✍️ "Yes, the Hula-Hoop Saved Me."

A poem by guest contributor Ann Humphreys.

✍️ From the Editor: The Hoop, the Heart, and the Art of Failing Gloriously

Every now and then, a writer drops a line so powerful it rewires your brain a little.

This week’s GuestStack feature comes from Ann Humphreys—a poet, performer, and professional hula-hooper (yes, really)—whose work reminds us that failure isn’t just part of the dance. It is the dance.

Ann’s poem, “Yes, the Hula-Hoop Saved Me,” is about joy, gravity, shame, and the kind of movement that shakes loose the stories lodged in your ribcage. It’s a meditation on circularity—in life, in art, and in the way plastic tubing can spin meaning into muscle memory.

And as you’ll read in her Notes from the Desk, Ann’s journey from poet to memoirist to self-published renegade author shows that she’s living proof that the creative life may not be easy—but it sure as hell is brave.

So whether you’re dancing in your kitchen, dodging impostor syndrome, or wondering if it’s too late to start again, Ann’s poem is for you.

Enjoy,

-Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

📚 "Yes, the Hula-Hoop Saved Me."

written by Ann Humphreys

Is today a day

to dance, or

to die?

Every day we must ask this question:

What will I do?

How do we find the heart,

that interplay of muscle and magic

from which light may come?

The light, the fire,

the holy stuff of dance

swept into my body

on the kooky current

of a hula-hoop!

And as a child,

I couldn’t even

do it.

How close, how secret

I’ve kept my failures.

Consciousness

a closed loop.

The hoop is failure,

the reminder that gravity

cannot be escaped.

The hoop is joy,

the knowledge that I dance

in the face

of certain death,

on the face

of a bountiful earth

to whom I owe my life—

a miracle of time

which chose me

in this body

and I fail again

in my glory

four credit cards maxed

the ceiling falling in

and a weird stink

I know only

to be human—

for to fail is

beautiful—to fail is to

do, and to do

is to believe.

For the privilege of

death reaches only

the living.

Is today a day to

dance, or

to die?

The mind says

Neither

The hoop says

Both

🖊️ Notes From the Desk of Ann Humphreys

Did you know that Sylvia Plath was terrible at writing prose?

I found the legendary poet's book Ariel when I was 17 and just starting to try to write "adult" poems. When I finished the slim volume—containing Daddy and Lady Lazarus and so many other uniquely jaw-dropping poems—I thought, That's it, I'm toast, I'll never write anything even close to the brilliance of these. I wasn't wrong.

For a while, the creepy-seasick feeling...which I later learned to identify as "impostor syndrome"...stayed with me. Why write poems if I can't equal what Plath did? Why even try? Occasionally, I would jot some lines down in my journal, because I just couldn't help it.

Then, in my early 20s, I happened to find a collection of Plath's short stories. I did not know she wrote short stories. I was astounded! I dove in and read them all.

In the entire volume, there was not a single memorable or even enjoyable story.

* * *

The realization that Plath was a mere mortal was—I confess—part of what guided me back towards attempting to write poems myself. Eventually I got an MFA in poetry writing and spent a couple of years compiling a chapbook. I worked at a literary magazine and a nonprofit and taught a couple of writing classes on the side. Life was steady and generally good (apart from my inability to get over my breakups in a sane and timely fashion).

Then the hula-hoop found me.

* * *

Because I never could hula-hoop as a child, I grew up feeling not just indifference but actually a degree of hostility towards hoops. It sounds so ridiculous. But you can be sure—if there were hula-hoops around, I was avoiding them.

Then, one day—oh, so many of you can relate!—there was this hot guy.

I was heartbroken (again) and walking my dog in the bright summer midday, to try and shake off some of my depressed catatonia, when I saw something moving. It was someone dancing—all by themselves, out in the open, in the middle of the town's central greenspace. As I got closer, I realized it was a guy—a rangy, dark-haired guy I recognized from the co-op. He was...whirling...around in a circle, like a Sufi dervish. How incredibly weird...? And I saw, as we strolled closer, this guy was really—actually—kind of cute.

And the black circle moving around and around and around him? It was--I could scarcely believe this—it was a hula-hoop.

And my life changed forever.

* * *

The main lesson I learned from my hula-hoop was how to feel instead of think about feeling. The touch of the hoop on my body, the sensation of the smooth circle of plastic pressing lightly into my skin—that was a feeling. And the endless ticker of words and sentences and explanations that scroll without cease through my awareness—those could suddenly be isolated and identified as my thoughts. In life before hooping, they were all the same thing.

The hula-hoop did what years of therapy could not: it taught me how to feel my feelings.

I was so transported by the simple experience of dancing every day that, for many years, I did not feel like I needed to write. But slowly, as my practice deepened and insights accumulated, I began to be preoccupied by this spectacle of change. Could I write about it? I believed that I could.

In 2012, I began writing what would become my first memoir. I figured it would take me at least a year—two years, tops.

It took me EIGHT years to finish.

* * *

Seven of those years were years of total failure. I'd spend ten months writing a new version, then send it off to my agent, who would (kindly) tell me "This is shit." After four years of this, she broke up with me. But I kept on writing. I could not stop.

For the next three years, I'd spend ten months writing a new version, put it aside for a couple of months, then pull it back out, read it, and realize "This is shit."

Then I wrote the eighth version. As soon as I read it through one time, I knew that it was finished. It was February of 2020.

* * *

Not knowing what Covid would do to the publishing industry, I made the decision to publish the memoir myself during the pandemic. I did everything in exactly the wrong order, but I managed to put out a book I am very proud of, and support it with two entirely self-generated book tours.

In the process, I became so broke I had to sell my house. There were book tour nights I spent in the back of my car at gas stations, where the bright lights would deter potential predators. Dinner might be a package of Lance Toasty crackers followed by a dessert of apple slices. At the tail end of the last tour, my Subaru exploded in Tampa—I made it home via Greyhound, vowing never to do this again.

* * *

But of course, I could not stop writing. I've completed a second memoir and started on a third. In the last few months I've started trying to craft creative nonfiction articles, all of the above garnering rejection after rejection after rejection. The impostor-y feeling started creeping back. Why was I doing this? Why am I doing this?

The same week I thought to myself, Maybe I should try writing poetry again, I saw Amy's call for poetry pitches. It has to be a sign! I thought.

This poem about hula-hooping is one of the most effortless to ever come to me. But I don't imagine that I did it all alone...I honestly think Sylvia might have been helping me.

👋 Meet Ann Humphreys, This Week’s GuestStack Writer

Ann Humphreys has a BA in African-American literature from Barnard College and an MFA in Poetry Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has worked as a professional hula-hooper, mitigation investigator, writer, and editor.

She self-published her memoir The Tao of Hoop: On the Transformational Practice of Hula-Hooping (Seriously, Though) in the summer of 2021. Last year she withdrew the book from a specific platform because billionaires. She is currently actively seeking re-publication of that volume as well as two other books.

Follow Ann on Instagram annoflineandcircle or visit her website here.

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