewed shorter than the other.
A tomboy, I grew up spending time with my dad on the farm. I was more likely to be found unloading hay, weeding gardens, or hitting a tennis ball against the barn than anywhere else. But the farm bordered hundreds of acres that opened into 50,000 acres of state forest, and the woods became my first and most lasting refuge. Other children had playmates. I had deer paths, bird calls, weather patterns, and creek beds. I learned nature’s language.
By adulthood, I had survived more years of childhood sexual abuse than not. Multiple near-death experiences and years of medical mysteries reshaped my understanding of body and spirit. One of those experiences came at eight years old. I was run over and dragged by a car and had an out-of-the-body experience.
Poetry became a bridge between those fractured traumas, helping me find language for what I could not otherwise name. Years later, when illness stole words from me, it was poetry that helped me gather them again.
I grew up memorizing the King James Bible, not out of devotion but because I wanted to out-memorize the boy in my class. I recited poetry at our church’s Christmas programs. With no TV, I read everything I could get my hands on, from science and news magazines to history books and the backs of cereal boxes.
What I didn’t discover until my thirties is that you can lie in poetry. A poem does not have to tell the literal truth to reveal an emotional one. Sometimes an invented image can carry more truth than a factual account. That realization opened a door into a whole new world.
Although the Plain communities I came from were known for pacifism, direct communication from women was often discouraged. A boisterous girl with ADHD did not fit easily into a strict patriarchal religious setting. I became skilled at making myself small, avoiding conflict, and keeping the peace. I wouldn’t even send food back at a restaurant.
Eventually, accommodation was no longer an option.
My life has taught me that survival is not a single event but a lifelong practice. Poetry became one way to unravel what otherwise could not be spoken. Years of fighting for my sons on the autism and medical fronts while navigating my own illness taught me how easily people are overlooked when they do not fit the world’s expectations. Those experiences continue to shape my work because poetry is one way to bear witness.
Some of what I write is what I call cairn poetry. These poems often begin with a photograph, a walk in the woods, a memory, or a question that refuses to leave me alone. I gather fragments of thoughts, senses, and memories, then stack them like stones. Sometimes I use nature oracle cards to spark unexpected connections. I create markers for what was witnessed, endured, learned, or loved. The poem decides the rest.
Today, I write for outsiders, survivors, caregivers, and those who have been misunderstood or mislabeled. Nature remains sacred to me, and injustice sits heavily upon me. I am drawn to overlooked stories, inherited silences, and the places where beauty and grief coexist. My life is a constant reminder that there is always more to a person than what appears at first glance, and poetry allows me to look closer.
Much of my story remains untold, but these are some of the roads, woods, wounds, questions, and wonders that shaped the writer I became. The rest is still finding its way into poems.
Joyce Enzor Maust (she/her)
Current DE House of Representatives Poet Laureate
*Poetry speaks truths that linger long after the words have faded.
We are so grateful that you are here. Please leave a message if you are inspired. We would love to see what you write. The White Rabbit Poetry Society is a place to find some inspiration and even some friends. Don’t be shy—add links to your poetry!
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Thank you💛
That was excellent. I very much enjoyed reading that.