Writing Through It

PRESALE ANNOUNCEMENT! Revelation and Revolution

Urgent business right up front: I am delighted to announce that my first book, a poetry collection called “Kintsugi Skull”, is available for pre-order via Politics and Prose.

“Kintsugi” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with liquified gold; metaphorically that is. Jagged pieces are jigsaw-reassembled to their original shape, or an approximation thereof, and held together with a lacquer infused with precious metal, thus accentuating the cracks. It is a physical manifestation of brokenness and imperfection being made into something new and beautiful and different. It is also a term that seemed to keep assaulting me (gently) while I recovered from a fractured skull.

The front cover is an image I found by searching “skull” on Unsplash, a fair use image search engine. It is not a scan of my actual skull. While I do think that would have been a cool artistic statement, I spent twenty minutes trying to find my skull x-rays on the patient portal and gave up.

I added a fracture to the skull image, which was uploaded by the New York Public Library, using Canva. I then duplicated the image for the back cover, added layers to approximate the view of a skull-from-the-rear, and added golden patchwork.

The title of the book is its first poem. It is the gold adhesive. It is a story about the interdependent processes of breaking and recovering. I think it is a vital human impulse to be compelled to create, even as things crumble.

It looks as though we may not get to the first printing run before the holidays, but I hope you’ll consider placing an order as a gift and sharing either this essay or the order link. I plan to do a couple of readings/signings as soon as I have enough copies to do so!

I don’t know if there will ever be a time for the rest of forever that feels appropriate to pursue an artistic dream. Maybe that has always been the case. It feels difficult to be a human right now, and it feels somehow selfish to want more. Thank you for any time you’ve chosen to spend reading my work.

At one point in time, approximately twenty-three-or-so years in the past, in an idyllic-if-slightly-overgrown fen tucked behind an Elementary School in West Concord, Massachusetts there existed a “snail pond”. The exact details of this snail pond have surely fled my recall, but I will do my best to paint an approximated scene:

The docile buzz of an early summer dawn in suburban New England glistens within the patch of mist that dances overtop a frog; on a log; in a small serene pool of fresh water. Tufts of algae tickle the liquid sky as a laser-wing dragonfly shoops from hither to thither in search of a morning tryst.

Ornate-shelled snails like fresh new pennies glimmer out from hiding as the sunlight catches them at manic intervals. They gather in the water with their snail secrets and their snail plans. A revolution brews, you see, one that will shake the entirety of the world, which spans from this spot here, all the way to the other end of the pond over there. No snail will emerge from the storm with its shell still intact.

Concord has always played incubator to revolution, from the pretty famous one of 1775 to the quieter philosophical revolution that popularized Transcendentalism. It is also the town where I, at the tender age of four or five or maybe even six, tumbled down into the grimy icky sticky deep known as The Snail Pond at my Elementary School.

While I do not think that specific fall retains a psychological grip, it is a fun dinner party story and a nice allegorical reminder: you are made of all the places you have been. A person never stops becoming; never stops learning from their environment. If I mystified it even further I might claim that some microscopic remnants of that pond still survive in my bloodstream; that the moment I toddled too close to the edge and hit that water my own fate partway fused with the fates of every single snail in that pond, all of whom are long dead, save the memories I have just immortalized in text.

I sort piles of feelings like filthy laundry into varieties and variations of short prose and poems; I try to fashion some sort of broader revelation about what it means to live through it. “It”, in this case, being… All This. I don’t know if any such revelation is coming. I think it just seeps through in increments. I think to write is to acknowledge those trickles of revelation… to not let them die unSeen.

Writing through it, writing as a coping mechanism, writing as an addiction; however you want to brand it, if “brand it” you must… Writing through it is my default. It is one of the essential actions I take to keep my body living.

“Kintsugi Skull”, in a very large way, is the distillation of that act. As I detail in its first pages, it is comprised of work that falls into three buckets: (1) poems written in the weeks immediately preceding a near-death injury, (2) poems written while recovering in the hospital, and (3) poems written and/or revisited in the year that followed.

Now the world is in whatever shape the world is in. And I am shapeless, or many-shaped, or just continuing to explore a “shapeshifter” metaphor. And life keeps moving too… and I still can’t quite wrap my head around that fact while also keeping it intact.

I am just writing through it.