Ironically Unreal Once Forever: Poetry

Local Author Rolls Out His First Poetry Collection

Back in 2019, I reached a personal creative crossroads. (In some ways I’m still not far beyond that point.) The third in the Dixiana series had been finished, edited and final-proofed; I dropped all three big novels on the world that year, a seasonal effort, one which I could regard with a certain degree of satisfaction: I’d been dreaming of writing a Great American Novel with a cast of thousands set in my fictional playpen of Edgewater County, SC. Everything I’d achieved in the writing world, a considerable amount, had been in each case only a step toward this one predominating life goal.

No exaggeration—even as a teenager forty-plus years ago, I fantasized about writing a huge novel like ones I’d devoured by Stephen King, Herman Wouk, James Michener, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and any number of other authors. Later, in the 1990s as a tie-wearing, paper shuffling office worker in a university film archive, I sat making notes on 3×5 cards about an epic small town novel featuring a darkly comic blood feud as its narrative spine. Between nurturing my long-held dream of becoming a Southern literary novelist and making Grateful Dead tape covers using the office printer, I’m not sure how much archiving got done.

Alas, it would take me until 2013 to finally write a draft of what had transformed through many attempts and a half-dozen titles into Dixiana, and as stated, another nearly seven years of effort to get its half-million words into a state of publication.

And once I was finished…?

A great burden left my shoulders.

I had climbed the mountain.

And then I was free… free enough, that is, for the poetry to begin to flow.

It would take another, much longer post to describe in detail what I go through to produce my poetry—the process is somewhat unconventional, to say the least. For now, though, let’s just celebrate the fact that as of 10/23/23, readers may get a glimpse of my writing through a vastly different lens than the old, fiction-based one. Thanks to all who have pre-ordered for continuing to support these modest artistic efforts on my part—enjoy!