I attended a workshop a while back on honesty in a poetry performance. As writers, we tend to put the truth or as much of the truth as we can inside our work. As poets who perform, at times we get on stage and somehow the meaning of our writings gets lost in our presentation. The audience doesn’t feel the emotions we are aiming to bring forth because there is a disconnect between what we are saying and the way we are saying it.

The workshop facilitator, RJ Eldridge, asked us to define what honesty is. Among the various answers, someone stated something to the tune of “honesty is fact” (now, that is not word for word because I have terrible memory, but that’s what I got out of their statement). This prompted someone else to point out that honesty is not necessarily restricted to facts alone (and again…