EDITOR’S NOTE
By Andrew Tonkovich
Thanks for reading the final 2025 issue of the Community of Writers’ in-house, invitation-only journal, where we find our shared struggles documented and, happily, our successes celebrated. In addition to featuring new work, I’m happy to reprint a profile of one of our most esteemed alums written, naturally, by another alum. There’s autobiography, poetry, a full-length short play, and meditations on stories, storytelling, and publishing from participants and teaching staff. Finally, we get a real-time dispatch from a participant of Peter Orner’s incredible online short course on Moby Dick from the Writers Annex: Things of this World and the Next.. This is an eclectic, diverse, and active community. Please do share the OGQ toward celebrating your own membership and inviting others in!
Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, OGQ
COMMENTARY ON “DEPARTURE: (F)ACTS OF LEAVING”
By MaKshya Tolbert
I have a locomotive heart, a heart that likes to move as much as a heart that feels rooted in a place. I learned this meandering east then west then east again down Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. I walked in search of relief. I sat in search of where to go once I could get myself back up again. “Departure: (f)acts of leaving,” and Shade is a place as a whole, is part-archive and part-blueprint of that heart I had to remind myself was here, beating.
In “Departure: (f)acts of leaving,” one attempts to build a method “to grow into place / on purpose or not.” And grow into place I did while writing these poems, though I exhausted myself in the process. “Departure” pulls me back into this sense of place and self, where one is both “waiting for a method / to grow” and simultaneously walking with their “heart in a rush.” What is it to both wait for the perfect moment, and rush toward and through it, at the same time? And could movement–and gathering while walking–interrupt the sorrow of doing one, the other, or both? Perhaps what I needed from this poem was to express what it was to seek out a place and pace for moving through and alongside the tensions in my life. To go see who I was on the other side of the duress.
Around the same time I began working on Shade is a place, I taught myself to juggle bean bags. I was in the first few weeks of some much-needed mental health support, and I used the bean bags as an experiment in connecting with my own elasticity, with my own capacity for learning to stay in my body. I’ll admit it read something like, if I can juggle, I can learn to eat again. But juggling felt like a crash course in trying, in movement, in regulating these different parts of myself and my surroundings. And as the jugglers and magicians once said, hocus pocus – this is my body. Perhaps I needed a reminder that I or anyone could restore our capacity for movement, for our own appetites, even if only for a moment. Like the walks, juggling was something of a rehearsal toward a “method / to grow into place,” another form of being graced “through this year’s ambivalence / about making it back to myself.”
“Look at your cow eyes,” a loved one called my eyes in 2022. (I liked being called that at the time. I now know the phrase can have mixed use.) But then, I was moved that someone – anyone – could feel the largeness of my eyes and of my desire: for what? I was at the very beginning of working on this poem, which I wanted to grow into a project. And I wanted the project to help ‘grow me’ into a place and into a person. And I needed something to interrupt the duress, the sorrows, what scholar J.T. Roane calls the “serial losses…”
So I took these easterly excursions, and called them shade walks – in search of form, in search of a place to put my attention. My excursions, they were my openings, my method. Trees interrupted the sorrow, again and again. Shade walking, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, interrupted the duress, interrupted the places in me where it hurt most. I needed to “be the invitation,” as a friend of mine practices with all their might and for as long as I’ve known them.
If one way of living was “Walking with my heart in a rush,” could apprenticing to my own discernment open me up to another?
When to rest, and when to move? These form today’s inquiries, and yesterday’s. How to live with myself amid conditions of time and place, how to heed the imperative, “I must / practice this condition” as the ground – and I – go on changing? So I chased opportunities to practice rest, to practice movement, to practice shifting from one to the other. And living in their pore spaces.
Shade is a place is part of what came through, somewhat safely. My weather, for a while. I needed to work–and walk–my way toward looking at myself, at you, and at each other, asking,
Will you walk with me?
“Departure: (f)acts of leaving”
“i was so unprepared for the earth’s
grace as it disintegrated beneath me”
—AKILAH OLIVER
Like a leaf on a tree
I was just there
Waiting for a method
to grow into place
on purpose or not
Walking with my heart in a rush
I limb walk and hope
form grows
Tree climbing handbook says
Best to go sideways or backwards
Willow oaks grace me
through this year’s ambivalence
About making it back to myself
I do not let myself dance
but I stay in time I must
practice this condition
I know below ground
is a different story
but do not know the way
Hocus-pocus
Here is my body
Here is this tour
of my body
Will you walk with me?
THE THINGS, THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED, THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO ME.
By Elana Arnold
It’s early November, 2023.
I wake, legs under my 80-pound sheepdog, right arm curved to cradle my cat. Before opening my eyes, I remember there is something I have to do today. I fish in the murk of memory, trying to grasp it: Is it a doctor’s appointment? A meeting? No. Today is Saturday.
Has that deadline caught up with me—the essay for the anthology that I’ve been struggling to write? There is so much I want to say but, lacking the proper container in which to say it, I haven’t been able to start. No, it’s not the deadline. The essay can wait a little longer. The words will come.
At last, I remember. Brunch, with an old high school friend. Benji. In town just for a few days for a conference, he’s made time to meet up with me. I’ll pick him up at his hotel near the convention center. He will tell me about his wife, their baby. We’ll drink coffee. It’s going to be a good day.
I extract myself from beneath the sheepdog and the cat. The sheepdog groans, the cat darts off. I pick up my phone from the bedside table, check the time, see my inbox pop up with notifications. I scroll through messages until I see a subject line that reads What Girls Are Made Of. One of my novels.
I click.
Subject: What girls are made of Message Body: You are a groomer piece of shit. Go fuck yourself.
My thumb darts to send the email to the trash, to bury it. But the feeling rises first: I am bad. I am wrong. I’m in trouble. Hide, my body tells me. Get small, head down. Hide. I hate that this is my impulse. It’s something I explore in my work—my reflex toward fear, toward shame, toward silence. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I am a freezer and a fawner. No fight in me, no speed. Shame laps at me, that familiar tide rising.
#
Later, with Benji. He shows me the photos of his baby—a boy, just one year old. My kids are older than he and I were when we met, at the beginning of my senior year of high school.
Benji is kind to the server who seats us at the café, listens carefully, nods, as she tells us the daily specials.
How have I let this person go?
It rises higher, the shame wave, this time from a different direction—here’s a person, a good person, who loved me, once. And how many years has it been since we sat together, laughed?
“Tell me,” Benji asks, leans forward, earnest. “How do I make sure I’m raising a feminist son?”
It’s the sort of question I love, and I bask in the good feeling of having answers. The other feeling, the shame, pulls away like the tide of the sea.
Later, when I drive him back to the hotel, I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to let him go. I ask, “What are you doing tonight?”
“Having dinner with a friend.”
Maybe it’s his tone, maybe it’s the way he adjusts his body, turning away—just a fraction—or maybe it’s something else, some other animal sense I’m not even aware of, that makes me ask, “Which friend?”
“Danny Wheeler,” he says.
“Danny Wheeler,” I repeat. “That guy.”
I remember Danny Wheeler. He and Benji were best friends.
“Why did that guy hate me?” I ask.
Benji clears his throat. “It’s not so much that he hated you,” he says. “It’s more that you… hated him.”
“I hated him?”
Benji nods.
I reach back, try to remember. “Why?”
Benji shifts, pulls the seatbelt strap away from his chest as if it’s too tight. “Because of the thing that happened with the guys in your dorm,” he says. “And how Danny took their side. They were in the same fraternity. Remember?”
#
The thing that happened was this: about six weeks into the first quarter of my first year at college, as a freshman at UC Davis, I went into the room of two boys across the hall from me. It was late morning. The dorm was quiet. My three roommates were in class. I was bored. I was probably a little bit lonely.
There was a joint. Did I smoke it? I don’t remember now, it’s been so many years. There was music, I think; they were the kind of boys who would have music playing. Across the hall, my room was a suite, two closet-sized spaces, each with a pair of twin beds, on either side of a main room, with four desks. This room was a double. Just two beds, two desks, two boys.
I don’t remember the music, but I remember the weight of one of the boys when he lay on top of me, his body pinning me deep into the beanbag on the floor. I remember the razor blade in his hand. I remember the weight of the other boy’s gaze as he watched, his eyelids heavy, his mouth soft and passive. I remember being trapped by them, the body and the gaze. “I could rape you right now,” the boy atop me whispered, and I was afraid.
Just like the two beds, the two desks, the two boys, the language that trapped me was twinned: his lazy declaration that he “could” rape me, right now, right then, and my understanding of how language worked—often someone said one thing to me, but they didn’t mean it, they were just joking, or teasing, and if I got offended or made a big deal, that was my fault, not theirs, I should learn to take a joke, I should stop being such a nerd, such a tight-ass, such a Jew.
Language layered upon language—this boy’s words, and before that, when I was younger, all the other boys’ languages, layered and folded and layered again. It was too bad I was so flat chested, my legs would look better if I shaved them, I looked like such a retard, the way I stared off into space, what was wrong with me? My laugh was obnoxious, there was something stuck in my teeth, why was I so disgusting? Look at that ass in those shorts, pretty sexy actually, did I get off when I was riding my horse? I must, that’s why girls like to ride, after all. Those words, layered and folded over the language of other boys, of men. My journalism teacher, as he watched me eat a microwaved pastry during zero period: “I’d like to take a bite of your honey bun.” The Spanish teacher—his language, as he kneeled beside my desk, his hand on my bare knee: “I just can’t concentrate, when I’m looking into your beautiful eyes.” My eighth-grade English teacher, who I so admired, who’d told me I was smart, I was special, and who whispered, “I’ll miss you next year” after he kissed me on the mouth on the last day of class. The gymnastics coach who told me that my splits—I was the best in the whole class at doing the splits, I could do them in all three directions, left leg forward, right leg forward, and the middle splits, too—he said that my splits “would come in real handy in a couple of years,” with a leer and a grin that made me feel afraid and ashamed, even though I didn’t understand what he meant. And back, and back, and back, so far back that I can’t remember the first time the language of boys and men made me feel that way—small, afraid, ashamed.
If I screamed, if I made a fuss, if I didn’t laugh off what was happening in the dorm room, would I be making a big deal out of nothing? After all, the boy wasn’t actually raping me. His penis, erect, pressed against the curve of my vulva, but our flesh was separated by his jeans, and mine. His knee had pushed mine open, his hand held a razor blade to my wrist, but he didn’t actually cut me, he didn’t actually put his penis inside of me, so why was I making such a big deal of it, why was I such a fucking nerd all the time, about everything?
#
In my book What Girls Are Made Of, the main character’s mother tells her, “As long as there have been women, there have been ways to punish them for being women.”
In the dorm room where something happened, after the boy with the razor let me go, I ran to the shared women’s bathroom. I went to the farthest shower stall, sank to the cold tile floor, and sobbed into my sleeve, trying not to make too much noise.
And back in my room, I locked the door. It felt silly and performative. I wasn’t ever in any real danger, after all, was I? When the phone rang, I answered. It was my mother, and when she heard that I’d been crying, she demanded to know why. When I told her—reluctantly, because I shouldn’t be making such a big deal over something that didn’t actually happen, they didn’t actually rape me—she insisted that I call the police. When I refused, she called them herself, and the boys were arrested. (It was a crime, it turned out, to hold a girl down by her wrists, to hold a razor blade above her wrist and press an erection into her vulva, even on top of her clothes, to watch these proceedings with lidded eyes— “false imprisonment with the intent of malice,” that was the name of the crime. A felony, actually.)
The boys were arrested, led away from the dorms. One of the boys—the one who watched—dropped out of school and moved back to Visalia. The other boy, the one who didn’t rape me, but had wanted me to know that he could—he didn’t drop out. His father was a lawyer, and he used language, too, and he made things better for his boy. Danny Wheeler had been angry with me because of what happened to these boys. And Benji—I’m remembering, now, as I sit here, so many years later, as he unclicks the seatbelt…Danny Wheeler and I were both his friends, and Benji hadn’t wanted to “take sides.”
It wasn’t long before I left UC Davis, too. I left because of the nightmares and the looks from the other boys and the anger from people like Danny Wheeler— “You’re really going to ruin both their lives over some stupid mistake?” Nothing really happened, after all. There was no reason to ruin their lives. There was no reason to make such a big deal out of nothing, or something that had only “happened” to me.
Benji and I faded from each other’s lives. I hadn’t wanted to make to a big deal over something that had happened in a dorm room, or over how Danny reacted to it, or over Benji’s silence. So, I never told Benji how terribly hurt I was by his neutrality. I stayed quiet, and simply drifted away.
#
I’m a grown woman now. I’m a writer. I make my living by using words. I get letters from readers who tell me that they see themselves in my stories. That they didn’t realize they were in an abusive relationship until they read my book. That my books put their feelings into words. And yet, still I hesitate to explain to Benji how I am feeling, what I am remembering, in this moment in the car, the power of erasure in the structure of his phrase— “Because of the thing that happened.” Even now, I don’t want to make him feel bad.
“The thing that happened with the guys in your dorm” is a phrase with no aggressor. If it’s even a crime, it’s victimless.
“I don’t want to make him feel bad” is the opposite. The aggressor is clear—if I speak, it’s me. The victim is also clear: “him.” And the crime? To make him feel bad.
I love language. I love it so much. And yet sometimes it seems that language does not love me back.
#
The thing that happened in your dorm.
You are a groomer piece of shit. Go fuck yourself.
#
The way I see it, my job is to look closely at what compels me. What scares me. What repulses, what thrills, what obsesses, what delights, what horrifies. And then to press at those places, and to transform them into story. For whatever reason, most of those places I press are inside myself. They are the meat of me, the memory.
I am alone in my car driving home, I am a freshman in college sobbing in the shower stall. It’s the strangest feeling. I’m not just remembering that girl—I am her. I feel her jittery unease, her fear, the lank and stretch of her limbs, the twist and crouch of her soul.
At home, I pace until the feeling fades, until the girl leaves and I am just middle-aged me again, such a relief to let go of that haunting, and I go to my phone and text Benji.
The conversation we started right as we said goodbye has really shaken me… I wonder if you might have time to see me again while you’re here? I’d love to talk some more if you’re up for it.
He responds almost at once:
Hey Elana, Absolutely. How about Monday night?
#
It’s not that I want to talk through my surfaced memories with Benji. I don’t want to explain the visitation from my college-aged self, resurrected by his words. I don’t look forward to laying it out: the way it’s rape culture, all of it—what the boys did to me, of course (not “what happened in the dorm room,” what they did to me); Danny Wheeler’s insistence that his friends’ lives “shouldn’t be ruined” over a joke I failed to get; Benji’s desire for neutrality; my own inability to speak up—in the room, to the authorities, to Danny Wheeler, to Benji. More, it’s that if I don’t explain to Benji how deeply he hurt me and why I pulled away, and how weird it is that I’ve reframed all of this to make myself the reason our friendship faded, if I don’t say: “This is rape culture in action. We were rape culture” … then I am perpetuating rape culture, still.
This is what I tell him Monday night. It feels so good to say these things carefully, and clearly, and out loud. And Benji hears me. He really does. He listens, and nods, and tells me he how sorry he is, that he wishes he had done better, then. We cry; we embrace. I am comforted.
But as we pay the bill, Benji confesses—a bit chagrined—that he isn’t going to bring this up with Danny Wheeler.
My friend Benji is a good man. He wants to raise a feminist son. He asked my advice. I have done my best with what I have—language—to explain things to him. We hug again as we say goodbye, but as I watch him drive away, I’m left with the feeling that I didn’t do a good enough job, that if I’d done more, done better, he would have seen how the layers, all the way back, all the way down, are fused one to the next.
#
Back home, that email is still waiting for me.
You are a groomer piece of shit. Go fuck yourself.
I could try again here. I could write a response to this email. I could explain how I became the person I am, the woman I am, the writer I am. How I managed to find a voice in my mid-thirties, at last, at last. How What Girls Are Made Of, the book this person finds so offensive, is the art I’ve made out of the things, the things that happened, the things that happened to me.
In a dorm room.
In a classroom.
In a gym.
In a bar.
I could try to help this stranger understand that my fiction, which they find so offensive, is based on what happened to me when I was a young adult, a teen, a child. I might tell them that I, too, am offended. I am offended by the stew of violations and fears that took away my voice, and all the work it took to find it, and the work it’s taking right now, here, every day, to hold onto it.
But it’s not my job to convince a stranger who hates me not to hate me, or even to explain feminism—true feminism—to my friend.
My job, same as it’s always been, is to transform pain into art.
And so, instead of composing another text to my friend or an email to the internet stranger, instead of giving away my words, I begin, at last, to write the essay for the anthology. To tell the truth, the best way I can.
Elana K. Arnold is the author of critically acclaimed and award-winning picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, and young adult novels, including The Blood Years, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Sydney Taylor Book Award, as well being named a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and California Book Award honoree; the Printz Honor winner Damsel; the National Book Award finalist What Girls Are Made Of; and Global Read Aloud selection A Boy Called Bat and its sequels. Her catalog of books for kids and teens has garnered dozens of starred reviews, state list citations, and other accolades. Her long list of titles has sold over a million copies, and she’s a fixture at conferences and schools across the country. Her work has been called both “devastatingly vital” and “comfortably familiar and quietly groundbreaking.” Born in Long Beach, California, Elana spent her childhood and teen years in many parts of southern and central California before earning her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and her master’s degree in English and Creative Writing at UC Davis. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her family and pets.
15 YEARS FROM FIRST DRAFT TO PUBLICATION, WITH A GOOD DOG BESIDE ME
by Mary Hester
My debut novel, Painting Grace, launches on February 24, 2026 (Silent Clamor Press). It’s been a long road that began with night walks with Lexi, my rescued pit bull, who always had a mind of her own.
I first saw Lexi on a street that connected two main thoroughfares on either side of my neighborhood in old, midcity Baton Rouge. Patchwork neighborhoods comprising streets like Lexi’s, lined by small houses, most sorely in need of maintenance or abandoned, and more genteel blocks of imposing large houses or tidy pastel cottages, all with manicured lawns, are common in midcity Baton Rouge.
Lexi, ribs showing through her scruffy coat, lay on hard-packed dirt in the front yard of a rundown pink shotgun house. An eight-foot, heavy metal chain was padlocked to her collar and attached to a ramshackle plywood doghouse. Her pacing had worn away the grass within the radius of her chain. At night, the house was usually dark; some nights a group of young men crowded around the open door of a car pulled into the front yard, dimly lit by the dome light. Drugs, I thought. I was wrong.
When I passed on the October days that still reached into the upper eighties, I saw no water or food bowls. I left a note in the mailbox (no one ever answered the door) explaining that I was going to bring food and water to the dog and leaving my phone number. The first day I came the hand-painted “BEWARE OF DOG” sign gave me pause until I noticed she was wagging her tail so hard her whole back end wiggled back and forth.
The landlord stopped by one day while I was there and showed me what was on the other side of a long rectangular outbuilding behind the house. Two pitbulls were chained up and so starved that not only their ribs but the veins in their necks showed through the skin. About ten dogs of different types were stuffed into wire cages barely large enough to hold them. The bait dogs.
I notified the municipal shelter about the dogs but couldn’t leave Lexi there. The padlock at her neck only fastened the chain to her collar, which I was able to unbuckle. I took her home. Her owner called, outraged, but calmed immediately when I offered to buy Lexi. I left the $100 he requested in his mailbox, along with two bags of nonperishable groceries by the door—it was evident that he had no electricity.
Having spent her life on a chain, Lexi was unsocialized to say the least. But after months of PetSmart training classes and many hours of battling wills, we were able to walk together amicably. So began the nightly neighborhood walks I would never have taken without Lexi.
Our neighborhood had many lovely old homes. One in particular drew me to it—a large two-story white wooden house with columns on the broad front porch in the classic Deep South style. It had once been lovelier, as evidenced by the peeling paint, overgrown landscaping, and broken fountain with green algae happily growing on the surface and black mold invading the plaster. The house was dark at night, but the reflections of streetlights in the tall windows on the second floor seemed to move from room to room as we passed, like glowing phantoms walking the floors.
On a morning walk, I saw a car in the driveway and piles of rolled-up clothes, a few sticks of furniture, a couple of photo albums, and bundles of paper on the ground around the large live oak in the yard. I furtively inspected the papers—they were graded student essays. On the ground beside them was a pencil drawing captioned “Professor Daigle” portraying a woman with short, straight hair, a rather stern expression, and eyes that seemed to be looking back at me. Rain the night before had dampened everything, including the clothes that should have been donated. Everything had been thrown in the yard with the unrealistic idea that a garbage truck’s crew would gather it all.
When Lexi and I passed by that night, I saw through the first floor windows a man and woman bustling around and two children running through the living room and jumping on the couch. A “For Sale” sign appeared in the yard the next day.
As I walked Lexi over the following weeks, I thought about the house and the woman who had lived there alone, her relatives swooping in only to dump the house’s contents and sell it. No evidence of any mourning.
Different scenarios ran through my mind. The illusion of lights moving through the dark rooms seemed more ghostly than ever, as if the professor still walked the halls. Originally my novel was a ghost story, but through its many iterations, the main character became a professor nearing the end of a life burdened by guilt, grief, and regret.
I thought about the story, changing and developing it, as Lexi and I walked, especially at night. After about six months, I sat down to write and typed nonstop for several sessions. After that, the story continued to unfold in the quiet of our nightly walks.
The door of my small office in our 80-year-old house didn’t close completely enough to latch. Old houses in Louisiana settle in the soft substrate. Wooden floors don’t stay level and doors don’t close smoothly. Lexi wasn’t at all deterred by the office door being closed as completely as possible. She’d butt her big bony head against it to barge in, then plop down with a sigh
on the rug next to my chair. Somehow the words flowed better when she was there. When I was stopped by a knot in the writing,
I’d bull my way through it like Lexi butting her way into my office. When I read my work out loud, she’d first appear to be listening, then she’drelax, soothed by my voice. Finally, her snoring would underlie the sentences.
She never entered my office when I wasn’t there. When I was, she always joined me. We went through many drafts and submissions together. And, yes, my novel includes a dog modeled on Lexi—deeply loyal and gently protective. Rest in peace, dear friend, and live on in those pages and in my heart.
SOMETHING COMING
by Lester Lennon
All of it, all that’s seen and unseen, all
has weight, each ash, each singed page, charred thought, has
loss, there is nothing weightless, all counts loss
always with us, accepted or not, always
demanding something closely held, demanding
our ownership of what’s no longer ours.
Whose lending library stands intact? Whose
books, soot-free, wait curbside silent as books
valiant as witnesses called to be valiant
against the ruins behind them, against
rubble haphazardly rising as rubble.
Don’t search unmasked ungloved, all is undone.
Ash-grayed trees loom above home claimed by ash
across from our spared home. We laughed across
their Christmas table longer than planned. Their
friendship too strong to leave too soon. Did friendship
sense change? Our hostess said, “Stay.” Did she sense
something hard coming, something coming, something?
Lester Lennon is the poetry editor for Rosebud magazine and an investment banker whose career in public finance exceeds 40 years. His first book of poetry, The Upward Curve of the Earth and Heavens, can be found in 70 public and university libraries including the Los Angeles Public Library, Yale, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his B.A. in English. His second book of poetry, My Father Was A Poet, was published in 2013. His third book, Lynchings: Postcards From America, was published in January, 2022.
FLY MY DARLING: A LOVE STORY
The Making of a Musical Memoir
by Lisa K. Richter
We sit thigh to thigh on her piano bench, her jeans against my skirt and bare leg. “Like this,” she says, dropping her hand in an augmented seventh. It is effortless for her. Harmonies, tonalities, rhythms. “Like this,” she says, nodding to me, and I find the shape and rest my hand over hers, my breath trembling, the heady scent of cigarillo floating in her hair.
~
“Are you pressing keys ,” she says, “or allowing the music?”
“Are you creating sounds…or hearing them?”
Lynda Roth entered my life as my jazz piano instructor. An immense musical talent with a renegade past, she was a deeply kind, ferociously intelligent, outspoken woman who enjoyed Scotch and cigarillos and once considered becoming a rabbi. I was a former software engineer, a classically-trained pianist, a beginning writer, a lapsed Catholic living in a gated community with a husband, daughter, and son.
Early in our friendship, after humorously recounting her failed male and female loves, Lynda declared, “Who needs a partner! Hell, I’ve got Zeke [her fat tabby cat]. He’s warm, agreeable, shares my bed, and shits outside. What more could a woman want?”
It turns out she could want quite a bit more. And I could, too.
Pinned to the cork wall in my office, along with wisdom from Adrienne Rich, Elie Wiesel, and Dante, is a drawing of that consequential moment when Alice studies the Wonderland potion she holds in her hand, knowing it will dramatically alter her and her life, quite possibly forever. And cork-pinned below, advice from friend and writer, Heather Donahue: “If you’re afraid to do something and it doesn’t include hospitals or prisons, you should probably do it.”
There was seemingly no stopping it, the onset of our unexpected and profoundly life-altering love. When a few years later Lynda was gone from the world, our time together began to feel like a dream. I had an urgent need to make sense of, and hold onto, those luscious, intense, tumultuous years in the middle of my life. They called out again and again, shouting, weeping, and laughing their way into poems and essays. But there was a larger story waiting. Scenes and memory fragments, some on index cards, others on scraps of paper, spread like scattered pearls throughout my office. I studied them for months, searching for the thread that might link them and make them whole.
I began rereading favorite memoirs and narratives: What was it, beyond their captivating prose, that made them work? What was their thread?
In Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, everything flows from a painting Mark Doty encounters in the opening scene of the book. “. . . I have a backache, I‘m travel weary, and it couldn’t matter less, for this whole scene—the crowd and hustle on the museum steps, which seem alive all day with commerce and hurry, with gatherings and departures—is suffused for me with warmth, because I have fallen in love with a painting. . . .” Doty moves through his life (losing a partner to AIDS, the awakening of a new relationship), past to present and back, the painting always somewhere there, sparking the memory, the reflection.
In Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, The Faraway Nearby, she returns again and again to . . . apricots. They’d been on her mother’s tree, and now she has them, a vast pile of them, spread out before her, slowly rotting. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine. [. . .]The vast pile of apricots included underripe, ripening, and rotten fruit. The range of stories I can tell about my mother include some of each. . . .”
In The Memory Room, Mary Rakow’s writing hits the page in lyrical snips and pieces. Not a memoir, though it feels like one. She once mentioned that until she came across the poem, Todesfuge, by Paul Celan, the book wasn’t finished. She interspersed fragments of Celan’s poem throughout, a thread from which all the memories and poetic reflections could attach themselves, until the entire story became a woven tapestry of recovery.
And then there’s Apeirogon, again not a memoir, though the manner in which McCann portrays the two men (one an Israeli, the other Palestinian) and the conflicts (internal, external, worldly) gives it the feel of one. An intimate story. But it is more than their story. Other pieces of knowledge and historical news are pressed into it. McCann travels freely through time revisiting events from different angles, again and again (the daughters have died, then they are alive, then the men are young, then old, then playing with the daughters ), linking the segments one to another with unique hooks, a thought or word in each showing up in the following, creating an intriguing, intellectual puzzle and grounding us in a flowing time fluster.
I, too, had assembled a collection of seemingly unconnected elements: moments of longing, desire, grief, death, birth, rebirth. Visits to hospitals, family farmhouses, local bars. Childhood reflections, philosophical insights, riffs on mathematical and musical concepts. I tried linking the memories, one to another and then another, a method which came naturally but resulted in nothing more than a complex memory map, a decidedly non-flowing time fluster.
Themes begin to emerge. Flying, certainly: the free motion and freedom of jazz. Improvisation in music and love. The sense (need) to let go, in so many ways.
I scrapped scenes, added others. Distilled thick paragraphs down to a phrase, a heartbeat. It would be important, I knew, to acknowledge the unvoiced: the emotive stillness that holds so much truth.
~
“Is there more?” My lips at her ear.
“Oh darling. There is always more.”
~
I worked out a rough chronological throughline with past events woven in—a story structure with the bones of a beginning (the searching and finding), a middle (the losing), and an end (the finding again). Segments were shuffled. And shuffled. The number of drafts grew. How would I get this right?
Don’t force it, I heard Lynda say as she had so often in the past. Listen.
I began to envision the story as a musical composition in words–poetic phrases surrounded by pulses of silence, allowing the tones, the emotions, to sing. And more: I realized the story’s beginning, middle, and end patterned themselves thematically after classical sonata form—a three-part musical structure in which each movement explores a central theme or motif. Basically, the first section introduces the main theme in a lively allegro tempo; the middle section (the development) challenges that theme, creating a counter melody, slower, pensive, often somber; the third returns to the original idea and quickened pace, somewhat altered, and occasionally in a different key.
A love story in three movements?
It felt right. Still, it was unconventional. Would anyone get it? Would it matter if they didn’t?
When I googled sonata form and uncovered this poetic description in Encyclopedia Britannica online of the form’s second movement–an astonishingly accurate telling of the story’s middle section— I knew I was on to something:
“In sonata form, the point at which [the second of three parts] passes into [the third and final part] is one of the most important psychological moments in the entire sonata-form structure. It marks the end of the main argument and the beginning of the final synthesis for which that argument has prepared the listener’s mind. The preparation for it is usually a long passage of gathering tension. As a result of the events in the development, the listener perceives the subjects in a new relationship rather like a traveler who glimpses the parts of a valley separately as he climbs a hill and then, when he reaches the summit, sees the entire landscape for the first time as a whole.”
And so, yes, a love story in three movements.
Allegro opens with Lynda standing in the door of her cottage as I approach that first afternoon, the sky a deep blue, the air rich with beached sea kelp, salt. The upbeat theme: a sense of anticipation, promise, a knowing that something more will come. The beginning of flight.
Adagio challenges that optimism; the mood turns pensive, soulful, then somber. It’s a passage of grief then spiritual realignment after Lynda’s death, a gradual moving upward toward something, something. . . .
~
I rest my hands on the keys.
It has been a while.
~
When the sun’s fire drops into the Pacific, I uncork a bottle of wine, the aroma intense, like my grandfather’s crushed black grapes. His own wine so pungent the color was nearly blue.
The close of another day, one more.
“Keep me open to accept the way forward.”
~
In Allegro con brio, the finale, I open the door to Paul who arrives with his guitar. There’s a sense of closure and of new beginning, a return to the theme of anticipation and promise and love, Lynda still spiritually present; an upbeat tempo—flying, freedom—in a decidedly different key.
The thread I’d searched for, of course, was music. It had been there all along.
This past November SMR editor Andrew Tonkovich invited me to offer a few Welcome remarks for the Review’s semiannual Fall issue launch, at the Edye. I’d been preparing my keynote talk for an upcoming John Fante conference in Venice, Italy — you know Fante, the Saga of Arturo Bandini, etc. — so that evening, during the welcome, I spoke briefly about Fante and some of his work, then got back to getting ready for Venice.
I’ve been reading and writing about Fante for over fifty years, but in Venice I learned things about the man and his stuff that were new to me, including some new approaches to both. So now that Andrew has asked me back to follow up on those fall remarks, I’d like to focus on a few things Fante wrote, of course, but also on certain things that for a variety of reasons he didn’t write, or refrained from writing, and how the negative space around, between, and behind his words invites us to enter in and fill it.
Let’s start with Ask the Dust, Fante’s signature Künstlerroman about headstrong young writer Arturo Bandini, the beautiful Camilla Lopez, and their twisted love-hate affair. Camilla is that enigmatic, elusive figure whose presence permeates the novel, even as she keeps disappearing. What do we know about Camilla? We know she’s a server in a downtown Los Angeles bar. We know she’s seen by Arturo as Mexican though she could just as likely be of mixed Mexican-American descent, with her flat Mayan nose and “negress’s lips.” We know she sways when she walks, like a dancer. But do we know where she came from? When she came? Who her parents might be? What she was like as a little girl? In short, who is Camilla Lopez, and why does she behave the way she does?
Despite the strength of her character in battling Arturo in their bruising romantic rounds, there’s a furtive, almost feral quality about Camilla, a certain looking-over-the-shoulder anxiety about her identity that the novel never explains. She trades her worn-out Mexican huaraches for a pair of new white American pumps, true, in an effort to placate the sneering Arturo. But what about that registration card in her Ford jalopy inscribed not as Camilla Lopez but Camilla Lombard? True, this is downtown Los Angeles, and Hollywood’s just a few miles thataway. Maybe she does wish she were a famous blonde movie star like Carole Lombard. But there’s something else it seems that her increasingly desperate reaction to Arturo is masking, in the face of all his he-loves-me-he-hates-me reversals.
Could it be the larger social environment in which Camilla lives, by which, we might say, she is being held? At one point she’s described as a “trapped animal,” at another her bedroom is a “little prison.” And later, as her mental condition worsens, she is institutionalized, locked away against her will in the County Institute for the Insane. But it’s not only Arturo who is driving her mad with his manic acting-out of insecurities ethnic, sexual, and otherwise. For at the time of Ask the Dust, pinpointed in the scene of the great 1933 earthquake, the city of Los Angeles and its vast surrounding county were actively complicit in the so-called “repatriation” movement.
Ostensibly aimed at reducing welfare expenses and competition for jobs, this campaign swept up Mexicans and Mexican-American U.S. citizens alike for summary deportation, coercing as many as a million women, men, and children out of the country. Camilla, in other words, is a fugitive in her own environment. And in not spelling out that fact of her condition, Fante instills Ask the Dust with a mystery we can solve only by reading beyond the margins. Doing so, what do we find but a contemporaneous front-page report in the Los Angeles Times conveying the anguish as deportees are forcibly entrained for the southern border: “Piteous scenes were enacted at Union Station as members of the group prepared to leave. Tears flowed freely among the adults, and small boys and girls who had been born in the United States were bewildered by the sudden turn of events which uproot their lives…and transfer them to another soil.”
Was John Fante seeing into the future? Or is it simply the poetic and historic fact that past is prelude? For in the United States today identical atrocities and worse are being perpetrated by masked government thugs snatching people off the street, out of children’s daycare centers, from bedrooms and into the unknown, all in the name of Making America Great Again.
Knowing that simply her name and face make her a prime target of such barbarity, what woman alone in such a hostile metropolis wouldn’t be anxious, wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder, wouldn’t be pushed to the brink of sanity by such a constant existential threat? And who says John Fante is not political? Forget his personally standoffish ways in not joining this party or that movement during this or that American moment. For at the height of the Red Scare he was fingered as a card-carrying Communist by a serial informer for the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. That charge never stuck though it rightly suggested the pitch of Fante’s political leanings. Point being, if we read past the frame of his novel’s narrative, we find that such expository omissions can guide attentive readers both to the artfully missing facts and the underlying principle that the personal is political, and as relevant today as ever, especially in his most excellent novel.
Between 1938 and 1940, Fante published two novels and a story collection — Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ask the Dust, and Dago Red — and he was beginning to make a name for himself. By 1941 he was hard at work on the novel he believed would be his breakthrough, a big novel about migrant Filipino workers in California’s Central Valley and what he called “the most vicious system of race and class taboo that ever existed.” With The Little Brown Brothers Fante’s dream was to rival, even outdo The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s bestselling epic of a family’s migration from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California. And Fante had done his homework. He had toiled alongside Filipinos in a Terminal Island fish cannery. He had frequented the downtown dance halls where they squandered their wages romancing mercenary white women. He had toured their labor camps with the chief of California’s Division of Housing and Immigration, his best friend Carey McWilliams, whose authoritative studies of American anti-immigrant racism Fante knew only too well, not to mention his own life experience as a second-generation Italian American to whom wop and dago were fighting words.
He also had a story to tell. In fact, he had already published the moving “Helen, Thy Love Is to Me” in The Saturday Evening Post, about the love-smitten cannery worker Julio Sal and the bleach-blond taxi dancer who hustles him almost broke. That story was now chapter one of Fante’s novel, which continued with Julio boarding a bus in Los Angeles for Sacramento. His plan? To reunite with his old friend from the prune harvest of 1934, Purificación Goldberg, son of a barrio girl from the Philippines and a Russian hatmaker or, as Goldberg calls himself, “the only Filipino Jew in California.” Goldberg has done well in life, rising from the sweat and stench of field and cannery to owning the Cebú Club, a six-table pool hall in the heart of Sacramento’s Filipino Quarter. He drives a red Packard Roadster, enjoys the privileges of country-club membership, and has wed an American citizen. And not just any American but a proud descendant of the Winthrop family, whose ancestors served under no less an American hero than General George Washington — their enslaver. Yes, Hattie Goldberg is black, and Goldberg wants to matchmake Julio with Hattie’s mother, a tiny, wizened widow who is not only black but also stricken with kyphosis, or curvature of the spine — a “hunchback,” as others call her.
If you sense that Fante was daring to go where no other American writer had gone, read on. For that sense only deepens when you learn of the novel’s subplots involving Chinese gambling dens and Julio Sal’s forbidden, impossibly trans-ethnic love for Goldberg’s beautiful Japanese housekeeper. And that’s only the first ninety-three pages. But after sending those pages to his New York editor, Pascal Covici, Fante could only reel when they were rejected. He was out of his element, Covici charged, writing about characters Fante didn’t know well enough, surely not as well as he knew the Italian Americans who populated his other fiction. Why didn’t he get back with his writing where he belonged? [1]
But wait. On July 6, 1941, Fante published in the New York Herald Tribune a review of a new novel by Bay Area writer Sidney Meller titled Home Is Here. “This is a sweet, good book,” the review begins, “about fine Italian people living in beautiful San Francisco. It is one of those books about Italians which, thank God, treats the Italian immigrant not as a comic opera character with handlebar mustachios, rings in his ears, and…breath strong with wine and garlic.” Rather, Fante says, Meller’s novel is about family, and community, and the Lombardian immigrant Alano Dorelli’s becoming an American. Fante praises Meller’s “masterful” rendering of the most intimate details of the Dorellis’ lives, from childbirth and youth through marriage to death, and he ends his review emphatically: “The subject of Italo-Americans has led to the publication of a good many novels in recent years. Excepting Mr. Meller’s, all of these novels have been written by Italian-Americans. Mr. Meller, a non-Italian, has written the best of them.”
To my knowledge John Fante and Sidney Meller never met or corresponded, and Fante never wrote another book review. But when he published this one, he was announcing in effect that yes, one can write trans-ethnically. Just look at Sidney Meller, Fante was saying, the Jewish author of this brilliant Italian novel and of Roots in the Sky, a first novel from 1938 about the family of an Orthodox rabbi in Oakland, California, and the humor, heartache, strife, and affection known by families everywhere — including the family in Fante’s own first novel from 1938, Wait Until Spring, Bandini. If Sidney Meller could do it, writing as if from within the experience of Italian Americans even though he was not Italian American himself, why could not John Fante write his big Filipino book? Only, it was not to be.
Whatever inspiration he may have taken from Sidney Meller’s example, Fante was blocked from ever finishing The Little Brown Brothers — blocked by his editor, blocked by John Steinbeck, who refused Fante’s request for a Guggenheim grant recommendation, blocked even by his wife and trusted first reader, Joyce, who felt that the draft’s pervasive tone was condescending. He hadn’t finished the draft yet, much less started over to revise, as ample manuscript evidence of other works in the John Fante Papers at UCLA makes plain he was in the habit of doing. But that blockage marked a turning point for Fante, a turning back to what he considered the stoop labor of studio scriptwriting. It’s thus left to us, by which I mean scholarly researchers, perhaps poets, and why not? filmmakers, to fill in the blanks of all that went unwritten, if not by finishing the novel, or by way of some speculative film or poetic adaptation, at least by affording what Fante left unfinished the critical and/or creative respect his failed effort deserves.
Fante once said, “Failure is good. Not the kind that crushes you, but the kind that inspires you, the kind that drives you on. Failure is a challenge. It is healthy. In a field where all you need is a paper and pencil, what have you got to lose? I like to fail. I learn by failure.”
There’s a scene in Fante’s last novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill, that says as much as that — and, without saying it, says more. Arturo Bandini is now an impulsive young screenwriter, trapped as a B-movie scenarist in the studio-system assembly line of 1930s Hollywood, even as he dreams of literary greatness. In Chapter 8, Bandini’s writer pal Frank Edgington invites him out to dinner. They’re having a drink at the bar when a man escorts two women past on their way into the dining room.
“Guess who’s here,” Edgington says. “Sinclair Lewis.”
“Good God,” Bandini blurts, “the greatest writer in America!”
Leaping off the barstool, he threads his way between tables to the booth where Lewis sits, absorbed in conversation with his companions. “Sinclair Lewis,” Bandini splutters, thrusting out his hand, “you’re the greatest novelist this country ever produced. All I want is to shake your hand. My name is Arturo Bandini.”
He fixed me with a bewildered stare, his eyes blue and cold. My hand was out there across the table…He did not take it…only stared, and the women stared too. Slowly I drew my hand away.
“It’s nice to know you, Mr. Lewis. Sorry I bothered you.” I turned in horror, my guts falling out, as I hurried between the tables back into the bar….I was raging, sick, mortified, humiliated. I snatched Frank’s Scotch and gulped it down. The bartender and Frank exchanged glances.
“Give me a pencil and paper.”
The bartender put a notepad and pencil before me. Breathing hard, the pencil trembling, I wrote:
Dear Sinclair Lewis:
You were once a god, but now you are a swine. I once reverenced you, admired you, and now you are nothing. I came to shake your hand in adoration, you, Lewis, a giant among American writers, and you rejected it. I swear I shall never read another line of yours. You are an ill-mannered boor. You have betrayed me.
Vowing to tell the world how Lewis has shamed him, Bandini signs off, “P.S. I hope you choke on your steak.”
In a 1979 interview Fante claimed he wrote that scene just as he had lived it, in 1934. Four years earlier, in 1930, Sinclair Lewis had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first U.S. writer to do so, for a series of big sprawling novels sharply critical of runaway Roaring Twenties American capitalism. Then, in 1935, as Fante was well aware, Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, as prophetic a dystopian novel as Orwell’s 1984. In it, a ruthless, lying “ringmaster-revolutionist” vowing to “make America great again” gains the White House by whipping up fear, blaming immigrants and universities for all that ails the republic, and demanding a return to supposedly patriotic traditional values. Like Hitler and Mussolini, he transforms the country into a brutal fascist dictatorship with his own private paramilitary, concentration camps for his opponents, a slavish congress, and a rubber-stamp high court. Nor does the novel offer much of a happy ending, with the nation on the brink of a second civil war.
It’s horrifying, how familiar this sounds to us today. But if the scene in the restaurant takes place in 1934, Lewis’s 1935 novel must be unknown to Arturo. And so Fante leaves it out of the novel he blindly dictates, decades later, to his wife. To readers alert to the pull of the unwritten, however, the silent cue can lead to illuminating connections, from John Fante to Sinclair Lewis and the interpenetrating visions of their respective fictions, unalike as they may be; not to mention the strangeness of how imaginative writing can foretell the future by nailing the present, even in mirror-image reverse. After all, 1930s America was in the midst of both the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s social democratic New Deal, a far cry from the fascist regime — the country would one day be sliding toward — the days we are now living through. Strange, too, how literary reputations can wax and wane. Excepting perhaps It Can’t Happen Here, for its ghastly relevance to our time, the Nobel laureate Lewis is seldom read anymore, while John Fante, largely forgotten through most of his life, is revered today internationally. In short, things change.
Reputations aside, what’s worth noting here and now is the lasting power of clear-sighted fiction, and sometimes especially the blank spots, those invitations authorizing us to fill them in with our own discoveries, interpretations, and understandings. Such art threatens those who fear its power to engage us in the responsibly free play of intellect and imagination.
So, what now?
Play on.
[1] Addressing the issue of trans-ethnic writing, Venice Fante conference organizer Elisa Bordin shows how the presumption of ethnic difference can restrict or even “ghettoize” writers to certain circumscribed themes, forestalling exploration of other affiliations and connections with other groups. See her Un’etnicità complessa: Negoziazioni identitarie nelle opere di John Fante (Napoli: La scuola di Pitagora editrice, 2020).
To sit in the heart of a place such as Olympic Valley is to confront the fiction of a singular self. In the American West, society often falls into the trap of viewing the landscape as a blank slate for individual discovery, a rugged backdrop against which we perform our personal dramas. But through the lens of a land ethic, we find that geography is less of a stage and more of a collection: a dense accumulation of existence and relationships that span past, present, and future. Finding one’s voice in this landscape requires an acknowledgement of this timescale; expressing that voice requires an admission that of being merely one layer in a much deeper history.
This notion of place-as-continuity has been the foundation of my writing, particularly in the work that led to my debut novel with Heyday Books, Trail Work. When we move through the West, we are interacting with a geological and social record that is constantly speaking, provided we know how to listen. The trails we walk are not just lines on a map; they are temporal bridges. They are tethered to the stewardship of the past, the labor of those who’s relationships with land etched the first paths across mountainsides, and the ecological demands of a future that requires us to be better ancestors than we are currently trending toward.
Placemaking, then, is not about marking the land or asserting divine existence over a vista. It is about the quiet, often difficult work of recognizing where we fit within the land’s existing architecture. In the West, this architecture is defined by its scale—the sheer, vertical indifference of the Sierra Nevada and the grand wide stretches of latitude across the Great Basin. To write about such a place is to attempt to translate that scale into human terms without diminishing its power. It requires a specific kind of humility: the understanding that while the writer may be the observer, place is the primary actor.
This philosophy of interconnectedness sat at the core of my personal experience at the Community of Writers. If the valley provides the physical timescale of granite carved over millennia, the workshop provides the human one. Writing is often framed as a solitary, almost hermetic pursuit, however my time in Olympic Valley proved the opposite. To write is to be part of a lineage, a participant in a conversation that began long before we arrived and will continue long after we depart.
In those workshops, the self I was trying to express was constantly being refined by the collective. This was a process of necessary friction and erosion; the rigorous critique from mentors and peers served to strip away the ornamental, leaving behind only the essential. I am certainly indebted to the gracious mentorship of folks present, including Jason Roberts, Blaise Zerega, and Sands Hall, amongst many others who provided simultaneous criticism and hope in the gentlest of manner.
This brand of fellowship is a form of land ethic in its own right. It is the practice of tending to a shared intellectual ecosystem to ensure the work is resilient enough to outlive the writer. Just as we might look at a watershed and understand that an action upstream affects the health of the valley floor, the Community of Writers teaches that our individual stories are part of a larger literary watershed. We are responsible for the clarity of the stream.
The intensity of the Community of Writers experience accelerates this understanding. When you are surrounded by writers who have spent decades interrogating their relationship to the page and the world, you realize that the hard work and years behind your debut is simply your entry point into a long-standing tradition. You are a new layer of sediment being laid down upon a rich, complex foundation that has become as permanent as the stone in the valley that surrounds it.
As an author local to Truckee, returning to Olympic Valley each summer feels less like a visit to a geographic point, and more like a reconnection with a source of creative orientation. My debut book, Trail Work, arrives this May from Heyday, and it is in every sense a product of that environment and those people. The book explores both the physical labor of trail work and the metaphysical labor of belonging to a place through the interconnectedness found in landscape and time. It is an attempt to live up to the standard of placemaking set by those who taught me that our relationship to the land is only as profound as our commitment to one another.
The Western landscape may often be defined by its rugged individualism, but the truth of the West is found in its dependencies. No species survives the desert or the high alpine alone; similarly, no book is written in a vacuum. Trail Work is a testament to the fact that we are all, in the end, part of the same geography: past, present, and future. We are working together to ensure that what we contribute to the record is as enduring and honest as the granite that defines our home.
By the time the snow melts and the trails clear this spring, my hope is that this work serves as a nod to the collaboration and camaraderie that the Community of Writers represents. Whether we are moving stones to rebuild a switchback or moving sentences to build a narrative, we are engaged in the same fundamental task: maintaining a path so that others may find their way.
THE COURAGE TO BLOOM
by Nettie Reynolds
This essay originally appeared at the online journal The ManifestStation.
It is the day before Donald Trump is to be inaugurated, and I sit in a plastic surgery waiting room, holding my son’s hand. He is 28—a grown man, a scientist, and someone who has spent years making sure this is the right decision. He waited until after college, went through counseling, and made his choice with clarity and courage. He is about to undergo top surgery. A moment of affirmation. A moment of truth. A moment of finally becoming.
Becoming not from She to They.
But from She to He.
I whisper, “I’d like to borrow that flannel when you’re done with it.”
He rolls his eyes. “Mom.”
That morning, in the too-big hospital gown and pre-op socks, I saw not just my child, but every hand I’ve held in my work on a clinical care team as a interfaith chaplain. That was my role—to come alongside people, regardless of belief or background, in the rawest, most uncertain moments of their lives. I sat with those who identified with religion, those who didn’t, and many who simply whispered, “I don’t know what I believe.” I didn’t offer answers. I offered presence. I held hands. I listened.
In my past work as a hospital chaplain, I held the hands of people who were sure they had done everything right—and those who feared they had wasted their whole lives in hiding. I held hands that trembled with fear and hands that reached, quietly, for mercy. Some hands belonged to people who were finally ready to be who they truly were—only to realize it was too late. And in that hospital waiting room, holding my son’s hand, I knew this was one of the bravest moments I’d ever witnessed.
My son is a scientist. An entomologist. He studies insects that, like people, don’t always fit binary molds. Insects that self-replicate, insects with dual sex characteristics, insects that change form, shape, purpose.
There’s a rare phenomenon called gynandromorphism—where an organism displays both male and female characteristics. Some butterflies and stick insects emerge with one side of their body appearing male, and the other female. Nature doesn’t panic. Nature doesn’t legislate. It just lets them be.
While it’s uncommon, some insects even experience sequential hermaphroditism, developing first as female and later becoming male—or the reverse. Certain stick insects show these patterns, too, with characteristics distributed randomly or mirrored on either side. And in some Hymenopteran insects—like ants, bees, and wasps—males can be produced from unfertilized eggs through parthenogenesis. They are born without ever having been conceived the way we think of it. Just—poof—there they are.
When my son talks about these things, his voice lifts with reverence for the small, misunderstood miracles of life. “Some insects,” he once explained, “are born in a form that doesn’t match their adult purpose. They molt. They evolve.”
Just like us.
Nature doesn’t need a debate to validate existence. Despite what politicians or media figures declare—despite the fearmongering of fringe activists—nature blooms anyway. It molts, transforms, becomes. No law has ever stopped a butterfly from emerging with two wings of different genders. Nature is non-political. No campaign has ever convinced a fly to stop pollinating. While humans legislate identity, nature simply lets life do what it’s here to do: become.
And that’s what I see in my son. He tends to the tiniest creatures—pollinators that make life possible. And like them, I show up too. I’m a momma bear parent. I will be there for my children, no matter what—just as bees return to blossoms, again and again. The courage it takes to live like that, to care for fragile lives when the world insists they don’t matter—that’s the same courage I see in him. The same courage I hope to live by.
Because what is braver than blooming, anyway? Especially when the world tells you not to.
During the pandemic, I worked overtime in end-of-life care. Instead of losing five patients a month, I lost five a day. I watched as people were wheeled into hospital rooms they’d never leave. I stood six feet away from crying daughters on Zoom. I spoke behind masks and face shields. Some days I prayed. Some days I cursed the sky. Some days I just sat in silence with unmanageable grief.
At night, I couldn’t sleep. So I started planting seeds in my garden. Seeds I bought from the Dollar Store—zinnias, cucumbers, snapdragons. Seeds that would bloom a leaf, a flower, vegetables. I planted seeds so I could see how things grow when they’re rooted in love and given the right care and soil. It helped me remember that things live and grow and bloom every single day.
That COVID spring, my son would visit and walk through the garden with me. He’d crouch low to inspect a curled leaf or a curious bug and explain, so gently, “Don’t disrupt the soil all at once, Mom. There’s life underneath. Microbiomes. Root systems. Whole communities of beings down there. You have to let them settle.”
As my wildflower seeds started to bloom, I noticed more butterflies, more bees—and flies too. Did you know that flies are pollinators? Even though most people don’t find them beautiful, they help feed the earth. They’re out there, quietly saving the planet. Just because we don’t honor something doesn’t mean it isn’t doing sacred work.
I stopped using bug sprays. No poisons. No “pest control.” Instead, I planted things that worked with the land, not against it. Companion planting, my son taught me. Biological control. You plant something sacrificial to attract the pests and protect the main crop. It’s sometimes called trap cropping. You give up a little to preserve something more important.
I never expected it would be my own child who would teach me the most about courage.
And it wasn’t the surgery that made him brave. It was every moment before and after: the way he faced the world in Texas, a state that often told him he shouldn’t exist. The way he corrected people, calmly, when they misgendered him. The way he moved through the world with quiet confidence, asserting his place in it with every step: I am here. I am whole. I am exactly who I say I am.
The older I get, the less patience I have for platitudes. I do not believe in a divine plan that condemns some and saves others. I do not believe queer kids are suffering for someone else’s enlightenment. If there’s any force I still believe in, I call it the Big Ball of Benevolence—a unified love-consciousness, maybe cosmic, maybe cellular—that moves with us, expands with us, and grows when we are ready.
My son lives fully now. He is planting seeds of research, growing new truths, spreading wings of knowledge over species both fragile and fierce. He reminds me—without ever needing to say it—that courage doesn’t always look like a shout. Sometimes it’s a quiet unfolding. A molt. A bloom.
Because in the end, what matters isn’t control. It’s becoming what we already are.
While I was waiting for my son to come out of surgery, I couldn’t help but think about all the hands I held on that clinical team. People who whispered regrets they never dared speak aloud before. Some were gay. Some were trans. Some had never told a soul who they really were. I sat beside them as they faced the truth—sometimes too late.
I wonder, if that might be the best we can do in this life: tend to the earth around us, honor the small lives in our care, and hold hands—firmly, gently—when someone we love says, “This is who I am.” In a world where being yourself can mean losing your family, your job, even your health benefits—courage is not theoretical. It’s lived. It’s breath and risk and hope. And still, the most courageous thing I have ever seen is my son, simply living in this world. Choosing to bloom anyway.
Because in the end, what matters isn’t control. It’s blooming into what we already are. And what I know now, more than ever, is that no one should have to wait until the end of life to finally begin.
EXTREMES AND THE SPACE BETWEEN
by Lauren L. McCoy
Seeing the movie Jaws effectively put an end to my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist. But it wasn’t the shark that did it.
Those shots looking out into silt-swept pelagic space, deepening waters extending into a distance it was impossible to gauge—those were what scared me. But what scares us most is often what haunts us. For as long as I’ve shrunk in the face of what mysteries those waters might contain, I’ve also been unable to look away. So while my career in marine biology ended early, I’ve persisted in asking questions—asking more than answering.
My first poetry collection, Wrecks (Noemi Press, 2025), was inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction around 1844. The book was inspired, initially, by the true story of one of the last great auks, killed by a small group of sailors from the remote island of St. Kilda, Scotland. The sailors, stranded in a storm, became convinced that the auk was a witch and was causing the storm, and killed her to stop it. As I dug deeper, I learned that St. Kilda had only recently been converted to Christianity, and therefore likely still clung to some of their pre-Christian beliefs.
Ultimately, Wrecks engaged not just with the history of the great auk but with the question of why many of those who came across the bird described the auk, with slippery pronouns, as having human characteristics—“it walked like a man”; “he made no cry”—yet immediately thereafter, killed the bird. These encounters evoked Freud’s work on the uncanny and the phenomenon of the “uncanny valley”—that is, those liminal spaces in which nothing sits easily in a single category. We react to categorization ambiguity with great discomfort. We lash out.
Having grown up in rural Kentucky a non-Christian, I knew how dangerous it could be not to fit into any accepted “slot.” Many of the poems in Wrecks evoke the violence that has historically arisen—that still arises—in an attempt to put people and animals and the natural world “in their place.” This place almost always sits within a hierarchy—on a scale of better to worse, superior to inferior, worthy to unworthy.
The first poem in Wrecks, reproduced below, evokes all of these themes. But there are as many ways to tell this story as there are beings to live it. And when I began writing my first novel, Underlake—forthcoming from Doubleday on April 21—similar threads emerged. What I was interested in exploring in Underlake was not so much the space in between, but the extremes.
We all construct our own versions of the world. We build them in our heads; we construct them of brick and beams, and seal ourselves inside; we paste them all over our walls; they drip down our personalized news and social media feeds. They reflect us back to ourselves, reinforcing what we believe to be true, and when left in isolation, unchallenged, they can become wildly distinct from anyone else’s version of the world.
In Underlake, a series of underwater cottages isolated for decades each comes to occupy its own mythology. As a result, everything outside of any given cottage becomes a space of discomfort, squirming with challengers to what the occupants know to be the truth. But a single, unchallenged truth is perhaps the greatest danger. That gray area between categories, between truths, between worlds—that, I believe, is where we learn.
That is why, as a writer, I resist answers. I believe my job is to keep asking questions—even if they’re the same ones over and over, each time a word revised, each time a different context. There are as many answers as there are people to ask the question. My hope is that, in time, we are all asking more than we are answering.
from Wrecks by Erin L. McCoy
Water can disguise itself: chapped
lips, gnawed tundra, or the glass
stomach of an abyssal fish with still-
burning mammoths inside it.
In captivity one auk liked to flaunt
her swimming at the end of a rope.
With winter’s approach, white feathers
bloomed at her neck. She slipped off;
soon rumors of a body limp ashore
at Gourock; how to know except
to cut her open, plumb the gut
for hemp fiber and milk? Am I just
another thief? Have I taken her blood
for my blood instead of bleeding?
A pet is a costume for a feeling—
shifts according to need, like water.
Where anything is forgiven, there’s
no need for mercy. I can twist any
crime into a fateful error
till everything’s a child’s drawing:
house, barn, horse, cross, terror.
ON FINISHING MOBY-DICK ON THE BEACH IN SF
by Mark Gozonsky
I commemorated my most recent finishing of Moby-Dick in December of 2025 on a dune at Ocean Beach at the western edge of San Francisco, beyond the Golden Gate, next stop Pacific Ocean. That’s where it happens, the ultra-climax of this novel that never ends.
To commemorate this third or fourth Moby-Dick reading of my lifetime, I turned on the beach to the chapter titled “The Pacific,” and found Ishmael looking my way. From the other side of the ocean and 180 years ago, he remarks how the same waves he contemplates from the Bashee isles also wash “new-built California towns” and make “all coasts one bay.”
That was really transportive. I took solace in the novel’s universal embrace on this morning after two more mass shootings. Later in the day, Peter Orner, teacher of this great Community of Writers course I’ve been taking on the book, would start off our last class, “There’s a lot going on in the world and I’m glad to be here.”
I’ve been thinking about his eloquent simplicity, and it makes me want to say a little more. Moby-Dick is suited to public mourning. A paragraph before Ishmael looks out towards California, he dwells upon the dead at sea:
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter’s Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
Melville gives us so many gifts of solace in this sentence, starting with the first word, “And.” Sentences that start with And suggest radical continuity. The next word, “meet,” was already archaic in 1850, a holdover from the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible. Here, the old-fashioned way of saying “fitting and proper” connects Ishmael’s reflections to those sacred texts.
Then we get into the oceanic rhythm of the prose, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing through sounds infinitely rich. Millions of mixed. Shades and shadows. Behold this rare pearl of a word — somnambulisms. Bask in the reverie of dreaming, dreaming. All of this beautiful truth as prose cresting to the metaphor of ever-rolling waves generated by the spirits of the drowned.
Moby-Dick is made of coping with grief. Ishmael’s story is an elegy for his shipmates and the redemption of his survival. On page one, he fends off suicidal survivor’s guilt by committing to tell the tale. Off he goes to whaling towns, paying his respects at a chapel where the walls are inscribed with terse, heartbreaking memorials to sailors lost at sea. It is not just human grief Melville registers. He feels deeply for the hunted whales, their dying heads “turning sunwards.” Ahab’s head turns sunward often, too. I could tell I was under this book’s spell because of how often I thought about it when I looked at the sun.
Before the Pequod is fully under sail, Ishamael eulogizes one sailor who stands for all:
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
I took some notes on the many smart and/or arguable things people in this class I’ve been taking said. This one guy, Michael, said something to the effect of, this book teaches us how to read it. At first I thought, does
it really? Because, you really do have to will yourself through long, long chapters about ropes and whale skulls to feel what I felt reading on the beach, looking out at the ocean Melville describes as “the tide-beating heart of earth.”
It really does help a lot to read this with other people because that’s what gets you through the hard parts. Also, I have come to realize that Michael was exactly right. “Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis” is how the redemptive power of Moby-Dick works.
You read through this amazing, stultefying, amazing, stultefying book, all 820 pages. On page 819 you know everything there is to know about whaling. You have entered the mind of God on this topic. And then, on page 820, it’s gone. Not only gone, but as if it never was. Nothing ends so completely as the ending of Moby-Dick.
Until you pick the book back up, maybe right away, maybe years later, maybe both, maybe life is just what we do while we’re reading Moby-Dick. Here it is, the universe once again unfolding, different each time, but always with generations of devout readers as companions, an epic Kaddish for reading and carrying on together.
ABOUT THE OGQ
Omnium Gatherum Quarterly (OGQ) is an invitational online quarterly magazine of prose and poetry, founded in 2019 as part of the 50th Anniversary of the Community of Writers. OGQ seeks to feature works first written in, found during, or inspired by the week in the valley. Only work selected from our alums and teaching staff will appear here. Conceived and edited by Andrew Tonkovich. Submissions will not be considered.