Poet Emily Hyland’s 2 writing essentials that help her get into a creative headspace

“My favorite notebooks [are] the Denik White Blank Large,” says Hyland about where she puts pen to paper. 

“I came out of a psychedelic therapy session and needed to write something,” she says, recalling the moment when having blank space gave her the “freedom [of] not being confined to any sort of certain structure.”

The unlined layout is a big reason the notebooks work so well for the way Hyland writes and how her poems begin to take shape. 

“I like to not be prohibited by the hegemony of a line on a page,” Hyland says. “I like having unlined free space. So I don’t like lines. I just like to be able to scribble, write in big letters, small letters, draw a picture.”

“Sometimes I can write straight across in a normal-size handwriting if I want to, but I like to just be able to go and let the pen take me,” she says. “But often I’ll draw.”

The paper itself, however, isn’t what makes the notebook special to her. Though it can handle both her writing and drawing, she describes it as “pretty normal printer paper, maybe a whisper thicker.”

The cover art is another part of the appeal. 

“I like them because they have so many artists,” she says about the varying styles. “The artistic cover is amazing.”

In fact, she even carries the notebooks at her yoga studio, YogaSource in Santa Fe.

“We carry them at the yoga studio too,” she says. “We have a display of a bunch of small notebooks that people love.”

Denik also lets shoppers customize their own notebooks, another feature Hyland appreciates. 

“You can also design your own notebook, and a portion of all of their proceeds help to support education,” she says. “It’s a great organization because you’re supporting artists and schools.”

“If someone is new to poetry, Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is a great—new or not new,” Hyland says. “I’m actually going to reread this.” 

The book goes beyond simply breaking down the mechanics of poetry. Hyland describes that “it provides a guide, like a framework for what it means to write, what are some skills of finessing your craft, and is also very accessible.”

That accessibility is part of why Hyland recommends it for both seasoned and beginner poets.

“It’s not meant to be super cerebral in a way that someone who’s new to this process can’t access it,” she says. 

She goes on to explain that “there’s a lot of training to understand what it means to be in the headspace, be in the body space to meet a poem.”

“There’s a lot about reading poems and practicing working with sound, or looking at famous poems and using them as scaffolds for entering in.” 

Hyland makes it even simpler by comparing it to another constant in her life, yoga. 

“Poetry, just like yoga, is for all,” she says. “All of these modalities are for all people. You don’t have to be good at any of them in order to do them. They’re practices to feel more alive that everyone gets to do.”