And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
It’s amazing to me how, when we wish to make a point or reach out to people, we often raise our voices. We yell. We shout. But at least in my experience, it’s often the softest voices that come through and have the most welcome impact.
It’s no secret that I’ve been having a challenging time. Since January 17, 2024, my life and my world hasn’t just been turned upside down. It’s been shaken, thrown repeatedly against a wall, dropped to the floor, and stomped on. Every time I think I’m getting my feet back under me, something new happens, and they’re yanked out again.
Which is probably why my dog Ursula’s horrible unexpected death has me thinking in every cliché in the world. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Also known as the final straw. The final nail in the coffin. The tipping point. The point of no return. The. Last. Nerve.
All are appropriate.
One aspect of all this that isn’t well known is that I actually stopped writing for a while. This has never happened before. Through every challenge, every fall-down in my life, I have shown up, first at the page, then at the screen. Writing is more than my career. It is my identity, my strength, my absolute source of sanity.
Michael died in June of 2024. From mid-February 2025 to mid-April 2025, I stopped writing, with the exception of this blog, though even that became gruelingly hard.
I lost my voice.
In my poetry book, The Birth Of A Widow, which will be released in early 2026, there is a poem from the day I sat down to write again, and it’s on the loss of that voice. I’ll include it at the end of this blog.
But it brings me back to soft voices. I took last week off of teaching, and this week too, because I simply found myself numb and unable to hold my attention on anything. With Ursula’s death, the fifth death I’ve had to deal with in 18 months, the fourth death where I had to make the decision to let those lives end, I found myself incapable of doing a damn thing.
And then came the soft voice.
I’ve written often about my high school creative writing teacher. I met him when I was a junior, and I’m now probably about 3 times his age when he taught me then. He was a relatively new teacher. I was new to the school, in the difficult position of switching schools midway through my junior year.
As soon as I began to write in his class, he lifted me up. Not that he made it easy; he challenged me in a way no other teacher had. By that point, I’d been praised to the hilt, and I was in that adolescent state of mind where I felt the world owed me something. Instead, he taught me that my writing wasn’t about what the world could do for me. It was about what I could do for the world.
In one note on a short story I’d written, he told me I had a responsibility. Not just a gift, but I had a responsibility to use that gift. And that would mean work. Lots and lots of work. But to not do it would be shirking my responsibility.
So I’ve worked and worked. I still have that story, still have that comment.
And then came the poetry unit.
He told me that fiction was my strength. My superpower. And poetry…wasn’t.
I was mortified. So my poetry and I went underground. I continued to write it, but never ever to show it. Never to submit it. As my career grew, I was asked often if I wrote poetry, because I make a point of making my fiction lyrical. I spend many painstaking, voice-robbing hours reading all of my work out loud, listening for the rhythm, the sound…the poetry. But I never admitted to it. I said I didn’t write poetry.
I don’t remember what led me to submit my first poem, well after my short stories and even my books started being published. But I did. And it was accepted. So I went from putting my toe in the water, to sticking in my whole foot. My leg. And now, I swim.
The poetry book that was just released, Let Me Tell You, Let Me Sing!, is my fifth book of poetry. The Birth Of A Widow will be my sixth.
I am still very much in touch with my high school creative writing teacher. We reconnected when he showed up at my first book launch. He has continued to be my sounding board, and he’s the one that tells me to get back to work when I waver.
But I didn’t contact him during that 3 months of silence. I didn’t contact anyone. I simply didn’t have the energy.
I dedicated Let Me Tell You, Let Me Sing! to my teacher. I said, at the end of the dedication:
So this is dedicated to you. I love you, and I’m so grateful for you. But sometimes…you were WRONG!
Last week, I went to the post office and mailed him the book. I put a post-it note on the cover, telling him to pay special attention to the dedication.
This week, for me, a card arrived in the mail. Inside it was a note from my high school creative writing teacher:
Well, I do have to admit that you were right (about poetry) and I was wrong. I do like your “story” poems a lot; I also like your short poems – which make me think.
That’s the beauty of your writing – you make the reader think. And you always have.
Keep writing.
And there’s the soft voice. Which has spoken to me time and again. From when I was seventeen years old, to now, when I’m sixty-five.
I wavered again these last two weeks.
But I am at my desk now.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
The poem I promised, from the upcoming The Birth Of A Widow:
5/16/25
ABSENT
For eleven months, you have been gone.
For three months, I have been silent.
I spoke for eight months
and it made no difference.
But after three months of my silence
nothing has changed.
I am still alone.
I have not been silent inside.
Inside, I have been screaming
and crying
raging
and pleading.
Outside, I open my eyes in the morning
move through my day
close my eyes at night.
But I hear the chaos within.
It comes out in dreams.
Dreams of running away.
Or chasing others.
Dreams of your voice coming from
a different face.
Seeing someone else I recognize,
but still know it’s you.
Dreams that are impossible.
And when I wake,
I face that impossibility.
One morning, I open my eyes before my alarm.
When I look over at your side of the bed,
I see a hole in the wall, just beyond.
A man sits there, a bald man, heavy,
reading a newspaper.
He looks at me and smiles.
Waves.
I wave back and return to sleep.
When I wake later, the hole is gone.
But I know it held your father
who died before I met you.
I feel he was telling me you’re all right.
And he was telling me that I’m not.
That day, I decide
to stay in bed.
I get up today.
I think about these poems
and about how I’ve gone silent.
My writing voice never silent before
but beginning to move away from silence
to missing.
Disappearing.
Dying.
Like you.
And I just can’t take another loss.
So today, I sit down to write again.
My voice is slow
and pain-filled.
But I think of your father
and I smile.
