“She doesn’t care to hear our stories and she doesn’t need to know how much I loved your mother.”
This was a line in a poem called The Good Lie and it was the most emotional entry for the 19-year-old Jesse Warner to share in her new book called where i am. The book is a collection of poetry to be released on January 1, 2016.
Warner said The Good Lie is a letter to someone who is meaningful.
“It’s a letter giving them permission to love somebody else and to tell somebody new that I’m the past,” said Warner, a second-year advertising student at Algonquin. “When you break up with someone or someone leaves, you lose not just them but their whole family.”
Creating relatable content was one of Warner’s aims in the book. One of her favourite parts was giving words to things – like smells or emotions – that don’t have words to describe them. She did this in an entry called Read When Broken, where Warner suggested that people could read if they’re feeling uninspired or “really beat down”. They could read it and get out of bed and feel better.
Currently, where i am is a collection of 100 pieces in a poetry book that Warner has been working on for over a year. There is an array of pieces from blissful to sad to uplifting.
“I called it where i am because a lot of these pieces are from where I’m at currently,” said Warner. “10 years from now, when I look back at this (piece), it would be like that’s where I was when I wrote those.”
The book will be sold online via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple’s bookstore, iBooks. Those interested would be able to order the physical book or simply the eBook version.
Warner is from Dorchester, Ont., a village near London, which is where a lot of the book’s inspiration came from.
Warner describes the village as one of those blink-and-you-miss-it type of towns where everyone knows each other.
“A lot of what (the book’s) about is that suffocating, small town,” said Warner. “But (it’s) also (about) loving it so much because it’s home. We have a lot of tractors and cows, not skyscrapers and colleges.”
Since everyone knows everyone in the town, Warner is a bit more anxious to release a book that is so personal.
“You’re literally reading right into things that I thought, things that I felt, things that I experienced,” said Warner. “It’s hard to put yourself out there like that.”
“It’s nerve-wracking being in a small town and releasing a book this personal,” she said. “But it’s not going to be a mainstream, New York Times bestseller that everybody’s going to know about. It’s kind of like my little secret.”