As she prepares for the upcoming school year, Fremont High School teacher Myah Gibney will be able to update her CV to include her latest title — published author.
After submitting her work to a writing contest, Gibney’s debut poetry collection, “Elements,” was released in April through Bookleaf Publishing. Now, the Purple Dragon Paper Co. is hosting her first ever book signing event on Saturday.
“I am excited,” Gibney told the Tribune in an interview at the Purple Dragon a few days before the signing. “I’ve got a lot of family coming, friends from Omaha, a couple friends from Syracuse are coming down, so I’m really excited.”
Like most writers, Gibney grew up with a voracious love of reading, which quickly turned into an equally passionate love for writing.
“As a kid I would demolish books by the handful. I have one of those stupid abilities to read a book like that,” Gibney said, snapping her fingers. “Super, super fast. My mom always said it was, she started reading to me from an early age and so I caught on and I took off.”
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In fifth grade, Gibney entered a writing contest with a story about a werewolf coming out of a TV screen and terrorizing her family.
“And me, you know, kicking its butt like an awesome little hero,” Gibney said. “It was the stupidest thing I’d ever written, but I won a prize for it and I think that’s kind of where I started having some fun with the writing.”
Gibney continued to write through middle and high school and on into college at Wayne State, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary English and theatre education.
While in college, Gibney started playing around more with poetry, which is appropriate given her namesake.
“My mom named me after Maya Angelou and so that is where I started reading poetry and kind of getting into it,” Gibney said. “In college I started getting more into it, and before college I wrote a few poems because they were fun. They’re short, they’re easy, you can mess with the format, it doesn’t need to be specific. You can write it about anything and everything and you can have so much fun with all of the different ways you can put it together and the different things that you can portray.”
Her college poetry led her to enter a writing challenge from Bookleaf Publishing, in which she had to write 21 poems in 21 days, after which the company would design and publish her work as a softcover collection and an ebook.
The first time Gibney saw her book out in the wild was at the Purple Dragon Paper Co.
“I found it because it was available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and I wasn’t sure about wholesaling,” she said. “(Purple Dragon owner Thom Ender) looked it up and … found it, bought three copies right on the spot.”
Ender said that a number of people had ordered a copy, and that the bookstore will have plenty of copies on hand for Saturday’s event.
Gibney said that she has noticed her work returning to a specific theme over and over — “the human condition.”
“It’s kind of the title of the book, ‘Elements,’ like the elements of the world, the elements of humanity and the elements of what make people people,” she said. “That’s kind of one of the themes that I keep coming back to because a lot of my poetry in that particular book is going to be about emotion and the way that people are and the things that we experience.”
Gibney is already working on a followup poetry collection that will further explore the themes of human connection. She hopes to have the poems written by the end of the year, though between teaching and waiting for inspiration, she’s not in any hurry.
“Most of the writing stuff, I don’t usually plan for it,” Gibney said. “And so some days when I have the time, I’ll just let it happen and see where it goes from there, so if I don’t get it done by the end of the year, boo-hoo. It’s a book.”
Gibney’s book signing is on Saturday, July 27, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Purple Dragon Paper Co., 512 Main St. For more information, visit facebook.com/events/1860029534422887.
