Articles

People need more than just practical support, but things to feed the soul, to brighten the gray of limbo and the toxic boredom of being in between one life and the next.

Through eight drafts over six years, John was my cheerleader. With each new revision, he would tell me how the play had grown, how a character had been fleshed out, how the story was becoming clearer, how I’d finally solved a certain scene. The acerbic John of early days was gone; he was my advocate, my encourager. My Samwise.

I ask her about all things millennial, and she tells me how to take decent selfies, how Tinder works, explains online etiquette and edibles, Venmo and UberPool. She asks me what it’s like to have a kids and a husband, to be “settled.”

I know you don’t believe in God, which is only strange to me because you feel like proof.

A certain way I was is gone,
I admit, the ways that I was young.

A bird sits the branch in beauty for
It has recently killed.

To be a poet you must write
more than you know

It was another year or two before Brother Thibault whispered to Gérard the secret of his salt. He had, apparently, received unearthly assistance.

Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?

Our solitude turns out to be crowded. The writer’s tiny hut is filled with ghosts; the painter’s chilly studio is populated by unseen rivals; in the poet’s hard-won hideaway, invisible influences lurk. Others are always already there. So much for the romantic myth.