The Power of Poetry!
A Monday morning hello.
Greetings!
I’m writing this on Friday to send on Monday because on Sunday I’m going on a short vaca with my son and won’t be home until Tuesday.
Basically, I’m just trying to avoid having to work when I’m spending time with my kiddo, even though he’ll probably spend most of our time together with headphones on and a tablet in his face because that’s what 12 year olds do.
I hope you had a lovely week since I last wrote. Mine went pretty well. One of the (all too brief) highlights of the week was the stunningly beautiful response to the heartbreaking death of poet Andrea Gibson.
I didn’t know Andrea. I never met them, though I know lots of people who knew them. In fact, in our interview earlier this year, Buddy Wakefield mentioned his “dear friend” Andrea as one of his influences. But man, their work was gorgeous. They wrote the most brilliant and funny and simultaneously devastating poems on life and all its ups and downs. If you want a good cry, check out their final TV appearance, in which they read a new poem, “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” to their wife.
Andrea died last week at the age of 49 after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer, and for about 24 hours after, my social media feeds were full of their words. So many remembrances, so many posts quoting their work.
For one day, the constant onslaught of social media negativity was replaced by the brilliant words of a poet, one who died way too young and too soon. If only we could inject more poetry into our daily feeds… Maybe the internet wouldn’t be such a hellscape.
Anyway, if you’re in the mood for some phenomenal writing, I highly recommend checking out Andrea’s Instagram or their Substack (which will continue, thanks to Andrea’s wife Meg) to read and hear more of their work.
Switching gears, I hope you enjoyed last week’s interview with Hannah Pittard about her wonderful and weird and wild new book, If You Love It, Let It Kill You.
We covered a lot, including the craft of writing autofiction (a genre I’d never heard of until I read her book) and what it was like to pull from some dark times to write a very funny novel.
Later this week I’ll share some outtakes from my interview with Hannah with paid subscribers, and on Friday I’ll share my chat with Eddie Yang, who has done special effects work on hundreds of films released over the past 35 years.
That’s it for now. Wishing you a wonderful, art-filled week!
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I clicked on this one befoe I even knew it was you. Like minds.