I don’t know if grief is really a thing with feathers. Sometimes I think of it as a ghost, sometimes there, sometimes gone, but able to suddenly appear and startle you almost to tears. My father died nearly 40 years ago; grief didn’t hit me until three years after his death. My mother died 12 years ago; I felt it immediately. My half-sister, 11 years older, died several years ago; it felt like part of my childhood died, the time I knew her best. My half-brother, eight years older, died last year, and that one hit me harder than all the others. The best and worst conversation of my life was our last phone call, when he knew he’d die soon and was saying goodbye.
But all these griefs return, not at once and not with the same intensity. Some dull with time; some don’t. The ghosts of grief are likely a measure of the strength and depth of the relationship. What I’ve learned is that grief, with all its ghosts, can be another form of love.
These thoughts about griefs and family and ghosts came bubbling up when I read Ash Light: Poems, the latest poetry collection by Martyn Hesford. (The collection is available through both Amazon UK and the publisher, Grey Swan Press.)
Like most if not all writers, I follow several writers who post and talk about the craft of writing. Like other writers, it’s helpful, encouraging, and instructive to see what others, Christian and non-Christian alike, are struggling with, learning, sharing, and figuring out.
I published my last book in late 2024. What followed was period of exhaustion. Writing that book had been an intense experience; the research had begun in 2016 and continued through the writing of two other novels and deepened in the final two years. The published book includes nine pages of bibliography. I’d never written historical fiction before, and it was one of the most intense writing experiences of my life. Through the process, my respect for writers of historical fiction grew exponentially.
PoetSally Nackerlives in a house in or near a woods. That means her home is surrounded by nature. To experience nature, all she has to do is open her door and inhale. It was perhaps inevitable that she would find poetic inspiration here. All she had to do was walk in her yard.
Find it she did.
My Wild Yard is a small taste of living in a natural setting. The 16 poems of this chapbook are simple and direct, inspired by the landscape around her. The poems are short; the longest is four stanzas of four lines each.
I’ve been rediscovering, or actually discovering, the short stories written by Agatha Christie. Years ago, I read only a couple of collections of her stories. I focused on her novels – Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. I’ll confess to being partial to Monsieur Poirot and his famous mustaches, but I generally liked all of her novels.
A few weeks ago, when a notice showed up (Amazon and its algorithm own me) about a short story by Christie entitled “The Map,” it contained no reference to any of her famous detectives. In fact, it made no reference to the word “detective” at all. The description did suggest that it might be something of a ghost story. As it turned out, it wasn’t only a ghost story; it was downright borderline horror.
And now I’m hooked.
Agatha Christie
The Golden Ball is a story about two people who unexpectedly become an engaged couple. A young man is lectured by his grandfather about proper attendance at work, and he finds himself outside of work on a busy London street. Driving by is a young socialite, engaged to a duke, no less, and she promptly invites him into her car, they decide they should get married, and off they go to the countryside to find an appropriate home. They do, but it is there that the surprises begin, and there are more than one. It’s rather madcap, reads like something light set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it’s great fun.
The Listerdale Mystery also concerns a house. A mother and her two adult children are formerly well-to-do gentr but brought financially low by the father’s unwise investment and borrowing decisions. They live in a cramped and rather shabby flat they can barely afford. The mother is worried that her son is becoming too interested in the nearby tobacconist’s daughter. The daughter is bewailing the interest of a well-to-do young man who wants to call upon her, but to see her living conditions would destroy any interest he might have. And then, unexpectedly, a fashionable property in Westminster in London becomes available at a ridiculously low rent, one even this down-at-heels family can afford. But gift horses are rarely what they seem.
Both stories are entertaining. They’re something of period pieces, but they show dimensions of Christie’s writing that are as entertaining as they are unexpected.
Given the number of movies, plays, poems, and novels about the man, you would think that the entire planet knows King Arthur was obviously a real person. The actual story is that proof has never been found that the man existed. St. Gildas, a monk writing about 540 A.D., mentions an earlier figure named Vortigern who won a battle against the Saxons. That account was picked up by others, including the Venerable Bede about 731 A.D. in the early 1100s, Geoffrey of Monmouth blew those accounts up, giving us Arthur, Merlin, and the start of the legend as we’ve come to know it. At History Today, Ken Dark makes the case for Arthur as a real person. (And I know for a fact that Guinivere looked exactly like Vanessa Redgrave, and the 1968 movie “Camelot” proved it.)
He may be the most successful writer you never heard of. Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo sold 55 million books in his lifetime, almost all detective stories. Then World War II started, and the Japanese government wouldn’t allow him to publish, because Western influences were considered verboten. After Japan’s defeat, Yokomizo was once again free to publish. And his books are finally being translated into English.
I don’t think I was quite ready for Morpheus Dips His Oar: Poems, the 2023 collection by Tamara Madison. The word that comes to mind is raw, something beyond candid. These are the words of understanding of what has shaped a life.
Most of that shaping is by people – parents, siblings, family friends who might be a bit too friendly. There’s the mother who is mystified by her own grandchildren and any other children not her own, but she can quickly sketch them, “stilled like insects on flypaper.” The postmaster, her mother’s friend, is a little too friendly with his hands. Her friend’s father, a professor who seems so sweet, drives his daughter to attempted suicide.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Twwwtspeak Poetry.
My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provided an outlet for sections that were cut, or exploring ideas that were good in themselves but didn’t fit the larger story. In some cases, they were small spinoffs from that larger story. A few have appeared online; most have not.
But I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the short form of writing fiction. I’ve written several for the Cultivating Project. Recently, I began participating in a short story writing project, a simple, self-reporting tally every week of stories and word count (more on that next week).
Poets, and writers in general, write from their own lives, their own experiences. How we are shaped as individuals is reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in what we write. A Godless Ascends, the 2024 collection by Trish Hopkinson, kept punching that home in my head as I read.
Shew rites about her family, her childhood, and herself. She writes about her mother and her father. She says this about her father: “Truth is, / my dad’s book closed before he learned / to read, so he bult a burning house instead / & when a thief offered him gold, he didn’t fight or turn to run / but swallowed it whole, carried it like lead in his throat.” That may at first sound cruel or uncharitable, but it is precise, a daughter weighing what she finally understands.
My parents were both profoundly affected by the Great Depression. My father, graduating from high school, saw his hopes for college and a medical career disappear. My mother, whose family had been relatively well-to-do, was a child, her family reduced to a father hunting for food, her mother scrubbing floors in movie theaters, and days when there was nothing to eat in the house. You don’t “get over” an experience like that; you can come to terms with it, deal with it, and overcome it, but it leaves a deep impression. At the Coolidge Review, Alexander Field writes that the Great Depression did have a hidden economic miracle that almost no one realized at the time.
Most of us watched or read about the testimony of Dr. Anthony Facui before a Senate committee on Wednesday. Or the non-testimony. My own Missouri senator asked if Dr. Fauci could tell them the color of his tie or of the rug in the room. Both questions were met with Fauci pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The fact is, he was caught. Even with the pardon he received from former President Joe Biden, answering any question truthfully about the COVID-19 issue would be setting off multiple grenades, including for his own reputation. The general news media, almost on cue, circled the wagons; they’re as culpable as Dr. Fauci is, and the insistence that he “did the right thing” is almost beyond belief. Reporters who dared to question the received wisdom paid the price. By the way, Racket News has unlocked all its articles on Dr. Fauci; it’s providing the coverage that our mainstream media should be.
The mayor of New York City released the names of all the properties the city was defining as “second homes” which would result in an additional annual property tax. Except the list was never quality-checked or, apparently, reality-checked. It turns out that a lot of the listings are not what the city thought they were, as a reporter for The Free Press discovered when his 81-year-old mother was socked with an additional $55,000 assessment on her house. It’s not a second home. She owns no second home. But someone in the city decided her property qualified. But never fear; there’s an appeal process – dense, opaque, and all online, almost especially designed to mystify elderly people. She navigated it, or actually, her son did it for her (article unlocked).
