Snap & Gratitude

It's been a really amazing few months. Four projects have come to fruition since September, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers who believe in them, Diane Goettel of Black Lawrence Press, the various editors and staff at Syracuse University Press, and Ariana Den Bleyker of Emerge Literary Publications. Thank you all for helping bring these books into the world: Rigger Death & Hoist Another, poems; the Dunn anthology, launched after six years of work; my fiction chapbook,The Smashing House, about the glass surface of the ordinary, like seeing boats in strange places or imagining the future of grief and the grief of the future; and Ripple & Snap which I worked for five years, trying to tell the story of the aftermath of a suicide. It's my first attempt at trying to unfold my own story of two suicides close to me when I was young, my attempt at unpacking the complicated emotional responses I had and still have. The form was the hardest to do, a hybrid unspooling of block micro fiction and monologues, with no resolution because, like the static behind the sounds that make sense in our minds, suicide just buzzes there, unending and incomprehensible.                   

With grace, we transmute what we know into art, but we don't do it alone; it takes other writers who inspire us and often work with us; it takes editors who believe in us; it takes publishers who put it all together and make it available to a readership. Thank you. Thank you, all of you.

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