Meet Taylor Dibbert

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Taylor Dibbert a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Taylor, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Mainly trauma. From thinking my life was over and then slowly discovering the power of art and writing to process grief and to heal.

I also find a lot of inspiration from little aspects of daily life that I used to overlook, or not spend enough time appreciating: observing small acts of kindness, having a great cup of coffee, catching up with a friend from college on the phone; hearing someone I’ve mentored or helped say thank you; watching dogs run off leash.

I feel like we’ve been taught as a society to emphasize and celebrate big moments – birthdays, weddings, etc. – but I’m more interested in what I’d call the spaces in between and the relentless search for beauty in the ordinary. That’s where so much of life is actually lived.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

These days I’m mainly focused on poetry. In August I published the poetry collection “On the Rocks,” which is my seventh book. The poems are connected by drinking in some way, though the book is mainly about examining universal aspects of the human experience and navigating daily life.

I’ve written a lot about relationships and dog-related things. Almost all of my poems are written in the third person. For me poetry is fiction and I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to the third person is to try to create some distance between what readers might perceive as my thoughts and what my poetic speaker is saying.

I did have a dog named London who I adored and I understand that there will invariably be people who read a book like “London” and interpret it as a work of confessional poetry, or a poetic memoir. I’m okay with those kinds of misunderstandings; I’m just happy if people are reading and, ideally, getting something out of the poems or identifying with these books and ideas in some way.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

A love of reading, writing and travel has helped me a lot.

But in terms of my poetry, probably the thing that’s helped me the most is just trying to live a full life and then when things go wrong and when the darkness comes, not running away from it. Staring down trauma and heartbreak and betrayal and pain and using poetry to try to figure out what all those past experiences and feelings mean has saved my life.

Everyone’s creative process is different and I’m reluctant to weigh in very heavily on an advice question. Though it’s hard to be a writer if you aren’t writing and making time for writing. So my advice would be to remain cognizant of that and prioritize accordingly.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

I’m currently looking for a home for a couple poetry manuscripts. I won’t go into detail about the content here, but they both cover topics that are similar to things we’ve already covered in this interview.

If you publish poetry books and would have any interest in considering these manuscripts, I’d love to hear from you: [email protected].

Contact Info:

• Website: https://taylordibbert.medium.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-dibbert-3b927813/