Backyard Ashes

While it’s a slow time in Editor-landia (at least for me), I’m enjoying digging through my old publications and posting them, and I hope you won’t mind these glimpses into younger versions of me. (This is as close to archiving my old work as I’m ever going to get.)

I’m not sure when exactly this journal came out, but my bio in it says that my third book was being published soon. That makes it pre- or early 2005. Let’s pretend it came out on May 28th, 2004, and then I can pretend it was twenty years ago today.

This poem is from my fourth book, in Cars, which I posted about last week. While I suppose there are things I’d change were I writing it now, no I wouldn’t. I trust the young writer I was then to know what she was doing. It might not be perfect, but I vividly remember writing this piece.

I used to go to a monastery in Saskatchewan to write. I did that for twenty years, until I discovered I simply didn’t need it any more. But I certainly wrote this piece there in my room in the basement of the guest wing. As I mentioned in my essay in the last post, a friend there had asked me about the hottest car I’d ever had. I went to my room and cranked this out.

This was the first poem I wrote for what would become in Cars. I knew I wanted to write about roller skating, but I didn’t know then how prominent muscle cars would be in the story. It changed when we went through editing at Turnstone Press, but not much. It was one of those rare pieces that arrives nearly fully formed on a platter as from the head of Zeus.

I was going to type it all up (the file is four laptops back), but I’m a little lazy today so I offer up snapshots of the piece as it was published.

This was a good journal. I’m not sure what happened to it, but I was delighted to be asked to submit. Thanks to editors Adrienne Gruber and Brecken Rose Hancock (and Tracy Hamon, who I think may have asked me).

in Cars sank like the Titanic, but I’m a lot more blasé about that kind of thing now that I’m older. It mattered then. It doesn’t matter now.

This is a young me, but I like her style, man.