Creating and the Creation

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author, book, fiction, freelance, language, literary theory, literature, non fiction, novel, poetry, poetry theory, writer, Writing

As wordsmiths it is easy to become obsessed with definitions, with steps and cues, with lines, and the manipulation of those lines. Art can resemble a science; the creative process becomes just that – a process, a string of impossible questions and frantic answers, systematic and unwavering. There are theories and rules, guidelines to control the streaming, each wave building further uncertainty and expanding definitions. Layer upon layer. The movement compels further movement, always forward, sustained by its own momentum and governed by the thin lines and strings of our own devising.

The creative process is just that – a process. And it is a consuming one. The act of creation propels itself, inspires itself, as it narrates its own creation. It’s easy to be consumed the process, with the external narrative of creating. We forget then, that our work isn’t about definitions and it isn’t measured by its process. We cannot simply be creative; we cannot simply be writers. We must create something; we must WRITE something. And that which we write, that something, cannot be a mere abstraction. It must extend beyond its narrative, beyond its own eternal possibility, and assume a physical presence in the world.

While it is nice to be a writer and to be in the process, always, of creating, it is far better to have created. Definitions of self, of identity, of who we are are meaningless when it comes to our art. Our art is not an extension of who we are becoming. Rather, it must be something, its own presence, a word, an object, a book, a sound – something to inspire movement, to assume and build upon the stories of others. It is in this exchange that meaning is created and that we (and our words) become something more than our individual symbols and definitions. We are not defined by a process, but by a product and by the way in which this product lives and expands beyond us and our vision – by what it becomes as opposed to who we are becoming. By all the ways that it becomes unrecognizable to us.

It’s hard to remember this. As a writer, so much of my work is wrapped up in abstractions, in ideas. The “something” that they create can easily be confused the process of their creation. And it is easy to settle. Whereas a sculptor can see the difference between each, for a writer, it’s more difficult to recognize the presence created by language; it’s easier to define ourselves in our own terms, our own language, as opposed to accepting and opening ourselves to the definitions of others, our readers.

But we must. I read once that words are just words – they are. But in the hands of a reader, words become something more. The trick? They must be read first.

And so, I retreat back into my maze of half finished projects, of hopeless dreams, and rambling notes to create something, to publish something, to become something. We cannot live our lives as partial verbs and phrases. Eventually, we all become nouns, the objects of our own wandering.

 

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Review: This is How You Lose Her

Tags

Amazon, Book Review, Character, Dominican Republic, fiction, Junot Diaz, literature, Memory, Narrative, New York Times, novel, Presence, Review, Storytelling, The, This is How You Lose Her, Writing, Yunior

“It’s just so raw,” my grandmother said as she glanced back through the pages. “I only got to page 20. Just page 20, but I was happy to be there.” 

While studying the art of writing, I paid very little attention to the art of reading. I focused on the craft of it, the process of it, as opposed to the purpose of it – to connect, to reveal and to inspire. I define good writing by my grandmother. She has little time for games or conventions. She couldn’t give a damn about the latest trends in narrative fiction, or the musings of distant theorists and philosophers. She has lived her life, a hard life, and now as it draws nearer to its final climax, all she wants is a good story.

Isn’t that what we all want? A good story, the opportunity to dissolve our present within another’s? To experience a world beyond our own if only to illuminate the shadows and corners our imaginations left unseen, unheard? Very few books have that I have read have demanded this level of active commitment. Many books have entertained me, brought me to tears, enraged me, moved me, inspired me, etc. But none have illuminated me. None have left me thrilled by the power of language, none have left me burning with the weight of stories yet to be told. Until now.

The books that I read pass through my grandmother’s hands first. If she approves, they come into mine. And that is how I came into Junot Diaz’s latest book, This is How You Lose Her.

Diaz is a brilliant storyteller. From the first sentence, I was captivated, not only by the quality and power of his story, but by its artistry. Wrapped within his prose, sentences ceased to be sentences, paragraphs were no longer paragraphs. I no longer conceived of the words, but was encompassed by the moments, faces and memories described by his language. The page disentigrated and I was transported. 

I tell my students that the purpose of writing, the art of narrative, depends upon connections. A story isn’t read; it is experienced.

Diaz skill lies in his ability to transcend language – to use language to get beyond language. One of the greatest challenges that I have encountered as a writer: my words tend to get in the way of the story I’m trying to tell. Diaz, damn him, has found a way.

The strength of a story lies in its characters, their ability to create windows as well as mirrors that instantly transport their readers while reflecting them, all of them. When faced with our own reflections, both as individuals and as a culture, we often turn away. It’s far easier to see and digest our own humanity through a veil, a mask of words and metaphors that turn the experience of it all into a distant memory. Diaz’s prose, as my grandmother notes, is raw. There is no veil, no mask or metaphor. There is simply the reflection, a living reflection that shifts, moves and bends the way that light can when faced with the pressures of time, doubt and our own uncertainty.

This eye turns towards the impossible depths of love – its obsessions, insecurities and triumphs. Centered on the trials of Yunior, whose passion is matched only by his recklessness. This is How You Lose Her is study of the connections that define us, the moments that become us, and the relationships that enable us to exist and persist within our own lawless chaos. 

I was captivated by its clarity and its expansiveness, the means by which time slips and spirals in and then, back out pressing its edges out against memory, against presence.

This is How You Lose Her is a powerful exercise in language and memory. It’s characters live within our imaginations, painting a vivid history too often lost, abandoned or ignored. The critical eye of a historian and the tongue of a poet, Diaz further establishes himself as a master of the story.

To those who adore, appreciate or aspire to find the story within our words – read this book.

This is How You Lose Her is available for purchase at amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/This-How-You-Lose-Her/dp/1594487367

 

 

 

 

I Am Writing a Novel – Selections from Agnosia, a Novel in Progress

Tags

Art, creative, editing, editor, feminism, fiction, insomnia, literary theory, literature, nonfiction, novel, poetry, possibility, science, women, writer, Writing

A Novel

I am writing a novel. The words create their own space. They pour from me, pour and scatter. Overflow.

“I can lose myself without anxiety because you keep me. This book is not narrative. It is not a discourse. It is a poetic animal machine…” Helene Cixous, Stigmata

I write this in my journal. I read it out loud, like a mantra.

My mind is numb and frantic similtaneously. There are questions of space and presence. Questions concerning space, location and language. Because where I am matters to the question of why, what, and how I am. My words are.

Trespass and linger, seeping, creeping. My words are scattered across my body, being places that they shouldn’t. I turn my tongues within and search between my shoulder blades for the adjectives I’ve lost.

They fill and overflow pouring over from every angle. It’s an alien substance. But it is me. It is mine. I claim it, driving my hands down my throat to feel the pulsing heart of it in my lungs.

There is flesh in my language. There is dirt in my words. My wandering vocabulary scatters and multiplies. It shifts in the air and returns to me, changed, moved. I cannot control it. I cannot recognize it.

I write and cannot write. The walls expand and contract. Fluctuating presence.

I am writing a novel. There are notes and tones, fractured verses. I dance between them, twitching unexpectedly between keys and tabs.

I write. Inside, the words echo. I must:

Get published

Get published

Get published

or it means nothing. Doesn’t it?

Ceaseless refrains. Every night.

I scribble on napkins and scraps of paper between tables and appetizers. It pulses. Demands.

I ride my bike home at midnight. The pavement is damp. There are no cars, only lights, growing and fading into the dust and dirt edges of the road.

One of my students asked how I could possibly be a qualified teacher without substantial publications.

Scribble. Submit. Wait.

Blue orchids and green foliage are set in wooden vases and left to whither under the reddened light.

Scribble.

Empty wine bottles frame the window sill and the coffee table behind me. A single peacock feather in a delicate glass vase. Papers scattered, printed, repeated, and torn. The blinds are slit. Coffee cups exhaust their water. Tiny drops seep and stain the window behind.

The television is on. I crave noise. I can’t write alone. Blue tipped light flickers, revealing flaws in the glass – tightening circles that intersect and expand.

Keys and ticks. In the loft, a soft, constant drumming.

I do not write novels. I write poems. I convince myself of this.

My writing instructor told me this. That I was a poet and not a writer.

I cannot tell a story. I can, however, trace myself in circles around it.

I do not understand plot, setting, characters. I understand narrative, but these are not the same.

Bobbie Hawkins, my writing instructor, told me I was a poet.

Before I could thank her she told me that she wrote poetry only once – after a man had hit her with his car while she was crossing the street in front of our school. She was in a coma for 3 days, and, as she couldn’t hold a complete thought long enough to remember and write stories, she wrote poems instead.

I understand.

I am walking somewhere in between. I cannot write sober. There is wine and insomnia to inspire the words that pour out of me.

I cannot remember them.

I fall asleep, curled in front of my computer, wrapped in sheets. I leave impressions on the couch. The mornings are damp and cold.

I do not know how to write a story. My husband also tells me this. He does not read my words, but he hears them, ticking away the hours he spends, waiting for me to slip into bed.

In bed, he tosses, driving his nails into the sheets. He dreams about screens. He dreams in black and white. He slips through the pages, constructing databases and worksheets, diagrams and charts. Trading numbers, like words.

Suffocate. I can only do this well – streaming. I focus on the empty nalgene bottle, the dust cleaner, and a bottle of gold calligraphy ink tipped onto its side and dripping onto the printer.

There are boxes and empty cans to house the wine bottles and wine glasses extended towards the end table.

Beneath the table are boxes and boxes of papers I’d left and forgotten. A peacock feather juts out of the holes in the sides. There are pictures of us everywhere. A vase on the mantel. Peacock feathers, dried roses, the remains of my wedding bouquet. The menu from our wedding day. A wooden guest book with our initials carved. Red bull cans and half empty tea cups.

I write myself as I imagined myself. There were stories there – they are not important, but they are me and they must be mine.

The mind slips into the process. Experience becomes language becomes knowledge, a way of seeing. I settle within it, aimlessly drifting in the spaces between.

How do I write what I barely remember?

There were conversations before with friends and roommates before. Whiskey Wednesdays. We stayed up in the whispers, talking or singing or watching one another.

There are no more conversations. I am writing a novel. The rest lapses into memories I will steal for material and manipulate into metaphors. Nothing is sacred. I will write them all, write every moment, every word.

I try to understand time and presence. I try to hold it in my hands.  I wrap myself in blankets and sit against the night, diving deeper and deeper into the screen, the cursor that blinks and demands ink. In the haze, the words cluster and divide, a maze of black lines stitched into the glare.

The sound of feet outside remind me that we live in a townhome. Our neighbors keep their lights on all night. I watch them through the blinds. Their shadows cross and dip beneath the banister. The window catches their reflections.

I write and am never satisfied.

Because I am a poet and not a writer. There is no order to it. I cannot claim it. I cannot hold it. It will not print. It will not manifest.

No one will publish me.

I imagine my reader, then, who is distracted, crowded between shelves in small bookstores buried in dust,  aging hipsters who lurk in late night coffee houses, shifting their eyes between baristas and the patched leather couches framing abstract paintings and dramatic black and white prints of coffee mugs, collapsed vases, and vague doorways, the kind of reader who sinks and finally, blurs before settling into memory, appearing in random list poems and haikus years after she was first noticed and committed to a memory.

She is not in real book stores, but in virtual ones, with virtual feeds and carts and screens. She browses, composing new verbs and adjectives to highlight. This is Tuesday rising and fading into Wednesday. The bar and the dimmed lights and the shades, blackened and stained red, too heavy to capture movement.  I imagine her in pixels. I imagine her barefoot and wandering, curled between piles of books and paper, books that creep, being places that they shouldn’t.

I creep and creep, dreaming of sleep knowing that I cannot sleep. I am writing a novel.

There is no reader beyond the woman I imagined in the corners, between the walls. She whispers to me, at times, telling me through the drywall, to curb my sentences this way or that. She directs me. I name her and she is happy.

In the end, there are only the words, this frantic pulsing that assumes the language I speak. In the night, I hear her laughing between the keys.

Love and Loss: Agnosia Selections

Tags

agnosia, Art, fiction, literature, monkeypuzzlepress.com, nonfiction, novel, publication, publishing, reading, writer, Writing

Hi.  I say

Hi.  He says

At dusk in the shallows, the red shadow of the ferry rises up through the tides.

How are you?  I say

How are you?  He says

Silence.

The book.  He says

The book.  I say and hope that he understands

The rise and fall of the tides coincides with the coming of the mayflies. Small, black boat-shaped dots and oil slicks – beautiful iridescent hues. The lake fills the gutted bellies of its shop with sand, shells, scales and anything else offered, dropped in, lost. Everything outside becomes buried things.

Keep them in. Keep them in.

What?  He says

Nothing. I say Nothing

There are no clouds on an island – just the mist off of the water – thickened. The edges are sharp, fine. It cuts itself into layers, rests and then pushes the air out. There are little deaths every night and every morning. Condensed water and oil – the smell of her, masked by the lights of the city. Its edges pulse in dark rings, a cloud of ash, pools of hot steel.

Tomorrow? He says

Tomorrow. I say and leave him on the docks.

…

Perhaps this needs context.

This is a section taken from a current project, Agnosia. The main character is engaging in a phone conversation with her husband, a man whom she has left though she hasn’t quite realized it yet. Leaving happens first in the heart before it reaches the mind. As she speaks these words, she is sitting in her grandfather’s living room, listening to his death-bed ramblings and chocked memories of lives he has and hasn’t lead. She is 2000 miles away, pretending to write a novel, and at once lost and hopelessly found, drowning in a sea of questions and uncertainty. Unable to know or see what she wants or even, who she is, she succumbs to a kind of numbness that consumes the novel. Her present slips into her grandfather’s past, evoking his memories of the lake, the small town on an island, the fishing, and the cabin in the woods, to describe the storm that she finds herself lost within.  

There will be more! Thank you for reading.

A Prologue

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ancestry, anthology, family, fiction, grandfather, history, island, Lake, literature, mother, novel, Ohio, poetry

The working prologue of Agnosia, a novel in the works.

A prologue

 

This is the beginning. I never intended it to be.

The beginning of this, at least.

 

Beginnings are strange things. They only exist in the looking back, after the ending. Only when those threads ravel back does their unraveling fixate to a single point. Like any story, the point begins somewhere in the center, expands, spirals out, filling the spaces between until everything blurs into one black dot. Impossible to escape, avoid. Everything falls in. Everything.

 

It works its way backwards – the beginning.

 

On the ferry, cutting through the shallow waves of Lake Erie, the last whispers of spring cling to the horizon. I smell ash, something thick and stale mascarading as air.

 

The rectangular mass that is Cleveland. The steel mill has shut down. Cold. So has the Ford plant where my uncles screwed rivets into the passenger side doors of minivans. Vacant neighborhoods, inescapable shadows that slip and steal in the night, brick by brick, the sidewalks and concrete facades I filled with faces – the otherwise empty corners and yards. Crumbled.

 

I left because of this. The emptiness that I had tried and failed to fill with the memories of my mother and grandfather. A dying city, strung up on rum and whiskey, the grills and the gatherings they invited. This void of never enough. Never enough and then, just enough. Always just and barely enough.

 

I left and there were mountains the ridges of Colorado, of Denver, California. And I thought the beginning was there, somewhere in the fictions I crafted alongside Kerouac and other would-be writers and love drunk poets. Or maybe, it was with him, with the strange acts of marriage and marrying, of courting – or maybe it was in the settling, the house buying, or the standard commuting, the 401K, the stock trading, the 8-5-ing, the teaching, always, the teaching, the grading, the countless nights of questioning, the birthing or lack there of, the could-have-been children I dreamed and imagined into a separate, private reality I fought for and defended against everyone.

 

I thought that the beginning lies in the leaving, always in the leaving, those long roads of indecision and sudden realization. Fearless and open.

 

But those are only spirals, bleeding blotches where the ink ran and poured over.

 

The beginning is always in the going home, the going back, someone else’s history, someone else’s fiction. Something stolen or assumed. Something borrowed.

 

Everything else is a scene, a moment leading back to the beginning already in the process of ending.

 

On a ferry, on an island in Lake Erie. Dark and dirty waters, shallow waters and separate pools.

 

There are shadows in the water, ropes, and cracked steel.

There is whiskey and bad cocaine. And the women. The women, my grandfather says.

The work and the work and beaches covered in glass.

What my mother loved.

The lights on the water.

 

 

 

An Exercise: How to Write a Novel, Part 2

Tags

Art, literature, novel, Writing, Writing Exercise

An exercise. Contemplate beginnings. Write the beginning before the beginning. Summarize your book in a single sentence and expand out, sentence by sentence until you find yourself back where you first began. 

The reason? When we begin, there is a certain clarity, an understanding of where we are and where we are heading. There are plots and diagrams; there are characters that we have carefully profiled. Somewhere beyond this beginning, however, everything twists, intersects, blends until it is a convoluted mess of intentions, profiles, and probably chaos.  Wading through this chaos can be a way to inspire and inform, but only if we have a way regain our clarity as the conductor of it all. 

As such, find your narrator. Bring him/her back to the beginning. How did they begin? Expand from there towards your story and towards a one sentence description of its purpose. You’ll be surprised where you end, and what you find your ultimate purpose is.

My exercise for Agnosia told through the point of view of its central narrator:

A Prologue

This is the beginning. I never intended it to be.

The beginning of this, at least.

 

Beginnings are strange things. They only exist in the looking back, after the ending. Only when those threads ravel back does their unraveling fixate to a single point. Like any story, the point begins somewhere in the center, expands, spirals out, filling the spaces between until everything blurs into one black dot. Impossible to escape, avoid. Everything falls in. Everything.

 

It works its way backwards – the beginning.

 

On the ferry, cutting through the shallow waves of Lake Erie, the last whispers of spring cling to the horizon.

 

The rectangular mass that is Cleveland. The steel mill has shut down. Cold. So has the Ford plant where my uncles screwed rivets into the passenger side doors of minivans. Vacant neighborhoods, inescapable shadows that slip and steal in the night, brick by brick, the sidewalks and concrete facades I filled with faces – the otherwise empty corners and yards. Crumbled.

 

I left because of this. The emptiness that I had tried and failed to fill with the memories of my mother and grandfather. A dying city, strung up on rum and whiskey, the grills and the gatherings they invited. This void of never enough. Never enough and then, just enough. Always just and barely enough.

 

I left and there were mountains the ridges of Colorado, of Denver, California. And I thought the beginning was there, somewhere in the fictions I crafted alongside Kerouac and other would-be writers and love drunk poets. Or maybe, it was with him, with the strange acts of marriage and marrying, of courting – or maybe it was in the settling, the house buying, or the standard commuting, the 401K, the stock trading, the 8-5-ing, the teaching, always, the teaching, the grading, the countless nights of questioning, the birthing or lack there of, the could-have-been children I dreamed and imagined into a separate, private reality I fought for and defended against everyone.

 

I thought that the beginning lies in the leaving, always in the leaving, those long roads of indecision and sudden realization. Fearless and open.

 

But those are only spirals, bleeding blotches where the ink ran and poured over.

 

The beginning is always in the going home, the going back, someone else’s history, someone else’s fiction. Something stolen or assumed. Something borrowed.

 

Everything else is a scene, a moment leading back to the beginning already in the process of ending.

On a ferry, on an island in Lake Erie. Dark and dirty waters, shallow waters and separate pools.

 

There are shadows in the water, ropes, and cracked steel.

There is whiskey and bad cocaine. And the women. The women, my grandfather says.

The work and the work and beaches covered in glass.

What my mother loved.

The lights on the water.

How to Write a Novel: Part 1

Tags

Art, fiction, literary theory, novel, writer, Writing

My writing mentor believed in simplicity. He believed in the relentless drive forward, a flood of words, and moments of pure inspiration. As his philosophy towards the art of writing was equally simple, relentless, and inspired.

“The secret to becoming a great writer can be broken down into three crucial steps: Ass in chair. Hands on keyboard. Write the damn book.”

For a great many  years I believed this to be true, exhausting hundred of would-be stories and chapbooks that to this day remain half-finished relics I cannabilize from time to time when I begin yet another could-have-been project. 

It took one book and one move to realize how ridiculous it is to believe that powerful, moving fiction can be composed and imagined simply by sitting. 

There is wisdom there – the belief that greatness aligns with sheer determination. In Nike’s terms, just do it. 

But there still needs to be purpose, direction, and ultimately, an awareness. I know what I am writing. I have outlined the plot, the scenes, each beautifully illustrated in an excel document to keep me on task. I have composed pages that describe the past, present, and future within and without each character. I have explored formats, fonts, and movements. I have analyzed tension, and learned how to manipulate suspense softly. 

I have forgotten something, however. That this effort and this text does not exist for me. It persists, lingers, and grows for one person and one person only: my reader. 

My text is not mine. It does not belong to me. It belongs to a future entity, someone I only imagined, that I glimpsed at through the cracks of a local bookstore and cafe. 

The first and last step in composing a novel does not reside within me, my work, or my computer screen. It belongs to my reader. Who is she/he? What will they imagine, inspire, realize within my words?

How to write a novel? The first step: know your reader, love them, and be prepared to give them your words freely so that they can be reimagined. 

The purpose of it all, the overarching why of why we write and what we write for lies in our readers, in a distant third perspective that will take the many parts and pieces I have awkwardly stitched together and grant it coherency, purpose, and above all, meaning. 

Who is your reader? I try to keep mine a desperate secret.

Classes begin with Coffee

Tags

Architecture, communication, fiction, novel, procedure manual, technical writing

I made coffee this morning which can mean only one thing: classes have begun. This term, it’s technical writing. Something different. I’ve discovered the importance of architecture, that is, the structures both hidden and visible that support, define, and inspire the art of writing.

The art of writing is not really even an art. It is a vehicle, a means of communicating with the world around us. The art lies in the conversation, that process of perception and interpretation by which our words come to mean something – and what’s more, to do something in the world around us.

For the next 5.5 weeks, my class will be writing procedures manuals – with a twist.

I will see manuals on how to save the day (written by a first responder), how to holistically treat ADHD, how to prepare for the demands of motherhood, and many, many more.

Their enthusiasm has inspired me to write my own manual: how to write a novel.

It is not an art, I’ve come to accept, but a science (an art of a different language). I’ve also come to learn that true creativity and innovation is realized when limited. A blank canvas is a blank canvas. But to work within limitations – that is art, building that which connects, which fills, which brings together. Anyone can write and many can write well. But very few can engage, connect, and transform our many parts and inspire unity beyond ourselves.

That is what writing is – a how to manual, a conversation that informs, defines, inspires, and ultimately expands what we know so that we can expand who we are and what we do with the time and space given to us.

As I aimlessly wander through nearly 200 pages of sheer gibberish and rambling chaos that is my first draft, I think back to a conversation I had with my father years back. My father, the architect, was a master of hidden structures. He stated, profoundly, that: “the art of it all lies in the decision. What we choose to reveal versus what we choose to hide. Regardless, the structure stands. But that decision…that is what defines what it means in its existence.”

The meaning lies in the process, the way in which its many parts are planned, are plotted, and fit together. Its the reader that enters the structure, the reader who transforms my empty traces and beams and transforms it into a story. My concern lies within the architecture. My reader will create the meaning behind and within it.

I desperately need a how to manual. I need structure, architecture, a medium of design and purpose through which the words and their meaning will manifest. Without the structure, it is aimless. And in my attempts to be aimless, a desperate and starving artist, I’ve forgotten a desperate truth. Writing is a kind of science, a system of thoughts and ideas articulated in systems and screens. The art lies in the conversation, the way a structure builds and then fills its borders.

To write a novel:

1. Be inspired

2. Get organized

I can’t wait to see the critiques I receive from my students when I post my proposal…

Losing Daughters

Tags

Art, heritage, novel, Writing

It’s a story. My grandfather breathes and slips back against the couch.

There is something in the walls.

A month, a week from now it will be tomorrow, and I will make eggs and toast. I will waste time. I will not write anything but stare at what others have written, not reading, staring.

There are manuscripts everywhere. In boxes. Books. Old notebooks. Looseleaf.

The bus at :15 and :45 past the hour.

It’s difficult. The pen moves without direction.

The book is kind. It splits, divides. Serrated frames and skylines.

The hitching post and the 45 minute ride to the airport with a man in the back of his pickup truck.

The pen keeps moving without direction.

When you lose your daughters, my grandfather says.

THere is fire in the sky, a kind of thunder.

Our house on the mountain is blue and crumbling. Two flights of metal stairs, chipped pain and baseboard heat. The wind int he walls and through the doors. We keep the heat at 55 in winter, wrapped in blankets in one upstairs corner waiting for midnight.

There are too many empty pages. Blank. Desperate. I imagine filling them. It sounds like drumming.

I try to be a poet. Scribble senseless things and hope that the space between connects them.

Something genius.

I haven’t read in weeks.

A throbbing in my head that manifests as a light in my hands.

I haven’t written in weeks. Coherently at least. The words spiral and condense. Abstract shapes and sounds. I am only fascinated by the space beneath.

I think too little of my reader, too much of myself and my publisher – an error.

Your reader is always more brilliant than you. I may write the words but my readers will make them actually mean something. Anyone can scribble. Anyone. The art is in the conversation – the triology of words, myself and you.

There is nothing left to be said – only imagined between us.

Possible. Resonate. There are ripples in the air, stones – invisible.

When you lose your daughters, my grandfather says and slips into the couch. It’s a story.