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Part of life on a farm involves death. My cats leave mice near the back door they’ve killed for sport, as if showing off. I found Harold, my basement toad mummified in a dark corner. A bat fell down my fireplace chimney and didn’t survive the welcoming committee that is Daisy the cat.

A wren fledged from the birdhouse on my porch falling straight into my dog Juno’s mouth. The instant I realized it, I intervened. Juno held the tiny body gently, behind her teeth, as if she knew it was a pearl of great price. She gave it up without resistance, ambling off to find a new thing to capture her interest. Cupped in my hand, I sat with the bird to figure out what to do next. It lay still in my palm, regarding me with its onyx eyes, a tiny rise and fall in its chest. Doc, the older dog, settled in beside me as if to help. His attention fully trained on the bird, he looked at it pleadingly, as if he might start crying. Then the baby’s mother figured out what was going on and began chipping her warnings from a nearby tree. The moment the baby heard its mother, it tried to flap its wings but that effort proved too much. It gulped for air and then closed its eyes, before going limp on its side. Stillness. It died right there in my hand, with Doc looking on like he understood exactly what was happening, powerless, just like me.

The two of us remained that way for several minutes, he giving all his attention to the tiny body in my hand, and me, marveling at the expression on his face, as if trying to will it back to life.

Tragic and senseless. But Doc and I witnessed it, and somehow, I think that matters.

***

The book launch was a success. Thank you to all who came out to offer your support and purchase a copy. It went as well as I could have hoped. If you’d like to purchase a copy, you can click here.

Funny aside: In a past life, the coffeeshop where I held the launch was mine. It’d been a beauty salon for 30 years prior to my decision to turn it into a coffeeshop. It took fourteen months of renovations to bring the dream of Crackpots Espresso into reality but the timing wasn’t right. For lots of reasons, sustaining that business proved too much so I sold it a short time later and retreated back to the proverbial drawing board.

The following year, my teaching career launched, and it’s easy to see from here looking back that it all worked out for the best. Returning to the space to welcome my first book of poems into the world felt like a full circle moment. Much about it has changed, but there are still little details of what I created all those years ago, and that felt lovely too. The new owner has turned it into a thriving gem. Sometimes, we have the vision and someone else pulls it off.

***

For inquiring minds, my bathroom redo is official redone. Short of a full gut-job it’s exactly what I wanted it to be. A new toilet feels like a real luxury. The old one worked fine, but, well, I guess you have to install a new toilet to understand what I mean.

***

On a final note, University of Iowa Press passed on my memoir. What happens next, you ask? I don’t know, but I’ll find out. I’ve grown quite accustomed to rejection. It’s all part of the territory. Odd how I’m nearly impervious to it after all these years and hundreds of no’s. I still don’t like them, but they don’t stop me.

I greeted the rejection email with a sigh and slumped shoulders. Five minutes later, I was back to researching new opportunities. Now, I’m elbow deep into possibilities that have me charged up all over again. The work continues. It ain’t ever over until the fat lady does her thing.

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It’s almost Saturday.

I’ll be at The Beanhive on Simmons Street in Galesburg from noon to two, with copies of my books, including my newly released collection of poems, Broken Hallelujah.

How do I feel about all of this? The honest answer is I’m not entirely sure. The box of books arrived a few weeks ago and unpacking it proved quieter than I expected. Not disappointing, just ordinary in the way that things that are much anticipated often become ordinary. I held the book. Then set it down and made dinner. I wrote about it here.

Maybe Saturday will feel different. Maybe handing a copy to someone who came specifically for the book will be the moment it becomes real in a way the shipment didn’t.

Broken Hallelujah is a book about the land I live on and the creatures who share it with me and the seasons of life and grief that move through it, unbidden. Underneath all of that it’s a book that chooses to praise these realities, the kind of reverence that rises out of brokenness. When I snapped the cover photograph during one especially cold walk, back in 2017, I had no idea its destiny. I was simply fascinated by red berries in ice. Looking back at how it all arrived, from the photograph, to the poems, to the press, and now the party — I keep thinking: of course! while also asking, but how?

If you’re in or near Galesburg on Saturday, I’d love to see you. Noon to two. The Beanhive's full menu will be available, so come hungry, grab a coffee, and stay a while. I’ll have swag and both of my books available. Heck, I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me.

Come say hello and sit a spell. I’ve been waiting for you.

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A decade ago, I decided to change up my bathroom vibe. I hung cow prints on the walls, a metal windmill fan sculpture, ceramic cow-head towel pegs. Very farm-esque, a style I’ll always love. I added a burlap shower curtain with chickens on it, black, tan and white everything, bringing the barnyard inside. It looked fine for a while before I started to get tired of it. Time wore on the corners of things, paint chipped, dust collected in corners that I stopped seeing. I walked into that room every day and every day it drew more attention to itself for all the wrong reasons.

Until this summer.

The vinyl tiles I laid a decade ago had lifted ever so slightly, the adhesive letting go. On the day I’d had enough, I wedged my finger under the corner of a few squares and yanked, exposing the previous floor from even longer ago. I made things look worse. Not sure how committed I was to change, I left the exposed patch for a couple of weeks to muster the nerve to destroy it the rest of the way. On the day clarity struck, I forced my own hand and demo’d the entire floor. It was an unmercifully sweaty-hot day, but the old vinyl came up in satisfying, tacky chunks.

Then I went to the lumberyard and chose a new floor. As I stood in the middle of the mess I’d made, I realized a new floor in an old room wasn’t going to suffice. I may as well paint. Armed with a brighter color and a new vision, I got braver. Throwing out the shower curtain was easy. But wrecking the vanity, pulling the medicine cabinet out of its wall cavity and disconnecting the old light fixture took a little more chutzpah which made the top of my head tingle, a sensation I often encounter when I plunge out of my depth.

That old light was here when I moved in fifteen years ago, a builder-grade situation that provided light but very little personality. I chose its shiny bright replacement, and then I did something I’ve never done before. I went to the basement and turned off the breaker. Then I stood on a step stool with a wire stripper and a weird, uncertain calm that comes when you have no one to ask and no choice but to figure it out yourself. I’ve watched electricians, plumbers, and carpenters work my whole adult life—holding the flashlight while they stripped, connected, capped and tucked — without ever consciously thinking I was storing the information. Turns out I was.

Just as I’ve seen done over and over, I connected the wires, installed the back plate and mounted the light. Then I screwed new bulbs into the sockets and went back to the basement to flip the breaker on.

Let me tell you, walking into that room bathed in new light hit me some kind of way. “Now we’re talking!” I exclaimed, clapping my hands together.

Invigorated, I unboxed the new vanity and with it, my electrifying energy hit ground.

I bought a cabinet the exact dimensions of the old one, but I’d missed one detail. The new one accommodated plumbing coming out of the wall, but my plumbing comes up through the floor. Had I wasted my money? I secretly wished for a person to step in and solve it for me, tell me what to do next. Pangs of self-pity hit me, but you know what? That person doesn’t exist. Or if she does, she’s me. So, I stood in the bathroom staring at a cabinet that didn’t fit and began to think.

What if I cut a hole in the floor of it and then lifted the whole thing over the top of the plumbing? It made me nervous to think about taking a power tool to a brand-new piece of cabinetry, but that’s what I decided to do. I measured, marked and then drilled pilot holes before plugging in the jig saw to cut a square big enough to accommodate the drain and waterlines. My saw skills are far from perfect, but I made the cut based on those years of watching other people work.

Then I lifted the cabinet over the plumbing and lowered it to the floor.

It fit on the first try.

“Now we’re cooking with peanut oil!” I shouted.

I mean, don’t peek under the cabinet when you come to visit, but my plan worked.

That’s the thing about rough cuts. From the outside, nobody knows they’re there. The cabinet sits where it belongs. The light glows. The walls are Mamie pink — that particular mid-century shade that pairs well with black the way it did in many 1950s American bathrooms, warm and a little unexpected but exactly right once you see it.

Walking into the room now I don’t feel the nagging ick I felt pre-reno. It hits me with a mix of pride, satisfaction and achievement.

That’s the thing about rough cuts, like the memoir I keep renovating or the poetry collection I sent out 90 times before I got a yes. I like living a life that grows out of not knowing exactly what I’m doing but doing it anyway, learning on the fly.

Results may not be perfect, but neither am I.

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Of the sixteen pullets I purchased this spring, one recently began crowing. I already have two roosters, Goose and Deuce, and this new guy’s story, with his squeaky and very unintimidating cock-a-doodle-doo, whose name has gone from Penny to Jeff, is still being written.

***

In a flower bed beneath my writing window, where I hang bird feeders during winter, my bird visitors pitched sunflower seeds all over the ground that found purchase in the black dirt. Now I am enjoying an entire volunteer garden of giant flowers that are blooming with a grand flourish while attracting all kinds of pollinators. Yellow explosions everywhere and little creatures enjoying them with me. I didn’t plant them. They simply came.

***

My neighbor let me borrow his tractor to freshen my driveway that had been overrun with purslane, crabgrass, and creeping Charlie. He gave me a quick tutorial, made sure I understood the basics, and then left me to figure out the rest of it. Twenty-four hours later, I drove the tractor back to his place, my driveway smoothed and weed-free, something I’m quite proud of. I didn’t know I could do it, but I did.

***

Another neighbor harvested his wheat from the field that abuts my property. For a week, combines and trucks came and went, busy and loud, first with the wheat harvest, then the straw baling. Just as suddenly as they arrived, they left, and silence returned. Silence out here isn’t absence of sound—it’s that particular quality of stillness that follows industry — a field gone from waving gold to stubble overnight. I sit on my porch glider to let it settle over me and don’t try to name what I’m feeling. Some things arrive better that way.

***

The first copies of my new book, Broken Hallelujah, arrived in the mail.

I want to tell you it felt the way I imagined it would. I want to tell you I held the book and wept or felt a surge of something cinematic. Instead, I opened the package and held the book and felt a sensation far quieter and stranger than I expected. An anticlimax, almost. Not disappointment. More like the feeling after a drawn-out wait, when you finally arrive and the arriving is simply a fact, ordinary in the way that all arrived-at things eventually become ordinary.

I think what happened is that I spent so many years and months in anticipation of the book through the long submission and acceptance process that led eventually to the long-awaited presale, the publicity and interviews and announcements, that by the time the actual book arrived, the emotional work was done. It’d already existed so long in my imagination that the physical object was almost beside the point.

Or maybe this is just what it feels like when something you’ve made finally launches and becomes its own thing in the world. It doesn’t need feelings. It just is.

***

I’m still waiting to hear from the editor I pitched in June, the one who raised an eyebrow and said she already had ideas about how to position my next project, a memoir. I’ve been waiting long enough now that waiting is simply a condition of my days, like weather. In fact, I’ve grown to appreciate the hope of anticipation that comes with waiting. A murmuring, perpetual presence. So long as I’m not being rejected, possibility remains.

***

This year, for the first time, I entered several photographs into the Knox County Fair and among the ribbons I won, I got a Best in Show. What an odd and happy achievement.

The photograph is of a tufted titmouse perched on a weathered stump at my writing window, a peanut in its beak. It’s looking directly into the camera with the absolute confidence of a creature who knows what it came for. I didn’t set up the shot. I didn’t arrange the peanuts or position the bird or plan for the angle of the light. I put peanuts on the stump. And waited. And paid attention. At a certain moment, the titmouse arrived, and I clicked.

After I learned about the ribbon, I took my grandson to his first tractor pull, where he ate his first snow cone ever, and we applauded smoke-belching machines popping wheelies and making noises we could feel in our chest. He’s three years old and completely serious about all of it, the way three-year-olds are serious about taking in the world when it becomes unfamiliar. I watched him watch the tractors and thought about how much of life is just this — showing up for the thing in front of you and letting it be exactly what it is.

***

Birds show up a lot in Broken Hallelujah. In the title poem, there is praise for the chickadees and the finches and the spatzees who sing in the clip and thrust of new bite in the air. I wrote those lines before I understood that I was writing about attention — about what it means to notice the small persistent creatures who show up at my feeders in winter and trust that the food will be there.

I didn’t know those birds were also planting sunflowers that would become one of my favorite things about this summer.

I didn’t know another rooster arrived in the box of pullets. Now he’s crowing his delight over joining this Spitfire Hill community. I hope he finds his place among the others.

Some things you plant. Some things you plan for and prepare and rehearse until they get close to what you envision. But some things simply arrive — on their own schedule, in their own form, maybe even in a box you thought contained something completely different than what you ordered.

Ask the titmouse. He just came for a peanut.

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This past week, I taught at a writing conference, and on the first day, standing in front of a class full of students, I found myself gasping, behind on my breathing, struggling to not sound like I was panting. Distracted by my need to get my breathing under control, I drew a couple of controlled breaths and brought myself back to center. It’s been a while since I’ve felt that familiar stress response to being in front of a crowd, but it didn’t take long before I settled into myself and the teaching that I’ve grown so familiar with over the last twenty years took over.

My classroom was filled with students ranging in age from 16 to well into their 70s, a span of more than sixty years. Typical of older students, the seasoned crowd engaged first, willing to risk embarrassment, less concerned with how they’d be perceived. The younger ones held back. I didn’t take it personally. I’ve taught long enough to know that a sixteen-year-old in a room full of adults is doing an enormous amount of invisible work just deciding whether it’s safe to speak. But by the third day they were raising their hands too, weighing in, trusting the room enough to risk being heard. I count that as one of the real successes of the week, less a product of my teaching than that the subject matter of writing creative nonfiction is wide and generous enough to hold a sixty-year age gap without anyone feeling like they don’t belong in it. Pat Conroy said anyone who survives childhood has enough material to write about for the rest of their life. He was right, and it doesn’t seem to matter how recently you survived it.

What none of my students knew was that I was carrying something else through those three days that had nothing to do with them.

I had scheduled a pitch meeting with a director from a university press, also at the conference. My first pitch ever. At sixty-one years old, after two published books and twenty years of teaching other people how to find their stories, I was about to do a new and intimidating thing for the first time.

For those not familiar, think of a book pitch as compared to an audition or playing ball for a big-league scout. You have precious few moments to get the attention of the person in a position to change your life. If you hear a thanks but no thanks, nothing happens. If you succeed, who knows what possibilities and opportunities are about to open up. It can be a very big deal.

I’d scheduled my appointment weeks ahead of the conference, the moment I learned I could reserve a spot. Then I spent untold hours researching pitches, building my own, refining it, printing out notes, and rehearsing to myself over and over and over until I stopped sounding like the script I’d so carefully drafted and began sounding like a polished version of my authentic self.

By the time the actual appointment arrived, I was exhausted from the anticipation. My nervous system idled at a higher RPM, and I noticed I was holding my breath. “Stop it,” I’d whisper, slowing my inhales, forcing them deeper, breathing out for five protracted counts. I knew that I was thinking too hard about it and that my body wore the anticipation like a lead jacket. Still, I remained in that state of heightened anxiety just enough that I continued to forget to breathe, like I historically have, no matter if the stress is good or bad.

Eager to get it over with and simultaneously terrified, I arrived early to my appointment, then stood in the hallway outside the meeting room like a lost child, my body vibrating. I could hear the writer ahead of me, through the open door, enough of the conversation drifting out that I could tell that the director was sending this writer back to the drawing board. They weren’t ready, and the materials they’d brought along were insufficient. When the writer emerged, she walked past me without seeing me at all, her head down, shoulders slumped, the particular posture of someone trying to take up less space than she’s already filling. I don’t know her story. I don’t know if she was simply earlier in her process than I am, or what she’d walked into the room expecting. I only know that she didn’t see me but I saw her, looking dejected and deflated.

But it was go-time, so I drew a deep, deliberate breath, all the way to the bottom, and walked through the door to introduce myself.

I immediately confessed that I’d never pitched before (then internally chastised myself for admitting it), but lack of experience is no excuse in a game where the stakes are this high, the pressure to say the right words in the correct order is the standard, and that it all must be distilled to fit inside a few vital minutes. I felt myself slide into the script I’d rehearsed ad nauseum, and in short order, instinct took over. She was genuinely listening. Then she raised an eye brow. Then she nodded and said, “Okay, you have my attention.” Her comment dumped fuel on my fire. I handed her some printed materials. She skimmed. Asked a couple of questions. And when I spoke more about the structure of my book and compared it to a recent book the same press published just last year, she said, “I’m already thinking of how we might market this.”

That line was gold, and I knew it. It wasn’t a “Yes, we’ll publish your book.” It was a, “You got your foot in the door and we’re going to take a closer look.” That’s all I wanted – the whole goal of the meeting. Those critical few minutes went as well as I could have hoped. Genuinely. When she said she was already thinking about how she’d position the book and what terms she’d use to help readers find it, I felt like I’d hit a home run. She asked for sample chapters and mentioned the name of the acquisitions editor she’s passing it on to who I can expect to hear from soon.

When I left that room, all I wanted was a gulp of air. Preparing to teach and teaching always drain me. Add to it the pitch I’d just delivered, and I felt like I was surfacing from a long stay under water, my lungs burning, craving a deep, satisfying swallow of oxygen that I couldn’t quite get enough of.

I’ve been holding my breath, in one way or another, for most of my life. Not constantly. Not dramatically. Just often enough, in certain rooms, and around enough people who’ve needed me quiet and small, that shallow breathing has become a kind of survival skill I deploy without noticing it until self-awareness resurfaces and I realize I’m starved for air.

That hallway, that pitch, that walk through the same door another woman had just walked out of unseen, didn’t cure anything. One good meeting doesn’t unwind sixty-one years of learning to take up less space than the room requires. But for a few minutes afterward, while walking to my car, I breathed like someone who doesn’t have to budget for it, deep and unbothered.

I’m still thinking about that meeting, days later. Riding high on the hope and possibility of it. In fact, I think that might be my actual work going forward, not the next pitch, or the next class, or the next page of the memoir. But remembering, on the ordinary days when nothing in particular is at stake, to breathe like I did in that parking lot. Full-bodied, satisfyingly, and as if there’s plenty of air for everyone, me included.

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I thought I was writing about my father – a man who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident three months after marrying my mom, before any of us kids were born. He came home from the hospital forever altered, or so the story went, and lived the rest of his life in the shadow of that loss.

He was a difficult man. Flawed. Incomplete in ways that had nothing to do with his missing limb and everything to do with what the missing limb had done to him. At 24, he went from a strong, athletic and physically capable man to a husband and father learning to navigate the world with only one good leg.

If you’ve spent any time with the story writer, Flannery O’Connor — and I have, considerably, having written my master’s thesis on her use of symbolism in the sky— you understand immediately why a father with a wooden leg felt like a gift. O’Connor built her fiction on exactly this kind of grotesque detail, the physical defect that externalizes an interior wound, the body made strange in order to reveal what the soul is hiding. A one-legged man for a father was not just a fact of my childhood. It was a built-in metaphor for everything complicated and incomplete about the man himself.

When I began writing my memoir, I titled it Prosthesis. It felt original. I thought I could use the word in a way it hadn’t been used before — not just as a description of Dad’s leg but as a lens for understanding everything his damage produced in me and in our family. A prosthesis replaces something that’s missing. It compensates. It allows function where function would otherwise be impossible. It is useful and necessary but it is not the real thing.

I wrote a short essay years ago by the same title. I felt certain I was onto something.

What I didn’t understand yet was who the prosthesis actually was.

***

It took a writing coach to crack it open.

We were working on my manuscript when she said something simple and devastating. Cyn, that’s what you’re writing about. You’re writing about being silenced and finding your voice.

I sat with that for a moment. And then I said — out loud, to her, to myself — of course.

Here’s what made it so obvious once she named it. For years I had talked about my short story collection, Ten Tongues, as being about characters finding their voice. That was always how I described it, fiction about silenced people discovering their own language, learning to speak the truth of their experience, inhabiting themselves fully for the first time. I said those words so many times they became rote.

It never once occurred to me that I was describing my own need.

I had spent years helping fictional characters find their voices and never connected their stories to the fact that I was still looking for mine. That I had been looking for my voice my entire life. That the reason I kept writing those particular characters into those particular situations was that I understood their situation from the inside and was working it out on the page in the only way I could which is to say obliquely, through invented people, at a safe fictional distance.

Then came the stunning realization that the memoir isn’t about my father’s prosthesis at all. It’s about mine.

Not literally. But in every way that matters for a writer trying to understand her own story.

A prosthesis is a device that compensates for something missing. And that I understood suddenly, with the particular clarity that only arrives when someone else names the thing you’ve been circling for years. From early childhood I was fitted into the role of compensating for other people’s deficits. My parents’ emotional unavailability. My mother’s need for control. My father’s rage and his grief and his diminishment. The marriages that needed me to remain small. I became what was required. I learned to function in place of things that should have been there naturally. I was useful and necessary, but I was not fully myself.

The title felt right. I just had the wrong character in the lead role.

Which meant I needed a new title.

What came next didn’t arrive through a writing session or a conversation or a moment of deliberate artistic decision-making. It came from something my mother used to say.

I can show you better than I can tell you.

She said the phrase the way she said most things — with an edge to it, a particular Midwestern passive aggression that left you understanding you’d been warned without being able to articulate exactly how. It was a statement that asserted: I’m done explaining myself to you. Watch what happens next.

I absorbed it. The way daughters become the weapons their mothers aimed at them. I used it for years in my own life with my children, with my students, with anyone who underestimated what I was capable of or doubted what I was saying. It became a declaration of resolve. A standing firm. A refusal to keep justifying myself to people who had already decided to ignore me.

If you won’t hear me, watch me.

And then I became a writing professor. I started teaching the oldest edict in the craft — show don’t tell — and something in the phrase lit up differently. I had been living that instruction my entire life, but not as a writer’s technique. As a survival strategy. As the thing a silenced woman does when language has been taken from her and all she has left is action. You show them. You show up. You write the book. You build the life. You mow the yard in June heat and talk to God and grab your keys and drive to the library. You show them what you couldn’t say.

So I changed the title of my book to I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You.

It’s my mother’s phrase. But it’s my life motto. The oldest instruction in the craft of writing. And the answer to every person who ever needed me silent.

I spent decades as a prosthesis — compensating, functioning, making myself useful in place of being real. My book is what happens when the prosthesis finally clears her throat and speaks.

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Now that the pre-sale for my first full-length collection of poems, Broken Hallelujah, has wrapped, I’m excited that soon I’ll finally be holding the book in my hands. Just a few more details to tend and it’ll go to press.

I’ve been thinking about this book, where it came from, all it’s taken to get it out into the world and odd as it seems, so much comes to depend on a rusty old plow I stumbled upon one gray winter day.

The path leading to the book was long and winding, but the one since writing it has stretched through many years too. During a recent event where I was invited to speak and share some of this journey, the very first question asked of me was “Where does the title come from?”

I tried to give the short answer which dealt with life and death and sorrow and brokenness but the long answer, takes a few more minutes.

I’d wandered off with the dog on a winter walk through the trees, drawn under the canopy growing above a steep incline, a jagged creek bed below. The kind of place where the world transforms into something ancient and rugged, never mind that civilization lies just over the hill. The dog set the pace, the direction, his nose guiding the two of us nowhere in particular.

Leaves underfoot, bare trees overhead, we walked through that particular quality of light that envelopes more than it illuminates. Burr oaks grew so old and so massive they stopped me mid-stride. These weren’t the graceful trees of postcards. These behemoths loomed heavy and tall, branches reaching out at angles that suggested they’d been negotiating with wind and ice for centuries with the shape to prove it. Standing under them I understood something about what it means to persist.

Moving in that light, through the leaf-crunch and bare-branch silence, something man-made caught my eye. A rusted edge, nearly the color of the season, almost invisible under the snow wedged against the brown and grey of everything else. I almost walked past it. Then I stopped to look more carefully, the way you sometimes have to hold very still before a thing reveals itself completely.

It was a plow.

An old one. Maybe the kind pulled by horses, used last century, built for the flat ground of working fields. And yet here it was on a steep hillside, wedged into the earth at an angle that made no agricultural sense. The longer I looked, the more of it I saw—its rusted iron materializing out of the landscape, the way the hill had slowly consumed it over decades as the seasons layered themselves on top of and around it until it had become part of the ground it once turned.

Someone must have shoved it down the hill to get it out of the way. Maybe it had broken, or worn out, or simply stopped being useful, and rather than haul it back up the hill they’d pushed it over the edge. Left it where it landed. The hillside had done what hillsides do which was quietly, without ceremony, without distinguishing between the discarded tool and the fallen leaf begin returning it to its origins. Rust by rust. Season by season.

I was writing the collection while both of my parents were dying. Not simultaneously, not in the same year, but in the overlapping way that aging parents sometimes go, one declining as the other followed, the losses arriving close enough together that grief became a continuous season rather than a discrete event.

I didn’t plan to write about them directly. What I found instead was that the land kept offering me opportunity. The dying season of the prairie with the brittle stalks, the dried eyes of susans, the bodies of clover and milkweed and thistle returning to the dirt held what I was watching happen to my parents without requiring me to explain it. Nature reclaims life with patience. It was exactly what I needed to witness.

It’s not consolation exactly. But maybe it’s better. Truth told without flinching—the kind of truth that actually helps.

I continue to think about the plow and what it means to be useful until you aren’t. About the indifference of the earth that reclaims everything with the same patience and the same thoroughness, regardless if its tool or thistle, the broken thing or the thing or even the person that simply wore out.

The collection I wrote toward all these years releases next month. I found its title standing on that hillside looking at a plow that had been pushed over the edge of someone’s field and left to become the earth again.

Broken Hallelujah.

The breaking isn’t the end of the story. It’s where the praise begins.

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Mom lost her driver’s license after the strokes started accumulating. Each one robbed her of something she couldn’t get back: peripheral vision, short-term memory, strength, confidence. Words that had been hers for seventy years evaporated, replaced by a gesture towards the thing she meant and a frustrated silence where the word used to be.

What remained until the very end was the certainty that she knew better than everyone else in the room.

For her 76^th birthday, I drove thirty miles to take her to lunch. We had soup and sandwiches at a quaint restaurant, did a little shopping, nothing strenuous, an ordinary afternoon with a mother and a daughter who’d forged a careful peace after decades of something less peaceful. On our way back to her house, I took a route she didn’t recognize.

Turn here, she said, pointing an arthritic finger in the direction she wanted me to go.

I didn’t.

You should have turned, she said, twisting in her seat, agitation in her voice, that familiar weather system gathering itself.

I’m heading this way, I said.

You should have turned back there, she repeated. From the corner of my eye, I saw her crane her neck, mourning the opportunity to turn as I kept going straight, the path she wanted, now irretrievable.

I laughed.

I couldn’t help it. Not a funny ha-ha laugh, but a chuckle of recognition. Until this moment, I’d always been the one in the passenger’s seat, subject to Mom’s decisions, forced to absorb her choices as my own, no other options. Had I been waiting my whole life to ask the next question from my spot in the driver’s seat?

What’s the matter, Mom — don’t you trust me?

She rocked against the seatbelt, the way she always did when the world wasn’t doing what she needed it to do.

NO, she yelped. I don’t trust you!

I kept my eyes on the road, still smiling, not with glee but with the stark realization that I was in control, maybe for the first time ever.

There are things your parents say to you in anger or frustration that they don’t mean. Hyperbole. Heat of the moment. Words that evaporate before they’ve finished echoing. This wasn’t one of those moments. She meant what she’d just said with her whole being. She had meant it my entire life and neither of us needed to pretend otherwise.

She didn’t believe I’d drive her into a ditch. It was that she couldn’t afford the risk of trusting me. That would have required loosening the grip she’d kept on everything and everyone in her orbit since before I was born. Surrendering control would have meant confronting what lived underneath it which was that I was separate from her, not a carbon copy, not a puppet.

I remembered that car moment recently in the context of a Lorrie Moore short story I return to regularly, “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,” from her collection Birds of America. In it a mother and daughter take a trip through Ireland together. The mother is a formidable presence, bold, opinionated, the kind of woman who lurches into roundabouts, crosses into the wrong lane and tends to proceed through everything with the absolute confidence of someone who has never once considered that she might be wrong. The daughter is anxious, newly separated from her husband, hoping that kissing the Blarney Stone might give her something she’s been missing. The gift of speech. The courage to say the things she hasn’t been saying.

At the Blarney Stone the mother’s mask slips. Despite her bravado, that fierce bonfire of a woman falls away exposing what’s underneath the façade, which is pure terror. She’s been proceeding badly through a great storm of terror in her brain her entire life. All her posturing is a ruse. It was always a ruse.

The daughter sees the flash of that slipping mask and the moment she does, something in her shifts. Not into pity exactly. More like clarity. And on the heels of that, the realization that she loves and admires the old woman.

My mother never gave me a clean Blarney Stone moment. Her mask didn’t slip so much as crack incrementally over the years, small fissures appearing and then closing again before I could peek all the way through. The strokes helped, if that’s a word I can use. Illness has a way of returning people to themselves, stripping away the performance when the body no longer has the energy to maintain it. By the end, she was more legible than she’d ever been. Smaller and more frightened and occasionally, startlingly, more honest.

NO, I don’t trust you.

She’d trusted me to wash dishes with my sister at age three while standing on a stool, barely tall enough to reach the faucet. Trusted me to walk alone for a block to the corner store through a railroad underpass before I was old enough for kindergarten. Trusted me to manage her emotional life and absorb the weather of a difficult marriage to my father, even phoning the police when he threatened her life.

But trust the essence of me? No.

Because trusting me would have meant seeing me. And seeing me would have meant acknowledging that I was a separate person with my own ideas, aspirations, opinions. A separate person with her own navigation could go a different direction entirely and what if that direction embarrassed or angered Mom, disappointed her, or even worse, exposed her?

Which is exactly what it did.

The rest of the way home, she rode in silence, her face turned away. I kept both hands on the wheel. Mom’s house appeared at the end of the route the same as it would have if I’d gone the direction she wanted. I pulled into the driveway and put the car in park. Then I got out to open her door, unbuckle her seat belt and help her gather her purse and jacket even as she moved with the deliberate care of a woman reassembling her dignity.

I thought about Abby at the Blarney Stone, watching her mother’s terror surface, feeling the shift from daughter to something more complicated, freer. I thought about what it costs a woman to hold that much fear for that long and call it authority. I thought about the little girl my mother had been, sent to haul water from a hand pump while her own mother lay pinned in her depression-bed for months, learning before she could read that the only safe place in a dangerous world was to be the one in control.

She had been terrified her whole life. She just couldn’t afford to let anyone know.

She took my elbow as I walked her to the door. We said our goodbyes and I returned to my car. Always before, she stood on her porch waving goodbye until I could no longer see her. This day, she stayed inside. I drove out of town, the way I always went, in the opposite direction, her diminishing figure absent from my rearview mirror

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I was a senior in high school when the boyfriend who would later become my husband lent me the one and only novel he owned. Jubilee by Margaret Walker had been assigned in an English class he’d taken three years prior. Its spine was still fresh. He was not a reader. This was the only book he had.

It was about a Vyry Brown, a woman who was owned, and who survived it. I read a little each night before falling asleep. One evening I opened it to find that my mother had been there. I can still picture her entering my room, scanning the way she always did, cataloging. The unfamiliar book cover catches her eye. She sits down on the edge of my mattress, opens the pages, and begins to read. Something offends her almost immediately — a word, an image, the rawness of language. She reads a little further. More offense. She closes the book, and retreats to the kitchen to rifle through the junk drawer until she finds what she’s looking for.

Then she returns to my bedroom taking up the book again. Opening it, she proceeds page by page with a black magic marker slashing through every word she finds damnable. Once her indignation is exhausted, she puts the book back on my nightstand where she knows I’ll find it. She never says a word about it. She knows I’ll understand what she’s not saying — that she disapproves which means God does too, thrusting me under a hot light of condemnation. I imagine her disappointment in me for willingly consuming harsh words and raw images depicting the worst in human nature.

Once discovered, I felt such disgust over the black redactions bleeding through the pages, I closed the book and never finished it.

Less than a year later I married the boy who owned the book. Getting out from under my mother’s authority had contributed to my determination to marry at seventeen, and among the simple pleasures I anticipated in my new freedom was the ability to read whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. During one of my first grocery trips as a married woman I spotted a paperback copy of The Thorn Birds on a wire rack and threw it in the cart. We’d enjoyed the miniseries together. I wanted the book.

Except every time I settled onto the couch and opened it, my husband appeared. Wanting something. Interrupting. Making his frustration known that I was distracted, inaccessible to him. His displeasure was consistent enough and pointed enough that I finally set the book down mid-chapter and didn’t pick up another one for fourteen years.

By 1996 I had birthed four children, one with a congenital birth defect requiring considerable medical attention. I had nursed my husband through brain cancer. I had spent sixteen years in a poverty so grinding it had hollowed me out. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I had finagled my way into a Thursday night creative writing class at the community college because I needed one thing, just one, that was only mine.

That class cracked open a door. But that’s a story for another chapter. This moment is about Oprah.

In October that year, the month I turned thirty-two, I sat on the edge of my sofa and waited for her to announce her second Book Club selection. Her first pick had sold out before I could get my hands on a copy, but I couldn’t have afforded it anyway. This time I was ready. When she said Toni Morrison, I didn’t recognize the name. When she said Song of Solomon, I thought of the Bible.

Immediately, I grabbed my keys and drove to the library.

I had no idea what I was walking into. Morrison is dense, demanding, uncompromising. Her sentences don’t open themselves up; you have to earn your way inside them. As a white woman I was reading about a world whose specific gravity I had no direct claim to, and I knew it. But Milkman Dead’s search for himself, for his name, for the story of where he came from and what it cost him stirred an ache in me that at once made me feel deprived and alive.

Oprah invited readers to write to her. The best letters would earn an invitation to lunch with her and the author. I wrote the show. I didn’t get lunch, but I did get a phone call and two tickets to the taping. I was in the studio, front row, when Toni Morrison walked onto the set. There was an air to her presence I didn’t have words for then and still struggle to name. She was regal and commanding, kind-eyed and fiercely intelligent. She wrote about people who survived the unthinkable and came out on the other side not so much diminished as clarified. She drew me in.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand what those three books had been doing all along. Jubilee, a Black woman’s story of surviving the horrors of slavery, censored page by page in my own bedroom by a mother who needed my silence more than she wanted my growth. Margaret Walker writing about what it means to be owned, and my mother taking a marker to the words she found dangerous.

The Thorn Birds, about a woman who gives everything to a love that can never fully claim her, put down mid-chapter at seventeen inside a marriage that would ask the same of me for sixteen years.

And Song of Solomon, a novel about flight, about inheritance, about a man learning to claim his full name and history. About what it costs a people, and a woman, to be property rather than person. Morrison didn’t write books that allowed me to stay small. She wrote books that demanded I expand to meet them.

I had been a girl who was forbidden to read who became a woman who stopped reading for fourteen years because a man told her to. And finally, a woman who grabbed her keys, drove to the library and sat in a room with Toni Morrison.

I didn’t choose these books so much as find my way to them the way water finds its way down a hill. Something in me knew what I needed before I had the language to ask for it.

Mom put that book back on my nightstand and never said a word. What she couldn’t have known, and what I couldn’t have known then either, was that somewhere inside those blacked out pages was a writer trying to find her way to the surface. Every year I wasn’t reading was a year I wasn’t becoming. The books I didn’t finish and the ones I never started were also the sentences I hadn’t yet learned to write, the voice I hadn’t yet learned to trust, the woman I hadn’t yet learned to be.

Years later I would sit in the front row of a television studio and watch Toni Morrison walk onto a stage.

Mom’s marker couldn’t reach that far.

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This is difficult to say, but it’s my fault. Not all of it, but enough.

For years, I helped power the very dynamics I resented. It’s easier to blame the narcissists in my life than to face the truth of my own silence. I was trained for it early, raised to accommodate, to manage, to endure and I got very good at it.

I lived inside a false choice of my own design: go along, or make things uncomfortable. Making things uncomfortable felt dangerous. So, I chose silence. I chose to absorb what was thrown at me rather than risk becoming the source of disruption. I opted to carry anger rather than foist it off on someone else.

Last Mother’s Day, I finally broke.

My morning routine, for me, is everything. Coffee. A seat in my writing window. Devotional reading. Meditation and prayer. It’s how I order myself heart, mind, body, and spirit. I’ve done it for years. It’s not a habit; it’s a way of being.

That morning, the man I was with who had seen this routine countless times wanted me outside helping with work on my property.

“Can you respect my need to take care of my quiet time first?” I asked, surprised by his demand.

“You should see my helping you out on your property as being more important,” he replied.

There it was. The tired script. What I wanted versus what someone else wanted for me.

Heat rose in my chest. He wasn’t asking. He was telling me, what matters to you matters less.

Shocked by this boldness and blatant disregard, I did what I had always done.

I went outside.

I put on work gloves and commenced beside him in silence, my mind screaming everything I wasn’t saying. I leveled argument after argument, whole speeches forming and dissolving without a word from my mouth.

“If you’re going to have an attitude, you might as well go back in the house,” he snapped.

Rich. Forced to betray myself and then reprimanded for feeling it.

“I’m working,” I said, through clenched teeth.

And I did. Hard. Hard enough to wear him down. By nightfall, he was exhausted.

I wasn’t.

I ended that day with a burden I couldn’t ignore. Not because it was new, but because it wasn’t.

I’d lived the same moment in different ways, repeated for decades. But this time, I saw it clearly. I had been disappearing in plain sight.

It took several more weeks. That’s the part no one talks about, the lag between knowing and acting. I kept hoping something external would intervene. That he would say the words. That circumstances would make the decision for me. That my unhappiness would become so undeniable I wouldn’t have to speak it.

But that’s not how it works.

I had to find the words.

“This is not what I want.”
“I’m finished.”
“It’s time to part ways.”

My voice shook. My stomach turned. Every part of me wanted to take it back, soften it, negotiate it into something more palatable.

I didn’t.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Not because it wasn’t right, but because I’d spent a lifetime avoiding that exact moment.

Years ago, a friend told me I was too accommodating. I preferred to call it peaceful. Easygoing. Mature.

I wasn’t.

I was disappearing.

I hid my light. I made myself manageable. I smoothed, softened, absorbed. I kept the peace at the cost of myself.

And when I finally refused to do that anymore, it wasn’t graceful. It was an explosion, followed by fallout.

So be it.

Yes, I was shaped by people who misused power. Yes, I learned a distorted version of love. Yes, I played small.

All of that is true.

But it’s no longer my excuse.

At some point, awareness becomes responsibility. I reached the point where staying the same grew more painful than changing.

I didn’t want to upend my life. I didn’t want the disruption, the loneliness, the work of starting over.

But the alternative no longer held.

So I stopped.

Once I did, I couldn’t unsee it, the subtle, relentless ways I had been disappearing in my own life.

Sound familiar? Maybe, like me, it’s time to do something about it.

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Despite several attempts, I can’t quite say the thing I’m trying to say. It has something to do with the difference between being needed and being wanted, but every time I reach for it, it vaporizes.

This has happened before.

When my oldest son was in Iraq, I couldn’t name the fear. Not until a friend told me that if God could give His only son, she could give hers. Her comment struck me as obscene. My son dying wasn’t going to save anyone. He wasn’t coming back in three days.

I heard myself say, “Not my son.”

And there it was. The sentence I’d been looking for. I didn’t want my son to die.

Simple. Clean. Done.

I’m looking for that kind of sentence again.

Because something ended not quite a year ago that I’m only now understanding. Not the relationship itself, that part was obvious enough, but what I was doing inside it.

I was being needed.

I’ve done that well my whole life. Two marriages, one decade-long relationship, children, a household, a life built around being necessary. More than forty years of it.

And I told myself that was love.

But being needed is not the same as being wanted.

Needed is functional. It fills a gap. It keeps things running.

Wanted is different. Wanted shines a light on you. It notices when you’re gone.

I started to see the difference in small ways. The way my body locked up when I saw a certain car coming down the road. The silences that stretched across the sofa. The effort it took to speak my mind, always falling on deaf ears.

I had been peeled off from my herd again.

And I stayed longer than I should have because I was still useful.

That was the trade.

I kept the peace. I asked for little. I made myself small and easy to have around.

Needed, but not wanted.

Eventually, that stopped being enough.

The day it ended, nothing dramatic happened. No explosion. Just a decision I could finally stand on.

Turns out, I don’t want to be needed if I’m not also wanted.

It took weeks for my body to believe I was safe again. Not because that relationship was traumatic, but because it fit so neatly into old, destructive ways of thinking.

Now I’m on the other side of it. Alone for the first time in my life.

And it feels like air.

No one to appease. No one to anticipate. No one to shrink for.

I finally refuse to be useful if I’m not also loved.

There are a lot of us. Women who have mistaken usefulness for intimacy. Who have stayed because we were needed. Who have disappeared so completely we forgot that wanting and being wanted are not the same thing.

I’m done being quiet about it, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one.

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I used to believe my mother needed me.

That’s the story I told myself.

One night I found her in the darkened living room after one of my parents’ fights, the television still murmuring from the basement den where my father had retreated.

She didn’t turn on a lamp. Instead, she sat there absorbing the fallout like so much debris and radiation.

I recognized the air in those rooms. Heavy. Metallic. Something had just detonated.

I knelt at her feet, not because she asked me to but because I felt the pull.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, worried that she was injured, broken.

“It’s your dad,” she began. “He hit me again.”

Then came the purging, the off-loading of their argument, what’d instigated it, how it’d devolved and its inevitable stalemate.

It was Dad’s fault. It was always Dad’s fault.

This night she’d confronted him about throwing my brother, Tim’s, yellow toy school bus into the trash can because Tim hadn’t put it back in his toybox. Rather than having a discussion about more constructive ways to discipline a three-year-old, Dad had barked his defense, “If he can’t do what I tell him, I’ll do it myself!”

Since neither of them ever seemed capable of seeing the other’s perspective on anything, the battle lines quickly materialized between Dad’s overreaction and Mom’s accusations of cruelty disguised as lesson.

I don’t know if my parents never learned to fight or if all they ever did was fight. What they never accomplished was resolution. Disagreement always ended in impasse, usually enforced by Dad physically silencing Mom. He might wrench her arm, shove her, lunge after her or, like this night, escalate it to the point that he’d held a knife to her throat and asked if she wanted to see her own blood before coming to his senses, throwing the knife in the sink and retreating downstairs.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why he has to be so mean. I wish he would just leave.” I fantasized about what life without him might look, how Mom and I could be best friends, how a household free of his voltage might finally feel calm and livable.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said. “I can tell you anything.”

I recognized what she was saying. That she needed me, and though the weight of her relief in me settled like an anvil in my gut, I understood what was required—to stand in this place in order to shore her up. What might happen if I refused my role? I couldn’t risk her collapse, so I shouldered into her and allowed her to lean. At 12-years old, I understood the assignment.

“You’re wise beyond your years,” she said, kissing my forehead.

I wore that last line like a badge.

I thought it meant I was special.

I didn’t understand that I was practicing.

Practicing how to absorb someone else’s fear while denying my own. Practicing how to use my voice for what she needed, not what I needed. Practicing how to steady a woman twice my size without making her feel smaller.

She didn’t ask me to do it. But when you are praised for being calm in chaos, you learn to manufacture calm whenever and wherever it’s required.

When you are thanked for being strong, you stop asking who else might help carry the weight.

I entered many more rooms over time, finding Mom silhouetted in the darkness, catatonic from trauma. In an instant, I could stop being a daughter and become a reinforcement.

And here is the part that’s harder to admit:

I liked being necessary.

There was power in being the one who held everything together.

There was identity in it.

There was even love in it, however polluted.

What I didn’t understand then was that every time I swallowed my own confusion in order to metabolize hers, I taught my body that silence was service.

And service was survival. It became necessary.

It took years to calculate the price of it.

With Mom, with Dad, in my marriages, if I spoke too loudly, too honestly, I destabilized the person who told me they couldn’t survive without me.

It took years to understand that a child cannot be someone else’s life support without eventually forgetting how to breathe.

Six decades later, I’ve finally learned how to breathe again and with that breath, tell my story.

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The local NPR affiliate wrote a feature story about my new book of poems, Broken Hallelujah and on the strange, stubborn beauty of turning prairie loss into poems.

If you’ve ever wondered what possessed me to write about wind, grief, grass, and God, this interview gives you the bones of it. It’s about land. It’s about absence. It’s about what praise sounds like when it’s cracked but still standing.

I’m grateful for the careful reporting, and for you. Truly. Books do not travel on their own. They move because readers carry them, mention them, press them into someone else’s hands.

If the work has meant something to you, thank you. If you’re new to it, welcome.

You can read the story at Tri-States Public Radio.

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A full-length book of poems emerged into the world this morning and is now accepting pre-orders. My debut collection, Broken Hallelujah, is a book that traces the fragile line between between praise and pain, devotion and doubt, inheritance and making one’s own way.

“The best writers are keen observers and in Broken Hallelujah Cyn Kitchen shows how closely she watches the world and then articulates the holiness she finds in everyday life. She witnesses the miraculous and reports to us about it in poems that make this collection feel like the prayer book–and the balm–I need right now, never sentimental but always tender, refusing to look away from the deepest despair even as it finds light in the darkness.” –Silas House, ’24-’25 Poet Laureate of Kentucky, NY Times bestselling author of Lark Ascending and more.

Pre-order now for delivery in June and to save a couple of bucks.

More details to follow, but for now just know that it’s real; it’s happening, and I’m equal parts thrilled and mildly alarmed.

Order here.

Or here.

Thank you for supporting my work!

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Once I realized I had less control over my dogs with one leash than two, I ditched the newfangled dual-leash model and went back to two leads, two hands. A steep downhill begins at the mouth of my driveway. It’s treacherously layered in ice and snow. I wear spikes to keep from getting dragged off by my meatheads who are always gung-ho at the beginning of a walk. Immediately commences a dance of leashes that keeps me switching hands, overlapping lines, and uncrossing cables while hanging on for dear life. Moments later, somebody crisses their cross again.

“What’s the statistical likelihood of walking two dogs on two leashes and the leashes remaining uncrossed?” I asked ChatGPT. Its answer? “Vanishingly small. Practically doomed.”

This didn’t make sense to me since it seems that there should at least be some probability that the leashes remain untangled, even once in a while. Turns out statistics favor tangled leashes because given the character of a dog, the tangled state is the stable state. My heart sank. Part of this dilemma owes to the wiggly path of a dog. They drift, get distracted, follow their noses, chase squirrels. What emerges is as clear a definition of entropy as I’ve ever encountered. Nature prefers knots. Order, straight lines, and square corners aren’t natural.

This got me thinking about the infinite monkey theorem that if you give a monkey a typewriter and enough time, it’ll almost surely pluck out a work of Shakespeare. But the two ideas run opposite one another. The monkey needs infinite time, but my dogs are inevitably going to tangle the second we walk out the door. What would take forever is for them to walk forward untangled. Monkeys will mathematically and eventually create order by accident, but dogs destroy it by their very nature.

This means that I need to wrap my brain around the inevitable tangle. Every few steps the dogs will undo me. Nothing is learned. Nothing improves. We continue anyway, in spite of it. Embrace the tangle, I tell myself. The dogs don’t care. Evidently, I’ll survive. This is not a metaphor for writing or life or anything lofty. It’s just what happens when forward motion meets curiosity. The rest is commentary. Probably.

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Walking my two sixty-five-pound American Bullies exhausts me. I know a trainer could help me teach them not to pull, but it’s one of those fixes I haven’t gotten around to. Inside the house, the three of us coexist peacefully. It’s the moment we step onto the road that undoes me.

Managing two leashes attached to a pair of knuckle-headed explorers who crisscross, backtrack, and stop dead to sniff, turns orchestral. The spinning, quick pivots, and constant recalculations required to keep them from knotting themselves together demand speed and concentration.

Stay with me, this will make sense in a minute. I asked a friend to give a pass at reading my recently drafted memoir, and she told me she didn’t see me enough in the narrative. I had to chew on that for a while. And I came to understand it more viscerally while death-gripping dog leashes. It means I need to stay present and hold my ground. Take charge. If I don’t, everything runs off without me.

Recently, I bought a two-dog leash. One handle, two leads, bada-bing, bada-boom. Right? Not so quick. Now, 130 pounds of meathead gets concentrated into a single hand making me feel less like a symphony conductor and more like a sled-dog musher, clinging to life while these two barrel towards deer grazing two hundred yards away.

If they’re not pulling, they’re getting themselves into pickles. Where they once tangled themselves in a complicated helix of overlaps and intersections, they now manage to hogtie each other so completely they can pin one other down. Two powerful animals rendered helpless by their own enthusiasm.

“Stop!” I bark.

They know that means to quit squirming while I unknot them.

If I ever lose my grip, they’ll abandon me, running until they’re drained of sense, until lizard brain finally flames out. Freedom, it appears, isn’t only the absence of restraint. Sometimes, it’s a line that keeps us grounded.

Holding onto that leash, I realize the same is true for my book. Pull is necessary but so is holding back. I’m not afraid of letting go, but my story won’t survive if it’s not tethered. If I don’t stay present in the moment of struggle, I vanish. A mentor once told me, “You can play in the clouds, but every once in a while, you have to touch the ground.” He meant that I need to let my body feel on the page. So I went digging in my memoir for a place to begin and this scene felt like prime real estate.

Here it is in its before:

Thus commenced the longest night of my life. Every creak, every passing car, every mouse twitch lit up nerve endings. I barely breathed my way through the dark hours, my mouth gone to paste. I could not cry. Could not pray. Could not process one logical thought. My brain slammed shut and pinned me, crushed beneath the weight of unseeable forces. I did not cry. I do not cry. Dad had quashed that impulse years ago. Besides, this horror exceeded what tears could affect.

I’m present but I’m pinned. Not reacting so much as enduring.

Here is the rewrite that makes me more present:

Thus commenced the longest night of my life. Every creak, every passing car, every mouse twitch lit up my nerve endings. I lay still, afraid that even breathing would draw attention, my mouth gone to paste.

I waited for tears and felt none. I waited for prayer and found nothing there either. I tried to line up one logical thought, but my mind couldn’t hold it. It slammed shut and pinned me, as if staying conscious were the most dangerous thing I could do.

I told myself not crying was practical. Quiet. Safer. Dad had quashed that impulse years ago, and in the dark it felt almost like a skill. Besides, this horror seemed too large for tears to reach. I lay there until morning, awake inside a body that refused to move, counting the sounds that proved the world was still there.

See the difference? Feel it? In the first version, I was accurate. In the second, I was present. I don’t introduce more emotion. I stay inside the moment long enough to show what my mind was doing to survive it.

Which brings me back to walking the dogs. I don’t win every time. Sometimes they pull, sometimes I misjudge, sometimes I end up untangling knots on the side of the road with my arm on fire. But I keep my hand on the leash. I stay. Writing, it turns out, asks the same thing of me. Not brilliance or control, but a willingness to hold on while the story strains and resists. That’s where the leash meets the fist.

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My first impulse to write came in the form of a poem. No one noticed. Not my parents. Not my teachers. It blew past them all, landing on deaf ears. In fairness, I missed it too. I didn’t yet understand that some of us arrive pre-wired for a particular way of seeing.

Years later, I wrote another poem after having my first baby. Like a pin dropped on a map, it sat alone for years, no new pins joining it.

Fourteen years after high school, I started college. By then, the urge to write had grown dense and insistent, but I gravitated toward stories in the form of narratives and fiction, as if poetry weren’t enough. I won an undergraduate prize for a poem about my divorce, then dismissed it as a fluke. None of my hard work in fiction won prizes.

When I began preparing graduate school applications, I asked a mentor for advice.

“I can’t decide whether to pursue poetry or fiction,” I told her.

“Your fiction is strong,” she said, quietly steering me away from poems.

In graduate school, I assembled my first book, a short story collection. Poetry receded completely. Outside writing programs, few people realize there’s a hierarchy among genres. Inside them, it’s unmistakable. Poets often place themselves at the top. Fiction writers hover nearby. Others fall lower. I didn’t invent this; I noticed it. My fiction cohort embraced me. Poets, not so much.

Once my book found a publisher, the impulse to write dimmed. I attempted a novel and failed badly enough to feel disgusted. What followed were wilderness years with no project, no center, only frustration. I wanted to write but couldn’t gather myself. Mostly, I complained in short essays about motherhood and marriage. Teaching helped. If I was supporting others who were finding their voices, my own silence felt less like an accusation.

In 2017, I committed to taking and posting one photograph a day on Instagram. What began as a joke became a discipline. Posting any old thing felt lazy, so each day I went looking for light, for story, for something worth framing. My eye sharpened. By the end of the year, I wanted to keep going.

Then it struck me. Could I capture a moment in language rather than image? That’s what a poem is, isn’t it?

“You’re not a poet,” I argued with myself. “You don’t even want to be one.”

I tried anyway. Much to my dismay, it worked. Those few lines didn’t soar, but they hummed, tentatively, recognizably.

The next day I tried again. Same result. Words struck a forgotten chord. The feeling was unsettling. I’m not a poet. Write the poem.

Surrender opened the floodgates. Within six months, I had hundreds of attempts, some of them good. The word poet began to fit.

I reached out to that old mentor and asked her to coffee, to talk about poems. My new confidence didn’t register. “I don’t have time,” she said.

The dismissal stayed with me. I thought back to her earlier guidance, the steady nudge away from poetry. Was my work too plain? Too unsophisticated? I didn’t know. What I did know was that the poems kept coming, urgent and insistent. Evidently, I had some catching up to do.

The idea of a book began to itch. “Too soon,” I told myself. “I’m not ready.”

Not long after, the mentor published her own book, to acclaim. From the back of the room, I watched her receive praise and attention and allowed myself, carefully, to imagine the same. When it was my turn in her book-signing line, I asked, “How many submissions did it take to get a yes?”

She looked at me, that familiar guardedness in her eyes. “Hundreds,” she said, sliding the signed copy toward me and reaching for the next book.

I doubt she meant to encourage me. But she did. If it took her hundreds of submissions, it might take me hundreds too. I had a book to sell, so I began.

Five years and ninety rejections later, my first book of poems sold on attempt ninety-one.

In those five years, I learned a few things. I am a poet. I take pride in that, and I think no less of writers who aren’t. Looking back, the signs were always there: a devotion to language, a lyric instinct, a mind tuned to image and metaphor. The materials of poetry lay scattered at my feet, waiting for time and deprivation to teach me how to gather them.

I don’t fault that mentor. I don’t resent her redirections, conscious or not. Maybe she disliked my poems. Our tastes are different. Maybe she saw something in them that made her wary. I’ll never know. What I do know is this: every time a door closed, I found another way in.

My book will be released in 2026—nine years after the most recent awakening in a decades-long cycle of impulses repeatedly ignored or misread. Like most things that matter, it found its way. If it’s meant to be, it always does.

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Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me.

Twenty years into the teaching career I never wanted—why I took it will make sense later—I’ve taught one lesson more than any other: the three-step recipe for storytelling. Theater folks claim it. Novelists claim it. Film people claim it. Doesn’t matter. It’s older than all of them.

I announce to my students that there are three steps to writing a story. “If you don’t remember anything else I tell you, hang on to this.” Then I take up the chalk in my 150-year-old classroom, and because I almost never write on the board, they perk up. I write: 1. Put a man up a tree. They laugh. Of course they do.

“What’s funny?” I ask. “What does it mean?”

They volley back the usual: “Put your character somewhere.” “Start them in a situation.” “Give them a place.”

Yes, yes, yes.

“How’d he get up there?” I press.

A ladder. He climbed. He fell out of the sky.

“Good,” I say. “From where?”
“Airplane!”
“Tornado!”
“Trebuchet!”

By now we’re all laughing, partly because the answers are absurd, mostly because they understand: how he got into the tree is part of the story. It sets the mood. It hints at conflict. It tells you who you’re dealing with. It exposes the storyteller’s hand.

Then I write 2. Throw rocks at him.

More laughter, then the real answer: give him problems. Put him in danger. Make him want out. Yes. Tension. Stakes. No one wants to read about a life without friction. Even happy endings need bruises.

Finally: 3. Get him down.

They’re off again. Chop the tree, helicopter rescue, broken branch, buckshot, or the humble option: he climbs down himself. All of them right.

This little chestnut survives because it’s honest. A story moves by pressure. A person changes by force. The climb, the impact, the descent—strip everything else away and that’s the human condition, dressed in bark and Newton’s Laws of Physics.

What I never tell them, at least not at first, is that I avoided teaching because it was all my mother ever wanted. And I wasn’t about to become her echo. I loved her, but proximity to her authority was blistering. She carried herself like the human embodiment of a rulebook, one she wrote, edited, and enforced. I saw how she taught Sunday School, how she presided over others with terse and prim authority. When she finally stepped into a third-grade classroom, she favored the prodigies and left the strugglers behind. I’d have shriveled in the climate of her teaching, but my brother didn’t have a choice. She made him call her Mrs. ____. He decided silence was his only rebellion, and honestly, I admired the hell out of that.

She taped a poster in the front of her room: It’s right to do right because it’s right. In her mind, “rightness” was self-evident. Whose right? Set by whom? Decided how? Never occurred to her someone might ask.

She kept the Ten Commandments close and her temper closer. She spelled her cuss words, as if that made them holy: S-h-i-t. Or her favorite jab at my father: “You dirty s.o.b.” And then there were the meltdowns, day-long eruptions that tore through the house like weather systems she insisted somebody else caused. No apology. No accountability. Just decimation.

Overshadowing all of it, the worst weapon: “God sees you. God tells me.” A heavenly surveillance system deputized in her favor. Whatever she didn’t know, God filled in. Then came the interrogations until I confessed to sins I never committed, just to get her off me.

So, no. I never wanted to be like her. But, annoyingly, she was once my closest friend. That’s the trap, love and fear sheltering in the same skin.

In spite of my efforts to avoid it, here I am, the teacher I swore I’d never become. Welcome to my tree.

I’ll get to how I got here. For now, just know that my mother wasn’t the only one throwing rocks. Thankfully, I’m not in the tree anymore, at least not that tree. These days I’m perched in another one entirely, of my choosing, one that cradles more than it cages.

Step one: put a person (girl, wife, mother, survivor) somewhere she never expected to find herself. Then watch what happens next.