Humble Beginnings

Humble Beginnings, my first chapbook, was arranged in Adobe InDesign during the second-to-last week of April 2025; it is 50 pages long, excluding the front and back cover. I remember my English teacher telling me that he designed one of his old photography books on the shelf with a software called Blurb, and recommending it to me if I ever wanted to make my own book. By then I had been writing for less than three months; the first poem I ever wrote without needing to, “January 20, 2025”, was written on 2025 January 15.

On 2025 April 20, my mother and sister went downtown; I can’t exactly remember what for, but I decided to bring my camera, a Nikon D3000, with us. I took some photos as we walked from downtown back to our house, and took a detour into the cemetery across from my house, Northfield Cemetery, for ambience. I took some more photos there as well. A few hours later, when I started burning the midnight oil, I thought back to what my English teacher had said, and decided to make my own book combining my best poetry up to that point and the photos I had just taken.

The first thing I did was make a list of the poems I wanted to include; I always approach them as tracklists for an album. Since my school gave us all access to Adobe Creative Cloud, I was able to locate InDesign, and taught myself how to use it in about seven hours, making the first draft of what became Humble Beginnings. Over the next few days, I continued to edit it by fixing typos, rewriting sentences in the Author’s Note, and other small edits that I can’t remember. I would say that it was done by 2025 April 30, my sister’s nineteenth birthday.