Durham Tech English instructor’s book of poetry to be published in February

Durham Tech instructor Bridget Bell began writing her debut poetry collection, “All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy,” during a difficult period in her life.

“I started the book a couple of months after my first child, my daughter, was born. She is 10 now. I struggled pretty badly with postpartum depression and anxiety,” Bell said. “I wrote to get through.”

The result is her poetry collection that combines academic research with personal experiences. The manuscript will be published in February.  

“I kept writing, took medicine, saw a therapist and now consider myself a survivor,” said Bell. “I wrote the pieces in the book over the course of five or six years. I kept revising, submitting individual poems until around 2022 or 2023 when I decided it was the year for me to focus on submitting the manuscript.”

Bell’s love for poetry began when she was a young child. Her diary and the poetry she wrote in it were the beginning of something she has “just always done.”

“I went to college at Ohio University and was a journalism major,” Bell said. “It was during my junior and senior years that I had space for some electives.  I took poetry workshops and had awesome instructors who introduced me to contemporary poets. I was hooked and didn’t really want to major in journalism anymore, but it was too late to change up my major.”  

Bell ended up going to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence College for an MFA in creative writing. During this time in her education, she learned a valuable lesson and honed the ability to emotionally distance herself from the writing.

“It seems like one would want to be completely emotionally invested in one’s writing, but when you are, it can blind you from writing the best version of the piece,” Bell said. “You don’t want to be devoid of emotion, just open to revisions and input from the writing community you surround yourself with. It’s an emotional art form, but you can’t get too close to it.”

Along with teaching composition and literature at Durham Tech, Bell works with a small literary press out of New York where she proofreads manuscripts. Bell, herself, has submitted upwards of 100 poems.

“It is a cycle of submitting and rejection,” Bell said. “Poetry is subjective, so you have to come across the right literary journal for your piece.”

Bell explains the submission process as one where a poet submits individual poems to literary journals, and as individual poems are accepted and published the poet continues to work towards a complete manuscript.  

“I found my home with CavanKerry Press, a poetry press that has been around for 20 years and which publishes in spring and fall,” Bell said. “My book is part of a series published by CavanKerry called Laurel Books. The entire series focuses on living with physical or mental illnesses. I hope through the poetry others who suffer from postpartum depression will feel less alone and come to know they are not bad or weak people and that they can survive.”

The informational, one sheeter distributed by the publisher says Bell’s poems “lay bare the raw, neglected parts [of motherhood]: the rage, the sorrow, the confusion, the ambivalence, the tentative joy. But these lines do more than simply give voice-they weave together to create a lyrical safety net, a road map to survival.”

“I like combining academic and medical information with my experience. This is really about grounding the emotional with the logical,” Bell said.  

Bell brings many styles of poetry to her students and teaches that the art form is alive and thriving.

“The process, the creative process, can be long and arduous, but creating is worthwhile,” Bell said. “It is in my DNA; it is in my essence.”

Readers can preorder a copy of Bell’s book at cavankerrypress.org/product/all-that-we-ask/. For more information about Bell and her poetry, visit her website at https://www.bridgetbellpoetry.com/