Keeping Her Alive

Thursday’s Thought

Well! I’ve received word that my chapbook is ready for publication. Writing Knights Press is going to start printing it in the next few weeks. Woo!

This chapbook, learn to find, was difficult to write. It took almost a decade for the poems to come out of me, mainly because writing about my mother, the loss of her first as a teen and then finally as an adult and her struggles with addiction have been events in my life that I have largely tried to ignore. I thought for many years that if I stopped thinking about those things, they wouldn’t have an emotional impact on my life. Turns out, that’s a bunch of bullshit. Avoiding (markedly or otherwise) emotional trauma does absolutely nothing to develop one’s self or advance one’s truth. It just buries it deeper and deeper and ends up manifesting in other ways.

I wrote the majority of the work over winter last year while I was holed up in the lab. I drank too much wine and ate too little food. I’d waft through Dental World as unattached as possible, eager to return to my pages. I felt manic most of the time, and the cold and snow of winter in Ohio was exactly what I needed to stay committed to finishing the work. My driving force every single day was to perfect my commas, choose the right words, find a way to wade through the pain and write her story.

I’m still not sure if I’ve done that, or if I’ve honored her spirit. I’m sure Efed and Ghost have different versions of their truths on how things went down, and that’s okay. They’ve both read the chapbook and have given their blessing for me to send it out into the poetry world. I can only hope that wherever she is, my mother might be proud that I’ve found a way to translate the pain into something palpable, something discernable, words on pages. I hope that I’ve turned the blood she shed into something worthwhile, a product for which she might be proud.

Once the chapbook emerges from the depths of the publishing house, the real fun will start – book signings, readings, making my way around the venues in the region to promote my work. I’m eager for that part of this process. My mother is dead. She’s been dead for almost three years. But that doesn’t mean that her story has to die. I intent to make sure it doesn’t.