A 2024 Burlington High School graduate has recently published her first book.
Riley Villont’s “Icarus Falling Through Light” is a collection of poems exploring self identity and discovery, relationships, and the evolution of Villont’s personal definition of success in the writing field.
“It is a collection of 20 poems,” Villont said. “Most poems kind of explore how success is defined in the writing fields, but others explore self identity and trying to define yourself when you’re not really sure who that is and friendships and the passage of time and how you kind of grow apart from each other and how some friendships seem timeless.”
The title of the book draws on Icarus from a Greek mythology, whose story gave rise to the idiom, “fly too close to the sun,” and Villont’s own struggles along the path to success. Villont also references Icarus in one of the book’s poems, “Icarus Falling.” In that poem, Villont uses sun and light as a metaphor for success.
“Icarus is in this poem flying toward the sun, flying toward success and burning himself out,” Villont explained.
It’s a feeling with which the author has grown all too familiar in her writing, but it’s one that she’s learned to overcome.
Sticking with it
Villont has always had an appetite for literature and writing. She began writing short stories in elementary school, her inspiration fueled by Barbara Park’s “Judy B. Jones” series and Mary Pope Osborne’s “Magic Tree House” books. She was a freshman in high school when she took up poetry.
“I think for a while it was just a creative outlet, and as I grew up and started dealing with anxiety and depression, it became a way to kind of work through those issues and just process, and then I just fell in love with it,” she said.
It was during her sophomore year that she hit a rut. Everything she wrote, she hated, but her English teacher encouraged her to keep writing.
“I was thinking about giving it up, and I decided to share my writing with (Mr. Boyd) at a Creative Writing Club meeting one night and he just pulled me aside and was like, ‘Hey, this is good. Obviously there’s always room to improve, but keep going with this,’ ” Villont recalled. “And so I did. I stuck with it, and it’s led me here.”
It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes, she sits in front of a blank document for hours, struggling to find the words or where to go next. Other times, she finds fleeting bursts of inspiration to fuel a few lines or stanzas, producing only snippets of poetry.
In these moments, she turns to her dictionary.
“A really good way that I found to cope with that is I open a dictionary and I pick out a word and I try to make a sentence for whatever I’m writing with the word,” Villont said. “It’s a really good way to be like oh, this is a little personal challenge and now I have to include this, and sometimes it just spurs on more ideas.”
In total, Villont estimates she has written an estimated 100 full-length poems. The 20 she wrote for her book were written in 20 days — the result of a Bookleaf Publishing challenge that she stumbled upon on social media.
“I was doom scrolling on Facebook at like 10:30 p.m.,” Villont recalled. “The Facebook page for the publishing company had an advertisement about a writing challenge that you do where you write every day for 20 days and then at the end, they publish your work, and so I saw the advertisement and I thought that could be a really cool idea and so I thought about it for a little bit, did some research on the company to make sure it was legitimate and then I decided to do it and I published.”
‘Just keep writing’
Growing up, Villont had a very distinct image of what successful authorship would look like: your work gets published, you go on book tours and you write full-time. In recent months, that view has changed.
Now, “I define success as satisfaction,” she said. “I’ve definitely discovered that you don’t have to be a traditional published author. You can self-publish, and that doesn’t mean you’re any less successful.”
Villont currently is studying Secondary Education at Southeastern Community College and plans to transfer to either the University of Northern Iowa or Iowa State University to finish her teaching degree.
Her ultimate goal now is to become a high school English teacher, but with several short stories in the works and new ideas taking shape, she doesn’t plan to stop writing any time soon. She hopes other young authors will do the same.
“Keep writing, just keep writing,” Villont said. “And if you need to take a step back from the doc and just take a breath, don’t read what you’ve already written. Just keep writing.”
Villont’s book can be purchased on Amazon. You can follow Villont across social media @rileyvillont.
