Her love of writing came later.
“I’ve always been a slow reader. My grandmother was an English teacher and she was always very worried about me,” Mitchell said. “Whenever I went to her house, she would always get out the Scrabble tiles and try to teach me Latin. And I was like, ‘Oh, can’t we just play Scrabble?'”
“I think it wasn’t until third grade that I started discovering writing and writing short stories.”
Stories allowed her to escape into the dream worlds of her imagination, but she didn’t discover poetry until college.
“What I really love about poetry, and what sets it apart from other art forms, is its purposefulness,” Mitchell said. “Initially, it was a little impatience that drew me to poetry, a kind of hunger to express myself. It’s like I have to get it done fast enough before my mind wanders to the next topic.”
Mitchell studied creative writing at Colorado State University, where she was surrounded by curious, passionate people.
But once she graduated, Mitchell’s writing voice became a whisper.
“I got nervous. ‘How do I get a job? How do I make money? What do I do? What have I done?'” she said.
Mitchell gave up creative writing. She worked for seven years as a technical writer and then as an office manager.
“I wasn’t taking care of my physical or mental health. I felt stagnant,” she said.
The walls fell in 2021 when Mitchell’s mother died of COVID-19.
“That was a big turning point for me. There were so many things my mom and I had discussed,” she said. “Things are changing so quickly, what was I waiting for?”
Mitchell began writing again. This time, she decided to share her work with others and began attending poetry events at Wolverine Farm, a creative gathering place in Fort Collins.
Through contact with other artists and poets, Mitchell began to realize that she was not alone.
At her kitchen table, Mitchell looks at a stack of family photos and a diary she found while cleaning out her mother’s house.
“When I looked through it, I realized it belonged to my grandfather.”
Inside she found a strange collection of addresses and notes. At the very back, however, she discovered a series of sonnets that her grandfather had written aboard the USS Bergen in 1946.
“It’s just cool to think he wrote it,” Mitchell said
