For many Cranston high school students who graduated the weekend of June 9, 2018, that day was the kickoff to what was the beginning of a very busy time. There were summer jobs to work, college packing lists and schedules to make, textbooks to buy and dorm room shopping to be done. For Jeanne-Marie “J.M.” Marcotte, a graduate of Cranston High School West, there was an additional item on her list: publishing her first book.

Marcotte works in a local restaurant in Cranston and is a freshman at the University of Rhode Island, where she studies Writing and Rhetoric. She entered in September already a semester ahead, due to a combination of AP classes and college credit-bearing classes taken in high school.

This past summer, she self-published a book of original poetry called “Life Spirals.”

The book includes 50 of Marcotte’s original poems that are reflective of her life over the period of about a year, as well as 50 pieces of original illustrated artwork to correlate with each poem, created by fellow Cranston West graduate, Kailyn D’Elena (ombrelloverde.weebly.com).

“Oftentimes these poems start off with an ordinary life situation, and as the poem unfolds, some learned insight is revealed about myself or about the world,” said Marcotte. “Each page has two poems side by side which may totally contradict each other, but that’s life, that’s the human experience.”

Marcotte began writing her poems in May 2017.

“I wrote my first poem because I wanted to write one that was a poem version of a blog post I had written,” she said.

Marcotte’s blog, Mystical Meanderings (mysticalmeanderingsblog.wordpress.com), began in 2017 as well, and she also helped to host Cranston West’s after school Coffee Shop, events where students could come and share their literary work with their peers.

It was during the summer of 2018 that she realized she had 75 poems written in her Google drive folder, inspired by her life over the previous year. She started to consider the idea of formatting them into a book of poetry.

“There were 46 or 47 of those that were usable and fit well with the theme of life spirals up and life spirals down so that I could make a book of 50,” she said. “It wasn’t hard for me to come up with a few more to make an even 50. I started thinking, ‘Hey, this is actually possible.’”

Marcotte had found inspiration from her teacher at Cranston West, Evan Lancia, who had just published his second book of poetry over the summer.

“He was such an example and an inspiration to me,” she said. “I was also really influenced by another teacher and friend, Kristen Capaldi.”

Capaldi had been the subject of an essay in the spring of 2018 that Marcotte had written for the Barnes and Noble “My Favorite Teacher” contest, which she won.

After revising and editing her poems, Marcotte sought out an illustrator and heeding the suggestions of her friends, approached D’Elena, who readily agreed to the job.

“She worked so hard, she spent at least three hours on each illustration,” Marcotte said.

Marcotte spent approximately a month uploading the poems and illustrations to Blurb.com, a self-publishing site, and formatting the pages of her book, before ordering a single copy to be sent to her.

“It was so much fun formatting the pages,” she said. “Some of them are towards the center, some of them are all the way to the edges of the pages. I wanted the book to be visually appealing.”

Just after her freshman year began at URI, the book arrived, and she’s kept it a bit under wraps since then, as she’s adjusted to the start of the school year and the fact that she is now a published author.

“No one at URI even knows I’ve published a book unless they see the signature line of my emails,” she said.

Currently, Marcotte has been distributing her first shipment of books to friends, family and other fans of her work, and selling them online as well. In terms of future publications, Marcotte can’t rule it out but won't put any pressure on herself to do another one just yet.

“We’ll see what happens when I reach that volume of work again,” she said. “I liked that theme of life spirals and all the different expressions of it. The poems are all about real life.”

To order a copy of “Life Spirals” online, either in print or as an eBook, visit blurb.com/b/8905856-life-spirals.