Impostor Syndrome at Events: 7 Lies It Tells Poets
A contest judge on why literary rooms make poets feel like frauds, the seven specific lies the feeling tells, and a practical script for your next launch, reading, or festival.
The trick with a wine glass is that it gives your hands a job. I learned this at my first book launch, standing near a shelf of collections I had not read, nodding along to a conversation about a journal I had never heard of, certain that at any moment someone would ask what I had published and the whole room would discover the clerical error that let me in.
Nobody asked. Nobody ever asks in the way you fear they will. But impostor syndrome at events does not care about evidence. It cares about volume, and in a room full of writers it turns itself all the way up. I have judged poetry contests for years. I have read thousands of submissions. I still walk into certain literary rooms feeling like a courier who forgot to leave after the delivery.
So this is not a piece promising the feeling goes away. It is a piece about what the feeling actually says, why almost all of it is false, and what to do with your face and your feet while it talks.
What Impostor Syndrome at Events Actually Sounds Like
The feeling is not shyness. Shyness is quiet. This thing is a narrator. It stands slightly behind your left shoulder and offers commentary: everyone here has a degree in this, everyone here has a book, the woman by the window edits a magazine you once misquoted at a dinner party. The narrator's genius is specificity. It never says you are generally inadequate. It says your bio is two lines and hers is a paragraph.
Notice what that voice is doing, though. It is doing literary work. It invents characters, assigns backstory, builds tension out of a cheese plate. Impostor syndrome at events is your imagination with nowhere useful to go. The same instrument that writes your poems is writing your humiliation in advance, and in both cases it is writing fiction.
Impostor syndrome is your imagination off its leash, writing fiction about a room that never auditioned you in the first place.
The 7 Lies, Named and Answered
Here are the seven I hear most often from poets I mentor, each with the answer I give every single time.
- Everyone here has published more than me. Unverifiable and irrelevant. Literary rooms are mixed by design: debut poets, hobbyists, one famous person, and a large silent middle who are exactly where you are and hiding it just as well. You are comparing your inside to their outside, and their outside is wearing its best jacket.
- If I speak, they will find out I am new. New is not a scandal. Every poet in the room was new in some other room, and most of them remember it with tenderness, not contempt. The writers who sneer at beginners are rare, and they are avoided by everyone else too.
- My question is too basic. Basic questions are the ones half the audience wants answered and nobody will voice. Ask how a poet decides where a poem ends and watch the whole row lean forward. Basic is another word for foundational.
- I only got in because of luck. Luck does not read your work. People do. An editor chose your poem over hundreds. A judge scored it. When I score entries for our monthly contest, I never see a name or a resume, only lines. If the lines got you in, the lines were the reason.
- Real writers feel confident in these rooms. The fifth lie, and the most durable. I have stood in green rooms with prize winners who were rehearsing apologies for poems that had already won things. Confidence at literary events is a costume most people rent for the evening. The feeling you have is the standard-issue feeling. You are not the exception. You are the room.
- I should not call myself a poet until I earn it. Poet is a job description, not a medal. It means a person who makes poems. You make poems. Say the word at the door and let your future work argue about the adjectives.
- If I left early, no one would notice, so I do not matter. This takes a true fact and draws the wrong lesson. Nobody tracks anybody at these things. That is not proof you are invisible. It is proof the stakes are lower than your pulse believes.
The Night I Met a Real Poet
Two winters ago, at a festival, I found the evening's headline reader standing in a service corridor twenty minutes before her set, holding her printed poems like a boarding pass for a flight she suspected was cancelled. Three collections. A major prize. She asked me, and she meant it as fear rather than vanity, whether I thought the audience knew who she was, because if they did not, she said, the whole reading would feel like trespassing.
I told her the truth: half of them knew, and the other half were about to. She went out and read beautifully. Afterwards she signed books for forty minutes. The corridor version of her and the podium version of her were the same person, one minute apart. That gap, I realized, never closes for anyone. Working poets just learn to walk across it on schedule.
Why Poets Get It Worse Than Novelists
I am convinced our corner of the literary world breeds a stronger strain of this than fiction does, and I think there are structural reasons.
- Poetry has no bestseller list to settle arguments. Status stays vague, and vague status breeds anxiety the way standing water breeds mosquitoes.
- Poems are made out of the self. A shrug at your novel is a shrug at your plot. A shrug at your poem can feel like a shrug at your childhood, your grief, your marriage.
- The rooms are small. In a small room you assume everyone knows everyone and you are the exception. In my experience, a third of any poetry audience met for the first time an hour ago.
There is a reason so much of the strongest work sent to us sits under the theme of selfhood and belonging; if you want to see how poets turn this exact ache into material, spend an evening with the poems gathered at our identity theme page. The doubt you feel in those rooms is not a malfunction. It is the raw ore of the subject poets have mined forever.
A Script for Your Next Event
Feelings do not respond well to arguments, but they respond very well to choreography. This is the five-step script I give every poet who tells me they are dreading a launch or a festival.
- Arrive with one honest sentence. Decide in advance how you will answer the question what do you write. Mine, for years, was: short poems about my grandmother's kitchen, and I am trying to make them less sentimental. Specific, modest, true. Nobody follows that sentence with an interrogation. They follow it with their own kitchen.
- Ask the second question. Anyone can ask what someone is working on. The person who asks the follow-up, the how or the why, becomes the best conversation of the other writer's night. Impostor syndrome cannot survive genuine curiosity, because curiosity points the camera away from you.
- Find the person by the bookshelf. Every event has one, standing slightly apart, reading spines with unusual devotion. That person is you in different shoes. Walk over. You are not networking. You are forming a two-person lifeboat.
- Compliment a line, not a career. Telling a poet their reading was great is weather talk. Telling them the third poem's last image stayed with you is a gift they will remember in a year. It also quietly proves to your own narrator that you can hear quality, which means you can make it.
- Leave on purpose. Do not slip out mid-sentence like a fugitive. Say goodnight to two people, then go. Leaving deliberately teaches the body that you were a guest, not an intruder, and the body keeps better records than the mind.
Write the Impostor a Poem
The most reliable trick I know is the oldest one in the workshop: give the voice a body and it shrinks. Making the impostor a character puts you back in charge of the fiction, the way writing in a borrowed voice does; the craft term for that move is persona, and it works on your own fear as well as it works on Odysseus. Here is a small one I drafted in a hotel lobby before a panel, in maybe four minutes:
The impostor checks my name tag twice,
agrees it is my name,
then asks who let me borrow it.
I did, I say. I always do.
He straightens my collar like a nervous aunt.
It is not a great poem. It did not need to be. By the time I had found the nervous aunt, the corridor feeling had become material, and material is something a poet knows how to carry into a room. Try it in the taxi on the way to your next event: five lines, the impostor gets a body, you get the last word.
And if you want a colder, kinder mirror than any crowded room can offer, put a poem in front of judges who never see your face. Writory runs a monthly international contest, entries open from the 1st to the 25th, and every single entrant gets a five-part score across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme. A breakdown like seeing your actual score gives you something the narrator cannot argue with: numbers written by readers who only met your lines.
You Were on the List
Here is the argument I want to leave you with. Impostor syndrome is not evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence that you can tell the difference between where you are and where you want to be, and that perception is a literary skill. The poets who feel nothing in those rooms are usually the ones who have stopped measuring the distance.
Read the bios of writers you admire, or scroll through the poets who have won our monthly contest, and you will find a parade of people who once stood at the back of a launch clutching a glass like a steering wheel. They kept attending. That was the whole trick. The room did not change its mind about them. They simply outlasted the narrator.
So go to the reading. Ask the basic question. Say poet at the door. Your name was on the list because someone put it there, and the someone, in the end, was you, the first time you finished a poem and did not delete it. The wine glass is optional. The showing up is not.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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