This has been an exceedingly difficult year on the personal front, due to my precious mother’s decline in health and all matters pertaining to her situation. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and exhausting for all affected; I haven’t done a lot of writing, but have managed to get new work out there and a handful of publications in very special journals — which I call a win.
In January, Whale Road Review published “The Beach House Offers An Elegy,” a persona poem I worked on for years after my father died. The persona method was useful in helping me approach my subject matter, and I had worked through countless revisions to get it ready for submission, so knowing that the poem resonated with the review’s editors was enormously rewarding.
In December, I received the unexpected news that WRR had nominated “The Beach House Offers An Elegy” for a Pushcart Prize. Needless to say, I was thrilled, but coming as it did during a time of extreme difficulty with my one remaining parent, the news had an even deeper meaning to me in that it brought attention to a poem I wrote as an attempt to capture an idea that has always haunted me — that the places we go in our lifetimes and the microcosmic environments that make up those places, remember us in ways we’ll never fully understand.
I’m eternally grateful to WRR and editor Katie Manning for their support. Here’s the poem: