The end of a relationship with a spouse or partner is like a death – a death of familiarity, a death of structure, a death of how we live our lives and who we share that life with. I’ve never experienced that kind of loss, but I’ve seen it happen to close friends and family members.
Gabrielle Myers experienced that kind of loss, a relationship she ended after “five years of verbal abuse.” She did what many poets do – she turned to writing poetry to understand it, assimilate it, and resolve it –if such a thing can ever truly be resolved. But she did it in a rather unique way, by using the natural landscape around her to structure and explain her poems. And her loss.
The result is Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life, Myers’ fourth collection of poetry. It could also be subtitled with the words she uses to begin her introductory essay: “Begin to Know the World Again from Nothing.”
After reading and writing about the three epic poems, I read Cross of Snow, the 2020 biography of Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes. Two years later, I saw the movie “I Heard the Bells,” the story behind Longfellow’s poem that eventually became a popular Christmas carol. And all this while, I kept looking for something that will help me unify a theme for this as-yet-unnamed novel.
The movie might have been the clincher. And I thought, what about Longfellow’s poetry? If I had searched more or better than I did, I might have found the 2017 novel What Longfellow Heardby Jon Nappa.
We have mobile phones, but we still have a landline. And according to caller ID, the most common caller we get on that line is someone I’ve grown rather fond of. His name is “Spam Risk.” He’s gotten crafty; he sometimes changes his name to “Medical Clinic,” or that of a local grocery chain, or just a location. But he is, and always will be, “Spam Risk.” He deserves his own short story or novel. But there might be hope for this unwanted intrusion; Gary Saul Morson describes it at The Wall Street Journal (story unlocked): A Modest Proposal to Deal with Spam Calls.
It might be because I’ve lived a long time. But what I do not get, at all, is this fascination for and support of socialism. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, and I remember when it was published. Ot the killing fields of the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Or the brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For those who think it could never happen here, well, they never thought it would happen in lots of places. Bradley Birzer, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, looks at the resurgence of socialism here.
Family history is rarely handed down intact, or even handed down at all. I was told a few things about my paternal grandfather, for example, mostly about the crazy songs he liked to sing and the expressions he used. A story about my great-grandfather, however, was handed down, an epic Civil War story. I based my novel Brookhaven on that story. Except the handed-down story turned out to be almost entirely wrong. But the reality told another kind of story – about a father who lost two sons and a son-in-law in the Civil War and was terrified that his youngest would be called up, so he took steps to protect that son as long as he could. At Front Porch Republic, N.P. Curtin writes about the importance of family stories, and keeping the family history alive.
