The Process of Process

The below timeline documents my journey in the production of “Process.” Check back later for a digital flipbook, each poem posted as a series, and reader-submitted content. If you have a physical copy of “Process” and want to share your “intermission” page or any other thoughts, email jesterlumos@gmail.com and include:

• Your Name (unless you wish to remain anonymous)
• Any attached image files you want to see on this page
• Any message you want posted along with your images
• And any private thoughts you have for me

First Contact

10 February, 2026

In the first month of classes, my first challenge was coordinating with a professor. Since I am not enrolled in any honors courses, I could have chosen any of my professors, but I wanted to complete an honors project for my CRW 160 (Introduction to Poetry) course to showcase my academic focus.  After our fourth class session, Prof. Botos and I discussed the possibility of such a project, and she was immediately and enthusiastically on board. I wasn’t initially sure quite what to expect for such a project, but when she mentioned the idea of compiling a chapbook, I knew it was the project for me. I grew up in the Vegas poetry scene where culture was  spread through chapbooks and conversations, and now it’s my turn.

Official Honors Contract 11 February, 2026

Having reached an understanding with my professor, the next step of the process was to fill out an honors contract. This proved surprisingly challenging as it demanded that I propose the constraints of my own project, and I wasn’t accustomed to this level of freedom or of responsibility.
I managed to muddle through, and over the following weeks, my professor and I fleshed out the particulars further. By the date of the showcase, I would craft a chapbook, distribute it amongst my classmates for academic critique, and prepare this visual representation of the history of the medium and of the journey of  “Process."

The Birth of… “Diptych”? 14 February, 2026

One of the things no one tells you when you start putting together a chapbook is that not only do you have to write poetry, you have to write enough poetry, and it all has to fit together on the page.  This proved to be so much more challenging than I had anticipated that I went through 4 different ideas before ultimately committing to one. I kept hitting the wall most people call “art block,” but I’ve come to learn that in these times, it is best to simply write what comes to mind instead of trying to force it. What came to mind came in full force, and this torrential wave of it ended up forming into “Process.” My writing was not so much “blocked” as it was focused.

The Birth of “Process” 14 March, 2026

As smoothly as it flowed after finding it, those other three ideas conspired to swallow an entire month of my timeline. This put me into a fairly significant time crunch, but by creatively channeling the focus others allow to deter them, I was able to synthesize enough entirely new content written with interconnection in mind.
Each piece plays on the basic structure of the process essay to turn the comfortable format of second person task lists into deeper explorations of social concepts and institutions around me. In this way, I was able to process complex emotions surrounding the state of the world through the more structured processes I explore and through the process of  crafting a chapbook.

First Draft 31 March, 2026

The first draft of “Process” was a testament to pure human craft. It involved me, a rented school laptop, the free-for-black-and-white printer in the computer commons, and the communal stapler  with only two staples left. I didn’t spend any money, only myself.

First Cover 02 April, 2026

I resisted the urge to experiment with cover designs until after I had a working draft manuscript, so that I could bring the same connective tissue that joins each poem to the cover. This allowed the cover to serve as an effective primer for the content, but I also wanted to showcase my identity and honor the unfinished process.

First Progress Report 07 April, 2026

A sacred mantra permeates the writing world: “kill your darlings.” The sentiment is that however good an idea may be in a vacuum, and however attached you may be to it, it must fit within the living context of the greater piece or be cut out unscrupulously. Meeting with my professor to present my progress and receive feedback was the first step in isolating them.  I had to kill a good few “darlings” for this project, but the most impactful was the entirety of the original first poem, now surviving only as imagery of spaghetti on the cover. This piece was too intimate to fit cohesively with the rest, but cutting it meant I no longer had enough  poems just two weeks from the showcase.

My Darlin’ Lay Dead 08 April, 2026

Being down a poem well within crunch time left me just one viable option: harness the “block.” If I have to write a poem, and I can only think about the state of the world around me, I’ll just have to write a poem about the state of the world around me. Fortunately, this  served to reinforce rather than erode the thematic matter of the chapbook, and the subject matter overflows.  In fact, I wrote not only “how to Celebrate the earth” but also “how to buy Love” the day after deciding to kill the original first poem. Part of what enabled me to do this was my use of form to restrict my structural options and allow me to focus on the content. I had just begun to pioneer a new form (tentatively the Terzaversenelle) this semester!

Final Formatting 09  April, 2026

“Process” was formatted entirely and exclusively by me from start to finish. This invited familiar challenges like the urge to spend more time formatting than writing and the question of where to break pages, but it also brought many interesting considerations like the importance of shape in poetry and my resulting choice to set all body copy in a monospaced font (one where every character has the same width).  I also had to consider capitalization, margins for statement-sized documents, and frontmatter. The latter two were trial and error, but my restrained use of capitalization proved problematic for the first time: “Process” forced me to consider it across a compilation rather than  a single piece. Do you think my SMALL CAPS solution is sufficient?

Final Arrangement 10 April, 2026

As with the formatting, the final layout was arranged by me. The finished product feels like it was simply printed in order, but due to the fold, each sheet of paper is actually a specific 4-page spread, like pages 19, 4, 5, and 18 below. This also means my page count has to be a multiple of 4, which gave me the idea for the intermission page.  The other concern is the order of the poems. They should flow naturally from each to the next, unfolding a larger narrative or packet of thematic matter. Many chapbooks (though not “Process”) have a “title poem” near the middle which shares its title with the chapbook, and the first and final poems hold nearly equal weight. These poems  anchor the reader and provide landmarks for the greater story.

Final Revisions 14 April, 2026

Down to the last week, I needed to push through and finalize “Process” as quickly as possible. This final round of revisions included the least changes, but took the most energy to make because revision demands fresh eyes. I had simply been looking at it for too long.   For this reason, I likely would not have been able to achieve such a polished product in such a short span of time without feedback from my classmates in workshop (for “how to survive the apocalypse” and “how to buy Love”) and Prof. Marianne Botos. The access to fresh eyes when necessary allowed me to isolate areas for revision which I had been completely overlooking, leaving me to focus on the mounting grief of  knowing my time with “Process” was nearing its end.

Final Cover 15 April, 2026 

My final cover design builds on my first to incorporate my unaddressed goals: to showcase my identity and to honor the unfinished process. I leaned into the existing vestiges of the latter by incorporating a photo of my first draft, an image of a stapler along the binding, and some smaller touches as well as a QR code to an unpublished subdomain of my portfolio so that some part of it will always be changing.  The former was a profoundly difficult undertaking, as it demands answers to unasked questions like “how do people see me?” and “what’s important about my identity?” I found my ongoing process, both with poetry specifically and with art in general at the core of both. To capture  this, I quoted my mother with an observer’s perspective of this process.

Reflective Publishing Timeline  18 April, 2026

That’s what you’re reading right now! Knowing that this was a component of my project requirements, I took notes on important dates and my thoughts throughout the process, but I largely had to rely on an oft-neglected source of research: memory. This can be far more difficult than other research methodologies because it asks for a unique extension of empathy: to see not others through their eyes, but myself through other’s eyes.
Only so much text can fit on a standard posterboard tri-fold, so I had to dig deep enough to collect the entire bigger picture but also then sift through that bigger picture, trying to predict which details would be the most interesting to you, the unknown peruser of my work.

Honors Showcase 22 April 2026