NowHere

What my mother gave me, and the book I'm finally writing because of it. Eighteen years ago today, my mother died. She was sixty-nine. Stage 4 liver cancer. Eight weeks from diagnosis to gone. Each year brings me new appreciation for the creative gifts she shared with me throughout our lives together. The first was the love of story. She loved to tell them, to write them, and to watch them played out in old movies, soap operas, science fiction and horror shows, and novels that

My friend and mentor, the late poet Robert Milby, once affectionately referred to the entourage of local poets that gathered regularly at the live poetry events he hosted and promoted in the Hudson Valley as mudlarks. The word was a nod to Robert’s penchant for Victorian literature and culture; an allusion to street urchins that once lived along the Thames and burrowed through its muddy shores in hopes of finding something of value upon which to subsist. I thought it an o

Because language does two things at once. It reveals, and it conceals ... Language opens meaning, but it also shapes it. It defines, narrows, and frames what we are trying to say. And sometimes, as writers, we use it not only to express what is true, but to circle it, soften it, or keep it partially hidden.

“Creativity is your baseline,” he says. “What are you going to do with it now?”

Nowhere is the space out of time. Now here is what that space makes possible: presence. A sentence. A question. A line that starts to move.