Celebrating Survival

Tonight I attended the launch party for Lydia K. Valentine’s beautiful book of poetry, Brief Black Candles. She had 113 people in attendance! One of the things she talked about was the way her father would welcome people into their family, saying, “You’re a Roberts” to non-blood relatives. I have long been a believer that family is the people we love, so this really spoke to me. And it made me reflect on the way the launch of my next book will be very different from my novels. In addition to my blood relatives, I have a wonderful family of people I’ve adopted, and people who have adopted me, and I know many of you all would be there to celebrate this next book’s launch if I asked. But it’s such a strange kind of celebration I would be asking you to attend.

Inviting people to celebrate the launch of When She Leaves Me would feel a bit like asking people to come to my own personalized version of a party to celebrate an asteroid striking the Yucatan Peninsula and wiping out the dinosaurs. Two years ago, my life exploded, but it did so in stages. First, I found out my marriage had been built on a lie. Then I foolishly fought to maintain that marriage anyway. I tried to live in the debris of the explosion for a while. Then that failed. Slowly (ever so slowly), I crawled out from the fallen trees and discovered the ashes in the sky were thinning. Slowly. So slowly. This book is not about some magical, complete recovery. I am a diminished person compared to the man I was two years ago. I’ve learned a lot about myself, but most of it is humbling and not-at-all flattering. I made a choice to include poems in the collection that revealed me to be angry, sometimes petty, often melancholy, frequently pathetic, and generally not a great guy to be around the last couple years. It’s odd to celebrate sharing that.

And yet, you are reading this because, for millions of years, small mammals like me survived. And we survived in community with one another. So, while I won’t be throwing a traditional launch party (or a non-traditional online version), I do want to thank you all for your support over the last couple of years. To paraphrase Lydia’s father, you all are family. I once heard Oregon’s poet laureate Kim Stafford talk about how poetry is about making connections in a very immediate way because it can be written so quickly. My novels take years to write. I’m sure part of the reason I turned to poetry during this time in my life was because I needed immediate communication with you, my family. Collecting that need two years later, when I’m no longer in the place I was in when this book ends, loses some of that benefit for me, explaining my reluctance to promote this book as much as I should, but I hope the work retains that benefit for you; I hope you’ll feel that reaching out in every poem and recognize it as a sign of my gratitude for you. Maybe survival is a small thing to celebrate, but I’m glad I get to survive with all of you.