Suzannah Gilman - from lawyer to poet

As a teenager, she would carry home stacks of poetry books from the library, as many as they would let her. She’d pore over every word on every page, for hours upon hours, until her eyes strained to continue. The inspiration struck her, the words she needed to write bursting from her brain, down to her hand, scribbling onto her notebook paper. It was her turn to write.

“Sometimes words come because you’re sitting there,” said Suzannah Gilman. “Your brain just kind of takes off, it turns on and goes.”

It’s been years since that flood of inspiration and passion for writing has hit Gilman, but she said it’s back now. There are days when all she does is sit at her desk and write, and dinner never hits the table. When all her worries are gone, and it’s just the exuberance, the pure joy of writing and creating, left for her to feel. Life is just easy.

“All that stuff goes out of the window in that moment of writing,” she said.

Gilman is a Winter Park resident and recently had a chapbook — a small book of poetry that normally has a theme — published called “I Will Meet You at the River.” It’s full of moments of love, real relationships and imaginary ones, all honest and true to the human experience, Gilman said.

Modest beginning

Growing up, words were a priority for her, but in her home there wasn’t much to read besides the Bible and their hometown newspaper. At her grandparents’ house, she found a book of poetry given to them as an anniversary gift when she was only 8. She read it cover-to-cover, skipping ones she didn’t understand, even memorizing her favorite, which she can recite to this day. When she was 11 she began writing, and her mother knew to leave her alone when the door was shut and the books came out.

“I liked the internal life about it,” she said. “It was really a great means of escape and entertainment.”

To purchase Suzannah Gilman’s poetry book “I Will Meet You at the River,” visit tinyurl.com/SuzannahGilman

But she hasn’t always lived a life full of art. She got married at just 19, had three children by 22 and another at 26. Gilman wanted to go to college, but her then-husband didn’t quite support her. She did it anyway, all while raising her four children. And then she got a law degree. That’s just how she’s always been.

“When she is determined to do something, she will make it happen,” said her friend and fellow poet Susan Lilley. “She has a diamond-hard ability to accomplish very difficult things.”

She lost her art while she was a lawyer, uninspired and too busy to write. But poetry was always with her, being a lawyer giving her sharper reading and writing skills. For a while she needed the job; she was a single mother.

Finding poetry again

But then she found a new love, and lots of opportunities — one drawing her back to the art of the written word.

“When I started thinking ‘What do I want to do?’ there wasn’t anything else,” she said.

“She’s found the art that has really been in her destiny all along,” said Philip Deaver, her past professor at Rollins College. “She has changed her life.”

Her fiancé Billy Collins, Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, has watched her intensity about poetry grow. Gilman often works until morning, taking her old poems and making them new. She said it’s being with other poets that has driven her to get her work published. She wants to publish more — she jokes she can’t be known only for her romantic poetry of her just released “I Will Meet You at the River.” Her work is — and has been — much more than that, hinted at by the twisting, haunting final stanza in 2005’s “To the Baby Upstairs.”

“She has the remarkable ability to pluck out little moments, real moments and intimate interactions and make them sparkle and bring them to life on the page,” said Lezlie Laws, another former professor.

“She sees the magnificent in the everyday and ordinary,” Lilley said. “She really has an eye for the beauty in all things.”