How I Write Essays (Spring Equinox 2016)

Left Behind

A few weeks ago, someone asked me the difference between essays and stories. I replied that I see essays as true stories slightly embellished for impact, while stories are pure fiction. Of course, those lines tend to blur with stories based on real events and essays with unreliable narrators, which all writers are to some degree. So maybe it comes down to point of view and intent, the author saying this really happened versus this could have happened. Or, in the simplest terms, the difference between “there I was” and “once upon a time.”

With certain of my essays, those lines seem even less distinct for my readers. More than once, I’ve written an essay base on a personal experience in my past only to have someone wonder aloud if I’m just messing with them, just making it up to make a point. The answer is always no. When I write an essay based on a memory, I try my hardest to relate the facts as I remember them. Though, in the spirit of full disclosure, I sometimes fill in the details that I don’t remember based on impressions and consistency. So in that regard, not everything I write in an essay is completely true. But no one’s memories are.

I think part of their impression stems from the strange things that happen to me and around me. Or maybe it’s that I dwell on those strange things rather than writing them off and forgetting about them. Or it’s just I have a strange take on events.

Another part may be that I’m willing to relate certain events that most people would hide because they fear they would reveal a vulnerability that others could exploit. I experience that same fear, too. But I also feel pretty strongly that someone else might benefit from my sharing certain events and feelings, that they might feel just that much less alone. I’ve also been bullied most of my life, and feel as though I can handle those few people who feel lucky enough to try.

Red Smith is famously quoted as saying, “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.” That is the way I approach my essays. It’s like donating blood: losing that little bit won’t hurt me. For me, essays aren’t hard. I write to express myself. I write to be understood.

That’s only one component of how I approach essays. The other is relating the thought or memory to something more current. That could be the meaning of one of the Celtic holidays, say the coming end of winter at Imbolc, or the thought of rebirth at the spring equinox. Without that contemporary anchor, my thoughts are just reflections, my memories just reminiscing. I don’t feel particularly inclined toward either.

Because most of my essays are written to the schedule of Celtic holidays, I often use that as my theme. Sometimes I find a memory running through my mind before a deadline, so I run with it, then try to weave something meaningful at the end. Other times, I sketch out a number of memory-related events or life stories in advance for an entire year then pick the most appropriate for the particular holiday. A few times, I just focus on what’s going through my head or what’s going on outside my office window.

My essays tend to break into three broad categories: Memories, observations, and nature. Each has its audience.

Memories I’ve already touched on. They can be some of the toughest to write because they dredge up a number of old feelings, some I didn’t know still lingered. More than once, I’ve found myself typing with tears in my eyes. Or rage in my heart. Sometimes both (“Darkness”). I always think I’ll eventually run out of experiences people might find interesting but I haven’t yet. They tend to have the most impact on my readers.

Anymore, observation essays are mostly one-offs not written to any schedule. They tend to be about what I’m thinking or experiencing at the moment. Some start as random thoughts that flash through my mind while going through something unusual (“Digging”). Others are more of an internal rant involving current events (“Storm Watching” and “In My America”). Many apply the twisted filter I view this life through to otherwise completely normal events (“Trash Migration” and “Der Panzer Toaster”). With each, I just tried to develop the theme into something funny or poignant or thought-provoking.

The final set encompasses the nature essays. That’s a broad category that includes things I see firsthand, from birds at the feeder to spider webs in the screen. Many of the lines for these come from staring at something and trying to figure out how to describe it, like a sunset or a sky condition. Most of the daily lines I wrote for a year back in 2009-2010 ended up in these. A number of them drift into the mythological, relating natural cycles to legends or the old rituals of the Celtic holidays. Samhain is particularly rich soil to till for that. These tend to be more poetic, some might say straying into purple prose. Most are simply titled for the holiday they on which they are posted.

One of the strangest parts of being a writer is that certain ideas can be adapted equally well into essays, poems or stories. As an example, when I first wrote out the idea that became the poem The Unwanted Gift, it was as a short story for the Christmas series. I could have made the poem Laughter equally as effective as a much longer essay. Any number of essays, from “Commerce” to “Bully” to “Teamwork” could have been adapted into literary short stories. Any number more could have served as backstory or motivation for a character in something larger (quite often, other minor memories do). I just decide what I need or want at the moment.

Most essays only take a matter of hours or days to finish. Generally, I reserve out only three days before the deadline to write and edit an essay. For me, they are easier than poems or stories. They flow more effortlessly from my fingers. One sticking point I tend to run across is weaving in the theme, sometimes uncovering it if it isn’t obvious. Another is leaving enough time for Karen to take a photograph or draw an illustration.

A final one is trying the stick the landing. The opening and closing lines of an essay are the ones that leave a lasting impression. Often times, I’ll do that through a bit of literary legerdemain. Sometimes, it involves a change in thought that seems like a tangent but truly just serves as a crossing lace to tie off the bow. Other times, that’s just a matter of mirroring the closing to the opening.

Since I used the thought break once earlier, I’ll simply reflect back on the opening, the difference between a story and an essay. At the heart, there isn’t as much as fiction and nonfiction writers or readers would like to think. A good story reads like a well-told tale of something that really happened. A good essay like a compelling story where all the events and characters just happen to be true. Like the light of the spring equinox, the trick is in finding the right balance between the two. 

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

How I Write Poetry (Imbolc 2016)

Discarded Bells

Imbolc is the Celtic holiday associated with Brigit, the Irish patron goddess of poetry. When bound inside by the rigors of winter, many ancient peoples turned to poetry as a way to brighten their long, harsh nights.

A friend and I were discussing poetry a few weeks ago. She described it as the veil words between the indescribable and you. I like that. I think of poetry as a sheer curtain that gives form to the wind. How do you describe the wind to someone who can’t feel it on their face?

Marcel Proust is quoted as having said, "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." For me, that captures poetry as well as my initial process for writing.

Because I only write poetry occasionally, I don’t usually seek out inspiration. It usually finds me. Moreover, it clubs me over the head and drags me by the hair back to its cave.

When inspiration strikes, I usually find myself confronting something I’ve never seen before. By that, I mean never paid attention to before. People who know me have seen me at social gatherings, in a park or on a trip studying something seemingly ordinary, almost enraptured by it. It could be something as simple as the sound of wind sighing through pines, a lizard challenging me with its territorial push-up dance, or the rise and fall of conversation at a party.

And then sometimes it really is something I’ve never seen before. A few years ago, we were driving home on a cloudy, late afternoon and saw sunlight bouncing off the Gulf onto the underside of the clouds with a strange bronze light. Or another day after a week of fog where the clouds rose to a high, thick haze that took on a platinum color that used to be very popular as a metallic paint for cars.

What I’m thinking when I have that thousand yard stare is, how do I capture what I’m seeing and put it into words?

The key for me is to try to capture the essence of what I’m seeing right then. To somehow make the moment set in my mind. If I wait too long, I’ll lose it. That means jotting down notes. Notes of lines. Lines of description. Metaphor and simile. I don’t dwell on getting them exactly right, just capturing an impression. One impression leads to another, and another. Before I know it, I might have eight to a dozen lines in my notebook.

As soon as I get back to my computer, I type in what I have. When I first review those lines, I don’t think they are very good or that many will survive, but most do with just a little tweaking. I clean them up to deepen each impression just a bit. If Karen was with me and took pictures, I note where they were. If the lines form a narrative, I create a file with a title I put in a folder called Working Poetry. I write down everything related as notes, including where and when I wrote them. Sometimes new lines come to me then. Sometimes not. But those notes are indispensable. It could be weeks, months or even years before I get back to them.

If the lines are one-off individuals (like when we are out running errands), I stash them in a file of random lines for future use. As a college roommate of mine is fond of saying, I file it under “I” for “I might need that someday.” Right now, I have scores of them tucked away. I could probably sit down and compose several poems from just those pickup lines. I don’t always use them in poems. Sometimes they go into descriptive essays, sometimes into short stories.

If I’m particularly fond of a line, I’ll post it on social media. A risk, but it forces me to finish the line before (or soon after) I post it. It gives me a little feedback as to whether people like it, whether it resonates. It also keeps me thinking about what it represents, setting the impression and emotion further while allowing me to view it from another angle if people comment.

At that point I usually let the lines or piece settle. This is critical. My first impressions with poetry are not always right. I have to let my subconscious chew on it intuitively for a while. I see this step as a settling pond where the murky sediment drops out to leave clear water. This is a step I repeat again and again before I finish.

When I finally sit down to finish a piece, I start by rearranging the lines into an order that supports whatever secondary theme I’m going with. On the surface, Water Falls (a recently posted poem) is about the various waterfalls we saw on a trip with a secondary theme of the water’s life journey as it falls. Often when I start, I don’t know what that underlying theme might be. So I arrange lines in an order that seems to flow. With poetry specifically I can’t finish a piece if I don’t know the underlying theme, the tie-in that weaves throughout, or at least closes it.

While I wait for the secondary theme to emerge (if I don’t have one in mind), I start playing with the lines and words. For me, this is a meditative process. I get lost in it. In this step, I use two vital tools, a thesaurus and a dictionary, both of which I have as throwback standalone programs on my computer which will be impossible to replace when I upgrade to a new operating system. I like the standalones because I don’t have to wait for load times or see annoying ads on Dictionary.com (though I use it, too). The thesaurus is convenient as I can click my way through a chain of words and meanings very quickly.

The thesaurus I mostly use so I don’t repeat words too often unless that’s my intent to create an impact. I try not to use complex words for their own sake, though using unusual words is a weakness. I almost always look up the words I choose in my dictionary, mostly to ensure I have the meaning (or meanings) right. And as much to examine their etymology. Sometimes nuances in the meaning only emerge from knowing a word’s origin and history. As well, both tools often lead me on little games of hide and seek where I know there is a better word out there but it just won’t surface. Sometimes I come across a completely different word that I really want to use.

I play with words. I repurpose them. Sometimes I make them up, or transform nouns to verbs, or vice versa. I repeat this process one word at a time, turn of phrase by turn of phrase. Internal alliteration is important to me. As is the cadence.

Once I get the words into some decent shape, I starting reading stanzas or the full piece aloud. I pause anytime I feel a burr in a stanza, word or rhythm. While I never write rhyming poetry or lyrics, rhythm is very important to me. I don’t focus on anything formal like measure or meter, I just see how it flows from one word to the next, from one stanza to the next.

After I reiterate that process to get the piece into something resembling a final form, I let it settle again. That could be an hour while I take a nap, or a day, or a week. If I feel the piece is close to finished, I’ll let Karen read it then to get her impressions. Or I read it to her.

Once I feel it’s ready, I embark on the final read-alouds and edits. Again, I focus on any burrs. I also look for opportunities to simplify the language, where simpler words or phrases will do. I try cutting out adjectives and adverbs, or whole phrases if they don’t really contribute anything. I spend a ton of time changing one word, changing it back, rearranging the stanza one way then another. Moving stanzas up and down. Swapping lines between stanzas so they reinforce each other and make better sense.

In Water Falls, I kept stumbling on a particular stanza. After at least an hour of consideration, I finally figured out that the first phrase of the stanza felt like it belonged at the end but the last three phrases felt more like a beginning. Once I understood that, I found another stanza at the beginning and started swapping phrases. Once I was finished, it felt much better.

Throughout the process, I pay carefully attention if I feel any point of resistance. That resistance can crop up anywhere in the process from the initial choice of a word, to the flow of a line, all the way to the final read-aloud. How any given line feels is very important to me. I know it’s right when it gives me chills. Not all of them do. Like almost everything I write, I try to lead with an impression to set a tone and close out on a strong note. In between, I’m mostly looking to transit from point A to point B. Transitions and lead-ins from stanza to stanza create that sense of journey.

Reading this, most people might think I do this all as a deliberate, logical process. Not exactly.

As we were watching a series of lectures on Strategic Thinking last month, the instructor described how true strategic thinkers think. As a rule, they don’t identify the problem, then come up with options for the solution and evaluate them one by one. True strategic thinkers see the problem and the solution all at once. I looked at Karen and said, that’s the way I think, whether when I’m designing software, war-gaming or writing. It’s a weird feeling that is really hard to describe.

I’m pretty drifty in the initial phases of the process. There are a lot of conditions I feel I need met to work on poetry, which is probably why I don’t do it as much. I need a lot of space and time where I won’t be interrupted. At times, writing poetry is an oddly non-verbal process with me. If I get interrupted while trying to sort feelings and impressions into words, everything derails. I need to feel safe, and that my responsibilities are taken care of. It helps to feel comfortable, nice temperature, breathable air, maybe a little sun, but that isn’t a requirement. Some of my best or strangest lines have come to me while I have a headache that borders on a migraine. I think because those proto-migraines sharpen my vision and force me to see the world differently. Almost like synesthesia (the overlapping of one sense on another).

As a way to cultivate this in people not quite so neurologically cross-wired, I offer an exercise. Write one line a day. Just one. Take the time to sit on your porch, or to look out your front window and describe the thing you see, the thing that initially catches your eye. Like in drawing, you need to really see it, to study it, to make sure your mind doesn’t shortcut it and make it a symbol. That’s the difference between describing a chair and describing the particular chair you are sitting in. Make the line the best you can. If you need more structure, make it fit into a Tweet (144 characters) or some other arbitrary limit. Do this every day for a week, a month, a year. A few years ago, I posted a line every day on Twitter for just over a year. It’s harder than you might think (as at least one of my readers found out). Not everything I wrote was great but I still have a few of those lines that stand out in my mind.

That’s a quick and dirty look at how I write poetry. At the Spring Equinox, I’ll talk about essays. Until then, let’s get out there and write.


© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III

Winter Solstice 2015

This is the third time I’ve started writing this. Initially, I had intended to write about making mead, got two pages in and decided it wasn’t right. Then I started down a different path about secrets. Another couple pages, another abandoned effort. Neither of them resonated. But of them created a great deal of internal resistance.

There’s been a lot of that this year. By yearend, I’ll have posted only three stories, two poems and eight essays. What you haven’t seen are the five other poems I’ve worked on, and the layout for a novel including the first three chapters. All of them in progress, all of them gone dormant to where I hope I can pick them up again one day.

But none of that helps me now. I had wanted to finish out the year with another memory, a final snapshot from my life. Something I could use to wrap the year up with some sense of poignancy. I had hoped at least a handful of this year’s essays might serve as a light against someone else’s darkness, an acknowledgement of their pain even as I relate my own. I’m no longer sure that’s true.

Normally, I’d take the opportunity to look forward to what the next year might bring. Problem is, at this point, I’m no longer certain what that might be.

A couple weeks ago, after events had finally settled down enough to no longer require my day-to-day attention, I sat down to decide what I wanted to do. A very small voice told me I was only happy when I write, when I explore some imaginary terrain of my own design.

I took that voice to heart. I sketched out and started a new short story. I jotted down the inspiration for a poem. But soon after, for the second time since the summer solstice message, the spotlight from a guard tower across the river panned along our shadowed shore. The chatter of gunfire echoed in the darkness. And we all scurried back to our foxholes.

Where I finally awakened a week later curled up next to Nyala, each of us taking comfort from the other’s warmth. My constant companion and my tenuous link to sanity.

Last week, a friend asked me whether I enjoy the writing process. I had to think long and hard before I answered. I enjoy the feeling I get once a piece is created. I enjoy world building and plotting out a story. I enjoy weaving small, strange bits of my experiences into the characters and descriptions to make an imaginary world seem more real. Sometimes I enjoy the act of writing itself. Sometimes it is very frustrating.

Writing is a creative enterprise that consumes a great deal of my energy. My creative spirit is like a small, shy child. When someone waves a torch in front of her, she retreats and hides. It takes a long time for her to feel safe enough to re-emerge from her sanctuary. A long, frustrating, no-way-to-short-circuit-it, unproductive time. Yet, eventually, she always has.

So as I wait, we’ll light the candles come solstice night and see where their scant light leads us next. This year, as every year, I hope your solstice, too, shines warm and bright.

© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III

Commerce (Samhain 2015)

Commerce (Samhain 2015) - a reading (on YouTube)

Just after I turned thirteen, my father moved to Rota to help maintain the US submarines stationed there.

Spain was in transition at the time. Franco had died a few years earlier and the country wasn’t quite sure in where it was heading. King Juan Carlos had begun the march toward democracy but no constitution had been signed. Previously outlawed labor unions conducted practice strikes, not because they were unhappy, because they simply didn’t know how and thought they might need to one day. The Guardia Civil cradled submachine guns at checkpoints and smashed cameras because they feared reprisals if their identities were confirmed. Of course, all this was set against the backdrop of the peak of the then still ongoing Cold War.

When friends and family came to visit, my father had a list of cities he liked to show them. Cadiz, Jerez, Seville, Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona. As a crossroads for invasion in the western Mediterranean, Spanish historical sites have a number of influences on display. Roman, Gothic, Byzantine, Christian, Jewish, and of course, Moorish.

Rota is situated on the Atlantic coast near Gibraltar. From there, it’s a quick ferry ride across the Straights to Africa. Tangier stands as Morocco’s gateway to the southern Mediterranean’s entirely different culture, exotic yet relatively safe.

You have to remember this was the late seventies, long before the current era of Islamic extremism. Morocco was an ally. To some degree, it still is. But Morocco was also in transition. It had been living under a state of emergency with its parliament suspended since 1965. It had just flexed its muscle against Spain to regain control of the Western Sahara, where its troops skirmished with Algeria’s for control. SADR was just another acronym for another fringe group unknown to most Americans then or now. But I didn’t know any of that at the time.

Tangier was another of my father’s favorite places to take visiting Americans. He brought my sister and me there when we stayed with him one summer. I can still picture the narrow, winding streets of the bazaar lined by shops where it seemed, at least to a fourteen-year-old, that everything was for sale. And the price you eventually paid was always negotiable. Like in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, haggling was not only encouraged, it was almost a requirement.

When my father and his wife took my grandparents to Tangier, my grandfather quickly either got overwhelmed or bored. I’m not sure if the culture shock overawed him, or he just saw little point in hunting through the bazaar for bargains on things he didn’t value with his wife and daughter-in-law. He was much more interested in people than things. So as I heard it, at some point he retreated back to a central square with a fountain near the ferry landing to wait the women out, like one of those guys you see camped out on a bench at the center of the mall.

And like almost every male I’ve ever seen in that situation, whether holding a purse at the doorway to a Macy’s dressing room, or a collection of brightly colored bags outside a Victoria’s Secret, he soon attracted a handful of other men to commiserate with. Being my grandfather, he struck up a conversation with the first person he found who spoke even the barest English. Being a proud American grandparent, he pulled out his wallet to show off pictures of his grandchildren. Which the guy he was talking to smiled at and admired. Some things are universal. 

Only he was still in a foreign country, one that, while somewhat cosmopolitan, held some distinctly non-Western values. So when he came to my sister’s high school picture, one of the non-English speakers behind him started rattling off a string of Arabic my grandfather didn’t understand.

The guy who spoke English began to translate, first listening intently then slowly and seriously laying out the words in broken English. Something about a large number of goats and sheep and cattle. Then something about a number horses which sent the translator’s eyes open very wide. Confused, my grandfather asked what he was talking about. The response went something like, “A bride price for the girl.”

My grandfather scoffed, thinking it was all some kind of mistranslation. The man assured him the offer was quite serious and genuine. Well, my grandfather didn’t know anything about that. No one really bought and sold fifteen year-old girls, did they? He thought it was a joke.

By now, a small crowd had gathered around him and his newfound friends. As my stepmother and grandmother returned from their extravaganza with my father in tow clutching their freshly acquired treasures, they all wondered what the commotion was about at the center of the square. Then they spotted my grandfather’s head above the crowd.

My father immediately understood this might be a problem. First he sent his wife and mother toward the ferry with all the packages, then he shouldered his was through the crowd until he was standing beside my grandfather. When my grandfather greeted him and told the man translating that this was his son, the man making the offer got more excited.

The translator’s English was still broken, so my father tried Spanish which he knew just enough of to hold up his end of a conversation in a bar. Relieved, the man switched to the language he was more fluent in. My father quickly caught the gist of what was going on.

The man making the offer was some minor but well-off sheik. The animals were from his herds, which of course, he would convert into whatever currency my father would like, pesetas, pounds, Deutschmarks or dollars (thousands and thousands of dollars). Unless he had use of the livestock. The horses are quite valuable, my friend.

Firmly and loudly, first in English then in Spanish, my father said, no, no, no, the girl is not for sale. Then grasping my grandfather’s arm, my father then hustled him out of the square toward the safety of the ferry back to Spain. Where he told my grandfather in no uncertain terms not to talk to strangers anymore, and to keep his pictures in his wallet and his wallet in his pocket. Tangier isn’t Boston or CocoaBeach. You’re not in Quincy anymore.

My family used to laugh about this incident, I think because despite all our other dysfunction, we knew something like that would never happen. I think it made my sister feel both valuable and valued, at least enough to keep. That feeling was a rare commodity in our family.

After the events of this summer, I’ve been thinking more about this encounter. About the value of a daughter to any individual family. About how their wishes are often subordinated to what someone else sees as what’s best for the family as a whole. About how their health and well-being are exchanged for someone else’s comfort, in our culture most often because someone else don’t have the courage to stand up for their daughter, or the compassion to see her as valuable when compared to a son. And all too often, that someone is a mother, a sister, a daughter herself.

Which draws me back to Samhain and the monsters lurking in plain sight. One kind disguise themselves behind the mask of normalcy that they don each day when they emerge in public even as they prey on others. Another weaves that illusion around the first with their denials, secrecy and silence despite anyone else they put at risk. Instead, they selfishly weigh off what the victim and perpetrator each have to offer like some sort of twisted trick or treat.

Ghouls and zombies engaged in unholy commerce, counting out the bright coin of someone else’s life as they drop them on the scales. In the end, I’m not sure which I find more chilling.


© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III

The Sound of Silence (Fall Equinox 2015)

The Sound of Silence (Fall Equinox 2015) - a reading (on YouTube)

Just over fourteen years ago, I was standing out in our front yard listening. All the planes had been grounded. Even living many miles from a major or even a minor airport, I was struck by how much background noise that normally emanated from the sky had simply disappeared. It became more notable in its absence.

Even traffic on the nearby four-lane roads sounded light. Our house is bracketed by several major roads within half a mile in three directions. The slightest breeze from the east, north or south brings the monotonous low hum of tires treading pavement. Few people were moving around that day if they could avoid it. Like a major holiday, most hunkered down wherever they wanted to be.

Uncertainty tinged the air like a corrosive chemical spill. Like the aftermath of a mass migraine, the shock and numbness of the previous day’s pain had not worn off. Media outlets had exhausted their sources of new information and devolved into increasingly dramatic speculation. Rumors surfaced in real time only to submerge hours later when someone finally did a fact check or sought official confirmation. Video that most of us never wanted to see again played on continuous loop in the background of every broadcast like a traumatic childhood memory we couldn’t get unstuck from our collective consciousness.

Almost everyone I know remembers September 11^th. I remember September 12^th.

That morning, I had turned off all the receivers. I knew from previous crises that no new news would be forthcoming soon. The professionals were gathering and sorting through information as they prepared for a response. No one knew exactly what would happen next. Events had spiraled well beyond my control.

Still a bit shell-shocked after spending the previous twenty-four hours cataloguing scenarios, I sat with my coffee at the dining room table looking out the front window. A flash of red drew my eyes toward the hibiscus hedge. A cardinal flitted through the foliage, playing hide and seek among the scarlet blossoms. A blue jay soon joined him, sparking a bit of a territorial skirmish.

Then I noticed the scurry of squirrels chasing each other up, down and around the pine tree and across the front lawn. One noshed on a mushroom like an ear of corn in the shadows of the hedgerow. None of these animals either knew or cared what was going on, or what it meant to me. Their lives went on uninterrupted. I drew comfort from the thought.

That’s when I wandered out into the front yard to soak in the silence. I knew I would want to remember that day, that I was unlikely to experience another with the white noise of civilization missing. Where the softer sounds in the symphony of life could finally rise above the diminished noise floor. I found the music that bled through that previously unheard silence reassuring. Our daily anxieties don’t matter in the larger context of life.

Since then, I’ve learned to take solace in silence as a way to regain perspective after a crisis. Or so I thought.

I spent much of this summer shrouded in a different kind of silence, one that felt more judgmental than reassuring. As I’ve said before, silence often has a quality, one I’ve grown accustomed to interpreting.

When people don’t know what to say, they don’t say anything. They quickly adopt a don’t ask, don’t tell policy with anything that makes them uncomfortable, anything they don’t want to think about. They convince themselves they aren’t that close, that anything they have to say would be unwanted. That others will reach out so that they don’t have to. That all you really want is to be alone.

Most times, they are wrong.

After I posted the Summer Solstice message, a profound silence descended. A few people touched base with us as a couple but only a handful with me as an individual. People whose friendships I thought I’d cultivated remained silent. As if to say nothing I’d gone through carried any weight. I knew it was coming. Not the first time. And probably not the last. But rarely have I felt so isolated and alone.

So when record summer downpours unexpectedly cooled the air outside from subtropical to something more temperate, I snuck out on the porch to smoke. Just loaded up my pipe with black Cavendish and sat staring at the green across the ditch, listening to the rain on the metal roof. Watching the odd squirrel take shelter on the gutter spout beneath the eaves. Stroking Nyala or Mara when they curled up beside me. Time slowed to the pace of smoke rings drifting away on the faintest currents.

I didn’t return inside feeling refreshed or rejuvenated so much as if I’d paused my fall farther down the chasm for a few precious moments. My focus was shot, my motivation faltered. Consistent stretches of writing were measured in minutes, not hours, days or weeks.  I spent most of the summer struggling to regain my balance through simulated, secondhand human interactions: watching movies, reading books and playing games. Or just synchronized napping with Nyala who rarely left my side.

I still find I am more easily exhausted, as if I’m recovering from a physical wound. Even now I don’t want to write this. I’d rather crawl back into those entertainments. Not because what I have to say is so difficult. Because saying it feels completely futile. And largely, it will go unread.

Several times over the past three months, I almost stopped writing completely. I came close to tearing down all my sites and walking away from the brand I’ve built. Retreating from revealing my thoughts and experiences to an at best ambivalent audience. Echoing silence with silence.

Most, but not all, of that temptation has passed. Though in all honesty, some days the coin remains in the air. But writing is something I do instinctively, for myself and for Karen. I need to remind myself that everyone else is just along for the ride.

So while the balance between light and darkness has returned to something nearing normal, the intervening silence has likely shaped me in unanticipated ways. In music, the rests define the notes. In writing, empty spaces create the words. In art, it’s best to focus on light or shadow, and avoid the middle values that just muddy up the eye.

But as I learned fourteen years ago, what I do or think doesn’t really matter in a larger context. In the words of Amul Kumar, a professional photographer and friend whose creative instincts I very much admire: “In three words I can sum up everything I know about life: It moves on.”


© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III

Mayport (Lughnasa 2015)

Mayport (Lughnasa 2015) - a reading (on YouTube)

Growing up, I was always interested in seeing places few other people had seen. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe because of the nature of my father’s work on nuclear warheads that he couldn’t talk much about. Maybe because that work called him away to places I’d never heard of, places he seemed to enjoy more than being with his family. Strange how the mind turns something negative into something romantic.

That’s how I came to be aboard the USS Leyte Gulf docked in Mayport the summer the first Gulf War started. I’d volunteered go to sea to support testing of the prototype communication system my company had designed. Which meant getting the equipment up and running before the ship sailed to Norfolk a few weeks later.

By the time I arrived, two double racks of electronic equipment had been installed in a shelter that was bolted to the deck of the cruiser, between a pair of Phalanx anti-missile defense guns, beside the forward smokestacks just behind the bridge. Our job was to get it at least minimally operational and talking to the high-power amplifier and the directional antenna up on the mast. To do that, we needed logistical support from the ship’s communications section.

High summer had officially kicked off in north Florida. The weather was steamy, hot and humid. Doubly so in the shipyard where the concrete and steel soaked up the sun then radiated that stored energy deep into the night. The kind of weather where tempers are prone to flare.

After dropping off my stuff at the hotel and picking up a badge at base security, I turned up at the ship. We’d been briefed at the office by a former sailor on Navy protocol and a few things to expect. Only some of which prepared us for the world we, as civilians, were about to enter.

After a brief tour of the ship and the routes from the pier to and from our shelter, I remember being told to grab some dinner before we got started. Other priorities and a compressed schedule dictated we do most of our work at night.

Sometime after dark, the guy I was working with, my former boss, needed to talk to an NCO in the communications section about something we needed. I don’t remember if it was about power, chilled water or getting our equipment’s crypto loaded with the new day’s key.  I hadn’t been down there yet so it seemed like a good opportunity for him to show me where it was.

The Leyte Gulf is over five hundred feet long and fifty-five feet wide with a crew of roughly four hundred. Somewhere in the maze of narrow corridors and steep stairs linking its decks, we got turned around. One corridor was blocked off as the crew prepared to redo the chipped paint flooring.

Eventually, we exited to the bow and came back toward the communications section from the other direction. As I said, it was dark outside. Most of the corridors were dimly lit, though not quite so bad as a darkened ship I would learn later. As we drew closer to our goal, the overpowering scent of noxious, industrial chemicals from the chipped paint flooring grew stronger and more disorienting.

Finally, we came to a compartment that was roped off with yellow plastic tape like you see at a crime scene. Emanating from the compartment was the overwhelming odor of the chemical solvent they used to dissolve the chipped paint before they relaid it. By now, I was dizzy and had trouble making my eyes focus straight.

Peering inside from the threshold of the doorway, I saw a compartment about the size of our living room and dining room. Old style, chunky, Government Issue steel desks were arrayed throughout with steel bookcases stocked with black two- and three-inch binders interspersed between. All the furniture was painted a uniform gun-metal gray, nearly indistinguishable from the walls and ceilings. The only color was the chipped paint flooring, a mottled mix of primary blue and white. 

The compartment was occupied by half a dozen sailors dressed in blue work uniforms and one lieutenant in khakis, probably a JG. None of them looked older than twenty-three. Each squatted atop one of the desks. All the chairs had been removed when the new, still setting floor had been relaid. But that inconvenience didn’t mean these men could stop working.

My coworker called to the NCO we needed to coordinate with, a petty officer first class I think. The man hopped from desktop to desktop until he reached the door, the same way as when a group of kids declared the floor had turned to lava. Even as he spoke with us, he kept a sharp eye on the other sailors in the compartment, like a veteran elementary school teacher who expected trouble as soon as his back was turned. The lieutenant ignored us and everyone else as if living in his own little world where none of us existed.

Midway through our conversation with our contact, the lieutenant asked one of the other sailors in the compartment to pass him a notebook. Immediately, our contact turned upon that sailor.

“HAND the notebook to the lieutenant,” he instructed with an iron glare as if addressing an incorrigible child, “DON’T throw it.”

Thinking he had made himself clear, the NCO turned his attention back to us. I watched as the grinning sailor, probably all of nineteen, picked up the black notebook in question and swung it with a motion like he was warming up for a throw. The lieutenant held out his arms, apparently overriding the NCO’s instructions.

The motion must have caught the NCO’s attention. He broke off our conversation mid-word and turned upon his insubordinate ward just as the notebook arced through the air. The kid’s lob was good, hitting the lieutenant squarely on the hands. But the lieutenant apparently had concentrated more on his studies in high school than on baseball or football. He fumbled the catch, swatting the notebook up before clipping it with another hand in a failed recovery and finally knocking it squarely onto the still damp floor where it landed with a squishy thump.

The NCO’s reaction came almost faster than the speed of light. “What the HELL did I just tell you?”

He followed it up with a blistering stream of invective laced with profanity the likes of which I hadn’t heard since the first time my mother tore apart my sister’s room by throwing everything she owned into the center of the floor as a lesson on neatness.

My eyes grew wide. I flashed back hard. I was scared and I wasn’t the target of this man’s ire. I exchanged a look with my coworker. We both froze. Neither of us knew quite what to do.

The lieutenant, however, carried on like nothing had happened, back in his own little world. Squatting lower on his desk, he reached down and retrieved the notebook, wiped off its cover, then opened it and set about continuing his work, completely oblivious.

Suddenly, like a parent remembering his misbehaving child was out in front of company, the NCO turned to us, as composed as a judge, and asked conversationally without a trace of annoyance, “You gentlemen are up in the shelter on the O4, right?”

It was like someone had thrown a switch. I think that scared me more. We nodded our heads uncertainly. Between the mind altering nature of the chemicals, the men eerily squatting on their desks as if it were normal and the NCO’s sudden on-then-off reaction, we felt as though we’d entered an episode of the Twilight Zone.

“Someone will come find you in a few minutes to address what you need,” he added. And with that he quietly closed the door, only to resume his screaming the instant it snicked shut. Dismissed, we walked away in a daze, uncertain what we had just witnessed. We could still hear him yelling at the kid from behind the door three corners away.

Welcome to the Navy, son. Never Again Volunteer Yourself. That made quite the first impression. But it did prepare me for the reality of live at sea.

For the past two months, that’s the world I’ve found myself in, unexpectedly and unrelentingly surreal. Like falling down a rabbit hole where white turns to black, where up means down. Where men squat on their desks to work and mothers abandon their daughters as disruptions. Where mimsy were the borogoves, and the vorpal blade goes snicker-snack. And I’m desperately trying to cling to the vision of that lieutenant as I try to carry on my writing despite the grim absurdity that surrounds me.

© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III

Darkness (Summer Solstice 2015)

Darkness (Summer Solstice 2015) - a reading (on YouTube)


My original intent was to write this up for Samhain. I’d been planning to write it up since last year, mostly in light of the number of brave women who had shared their own stories, stories I’d read. Recent events caused me to revise the timetable.

That revision started with breaking news about the Duggars, then Dennis Hastert. It ended when my wife broke her long silence and publicly shared her own story. Karen was incredibly brave in telling it. I have no desire to detract from that, only build upon it.

She first told me nearly twenty-one years ago. We were newlyweds, married just over six months at the time. We were out walking in the neighborhood one night in the fall. I was bitching about my family, about something one of them had done that had left a wound when I was young. I’d probably been talking too long, too self-absorbed. That’s when Karen dropped the bomb on me about her brother.

First, a little context. When we first started going out in college, nine years earlier, I noticed something odd about her. She was skittish in a very particular way. She didn’t like to be seen as a woman. She tried to hide in plain sight. She tensed sometimes when I touched her. Something clicked in my mind. She’d been sexually assaulted. So I asked her.

I remember she looked startled, probably wondering how I knew. She said she’d been raped in high school. A friend of her brother. She hadn’t told her family. She didn’t offer details. I didn’t ask. She would tell me when she was ready, if ever. We were only going out. I just tried to be careful not to set off any landmines that I now knew remained below the surface.

As we got more serious and eventually moved in together, I began to worry. What if I met her brother’s friend? Since her brother didn’t know, I figured it was at least a possibility, though maybe not a likely one. But I didn’t know what I would do if that happened.

Eventually, I met her brother and his family, but never his friend. Or so I thought. Karen’s brother seemed nice enough. Mark Monroe was four years older than I was, married with two daughters and a son. He was an engineer like me, though he had attended a prestigious engineering school in Virginia and worked for a major tech company (he is a former director at Sun). He was a fair-haired child. A golden boy on the rise. I started looking up to him. I trusted him.

Fast forward back to where I started, fall of 1994. Walking in the neighborhood. My wife turned to me and said something like, “I’ve been betrayed by family, too.” I looked at her, skeptical no doubt. Her family appeared to be the pillar of Norman Rockwell’s New England. But every family has their secrets.

“Remember when you asked back in college if I’d been raped?”

I nodded, uncertainly. “Yeah, by your brother’s friend.” I figured from her tone it was about to get bad, I just didn’t know how bad it really was. My mind raced but I waited.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t my brother’s friend. It was my brother.”

Darkness. Complete and utter. No sound. No light. Just that shock after you feel the impact, when you know you’ve been hit, hard, but your mind hasn’t caught up with the pain. Which you know is coming and will be crippling when it does.

At this point, my memory goes blank. The next thing I remember is us sitting in the back room of the house, mostly in the dark. I remember her describing to me exactly what happened, blow by blow.

She was fifteen. He was a freshman in college. An adult old enough to know better. Fuck, even fifteen year-olds are old enough to know better.

I knew I had to listen. I’m not sure I was looking at her. I was afraid if I did, all the hate behind my eyes would pour out. Hate not at her, at him, though I knew she might not be able to tell the difference. I thought my heart would burst.

As she recounted her story, I could only close my eyes, as if my eyelids could contain my rage and keep the darkness out. I heard every word she said. She didn’t spare me the details. I didn’t want to be spared. I needed to know.

He waited until their parents were gone. He started by exposing himself to her. She told him to put some clothes on. Later he went into her room. He tried to coax her onto their parents’ bed. She said no. He didn’t stop. He was six inches taller than she was, a hundred pounds heavier. He played football in high school. Any struggle would have been short-lived. No one would have heard her scream.

There was no one there to save her. That’s what big brothers are supposed to do, but he was broken and standing on the wrong side of her bed. Who the hell did this to anyone, never mind his own sister? What type of sociopath was he?

As the picture she painted formed in my mind, I felt an imaginary pistol pressed against the small of my back. Over the next few moments my imaginary hand came to rest on its imaginary grip. By the time she finished describing the way he violated her, that imaginary gun was out in my imaginary hand and pointed at his imaginary head.

The rage inside me was visceral and instinctive. Someone had hurt and betrayed my wife in one of the worst ways possible. The monkey inside me howled in anguish. Son of a bitch must pay.

Darkness. Another damaged sector on the memory spool. I think only seconds passed, but I can’t be sure.

“What are you thinking?” There was a pleading in her voice. I know there were tears, hers not mine. I seem to remember my face feeling dry and hot, like you get when you’re bordering on heat stroke. All I wanted was to go to sleep, like when I was a kid and my mother flew into a rage. Just fall asleep and wake up to find everything was a dream. Or never wake up at all.

Attention, Kmart shoppers. We have a man down in housewares. Cleanup on aisle fuck.

Again, I don’t remember my answer. I think I said she’d done nothing wrong, said how sorry I was. Said how angry I was. I don’t think I needed to add that last. I think she was afraid of me in that moment. Not of what I’d do to her. What I’d do to him. I’m sure it was written on my face.

But I knew the imaginary gun wasn’t real and never would be. It was just a symbol of my rage. My primate brain wanted to kill him. Pick up the jawbone of my slaughtered prey and use it as a club. As I clawed my way back into something more civilized, I wanted to round up my friends and male cousins, ride out and burn his castle to the ground. But I knew I never would.

At some point my rational mind kicked back in. I said in very short order that she would need to talk to someone, a therapist. As much as I wanted to help her, this was well beyond my league. Besides, I knew I had my own shit do deal with on this issue. I had too many conflicting emotions. I was pulled in too many directions at once. I had to prioritize.

It quickly laid out like this in order of importance. Support my wife and get her help. Protect her nieces from this predator. Make sure no one else ever went through this. See some measure of justice served. Justice was the last and the least important. The imaginary pistol had gone away. Even through the worst of what came after, it only reappeared once, two decades later.

Karen tried to swear me to silence. I told her I couldn’t. Silence is toxic. Secrets get people killed. I knew that from growing up. I told her I had to tell at least two people so I could have someone to talk to as we sorted this thing out. She agreed. Only two. Not her family. Not mine. That last was never really an issue.

I insisted she share what happened with her family. Her brother had two daughters. Her sister had one. There was no way I could let silence claim one of them as another victim.

But I knew even then that the odds were not in her favor of getting their support. The psych stats are grimly clear. Families tend to blame the messenger as the one who overthrew their world, not the perpetrator. That’s if they believe the messenger at all. People are supremely willful in their ignorance when reality will dispel their illusion of the world.

My enforced silence lasted a year and a half. It was brutal. It tore me up inside. My attitude suffered. I grew short tempered. People at work noticed. All I could do was let my supervisors know I was going through something. I didn’t tell them what. I almost lost my job. I would have if I hadn’t straightened up. Somehow, I did.

After a lot of pushing, and hard work in counseling, Karen was finally ready to confront her brother and tell her rest of her family what had happened. Anyone who thinks counseling is easy has probably never sat through a session. I went to several with her, whenever she wanted. I left each one feeling raw, sore, exhausted and drained. Like I’d been beaten. And she did most of the talking. I can only imagine how she felt.

At first, things went ok when she told her family. They believed her. That was at least one major hurdle passed. Her parents were shocked but seemed supportive. Mainly, they seemed disappointed she hadn’t told them when it happened. They would have gotten her help. Her. Not him. Looking back, I shudder to think what that might have meant. The Duggars now spring to mind.

Her sister’s initial reaction was, “The Golden Boy has feet of shit.” A telling comment by my measure. But that quickly changed to “Nothing you’ve said changes my opinion of him.” She also insisted that the incident be hidden from her children even though her daughter was almost the same age Karen had been when her brother raped her. That fit the normal pattern. I’m sure her sister thought she was protecting them, but looking back I wonder if she was protecting him, and the way her children saw their uncle.

My wife talked to her brother in her therapist’s office. That, too, seemed to go surprisingly ok. He admitted what he’d done. She told him what she wanted him to do to make up for it. He agreed. I thought maybe her family had beaten the odds.

That fell apart pretty quickly. Once he was back home, her brother reneged on his promises. I called him on it. Words were exchanged. I told him if I ever found out that he’d raped anyone else, I would see justice served. That as he looked as his wife and kids and beautiful life, he needed to think about that. He took that as a threat. Which was fine by me if it kept his stupid ass in line.

Rape, that word alone became an issue. Karen’s brother and his wife took offense to our using it. They wanted something softer, something more lenient. Karen wasn’t raped, they said. Molested, maybe? Fondled? Could we just say that? No. We can’t. Rape is the legal definition of what he did, in the state where he did it and in the state in which we live. That was just the beginning of his equivocations and backfilled rationalizations.

In the last letter he wrote my wife, he blamed her for what happened, for not stopping it. He cut her off from his children, holding the cards and presents which we still sent as we tried to work it out. “If you don’t have a relationship with me, you don’t get to have one with them.” Ah, yes, extortion. Now we were back on script. I suspect he did the same with his parents. At one point, Karen’s mother said to us, “I won’t cut myself off from my grandchildren.” That caught my attention.

Soon after, her brother’s wife found God and forgiveness soon followed, as we were told it should for us, automatically and unconditionally. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. Her parents began treating the incident like a sibling squabble in which they refused to take a side, as if there were no right and wrong.

Then things got weird. There was a visit where we were put up in her brother’s bedroom, the only bedroom that hadn’t been redecorated since the kids moved out. A will where all three kids had to all agree before anything could get done. A string of years where my wife tried to visit her parents at her birthday only to be told point blank not to come because it was too hard to schedule around her brother’s family events. There were others.

Rereading that, none of it probably makes sense to anyone else. It’s all contextual and emotional. Time after time, I called her family on it.  Only then would something regarding the particular incident change. But the overall pattern did not. It pointed to a distinct lack of empathy. Or cleverly disguised passive-aggression.

Karen began hearing how much her brother and his family were suffering. How he was depressed, how he was in therapy, how his marriage was suffering. Fuck, we were depressed, Karen was in therapy. Our marriage suffered. Talking about having children was off the table. “Children are too cruel to each other,” Karen said.

Eventually, Karen had to tell her parents she didn’t want to hear about her brother and his family any more. It hurt too much to listen to their sympathy when he had done nothing, nothing he’d said he would. She felt more and more outcast, alienated and alone. More than once, she told them.

It didn’t matter. Over the years, things went back to normal for the rest of the family. They seemed to have forgotten about what he’d done, as if it never happened. Visits and joint vacations were once again scheduled, family milestones were reached and celebrated. Everyone attended. Everyone but us.

My wife gave up on saying anything, just began to accept the hurt, as though it were her lot in life, as though she had done something wrong. It isn’t and she didn’t. He did.

I did not accept it. I grew up in an abusive family. There was no way I was signing up for a second, not matter how casual or thoughtless their cruelty. It seemed we had become the problem, the inconvenience, the reminder that everything had changed. Because we were the ones who wouldn’t let it go.

Like Karen could. That was her first real sexual encounter. Who the hell thinks that didn’t leave a mark? What would have happened if she’d gotten pregnant (which she could have if he’d done everything he wanted)? What if that had been you? Your wife? Your sister? Your brother? Rape and incest never go away.

I think her family believes Karen or I are stuck on justice. By the time Karen told me what had happened, the laws and statutes of limitations had already begun to change. States recognized these types of cases take time to surface, take time for the survivor to confront what happened. Karen could have sued him and very likely won. She might still be able to. She probably could have had him arrested and dragged into open court. If he’d been convicted, he’d be a registered sex offender now. She could have made a call to DCF stating anonymous concern for his children. She could have ruined his life. With very little creativity, she could have turned his life farther upside down just like he did hers. She didn’t. I deferred to her wishes.

As far as I’m concerned, he walks around free on sufferance. Karen hoped, one day, he would see the light and atone for what he’d done. But he only sought forgiveness from his wife, his god and his family, not his victim.

It very much seems like we are the only problem left. The ones who just won’t let it go. As if my wife’s brother were an unrepentant stranger, anyone would ask.

No one in her family seems to recognize that. And she got beaten down.

Her family chose a side and it most distinctly was not hers. So he got away with rape and incest. They shielded him with silence. They never insisted he keep his word. It was easier to let Karen drift away.

Which brings me back to Chekhov’s gun, the one I mentioned earlier. That imaginary pistol only came out one other time, a few days ago. After another message where we were told how much fun the rest of the family would have when they gathered for another week together, how much fun they always had. Without us was left unsaid.

That spawned yet another email, another tearful phone call, another emotional discussion. And finally, seven words emerged from Karen, born of frustration, rejecting everything I’d done.

Those words hurt me so deeply that I was ready to give up and walk away. I couldn’t do this any more. I’d supported her. At points, I’d carried her. I’d tried my best to look out for others in her family, the ones who couldn’t look out for themselves. Those seven words erased it all. There was truth in them. They resonated. It didn’t matter whether she meant them or not.

I knew exactly how bad it was when I was sitting at my desk before dawn Sunday morning and that imaginary gun reappeared in my hand after all those years in hiding. Only this time, it wasn’t pointed at Karen’s brother. It was pointed at me. Its barrel in my mouth.

That wasn’t a suicidal thought. It was a symbol of futility. In that moment, it seemed nothing I’d done had mattered. My help had been unwanted. The darkness had returned.

Separately, Karen and I looked down into the abyss and saw the abyss looked back. We saw this thing could still consume us if we let it. Instead, we clasped each other’s hands and took a careful step away.

I wish I could say it happened that easily or romantically. But like any birth, there was pain and screaming and irrational accusations and more than a little (metaphorical) blood.

Karen wrote what she wrote and named her brother’s name because she finally could. Because it was the only thing left for her to do. She didn’t tell me she was going to do it. She didn’t tell me that she had. She left it for me to find if and when I did. She didn’t do it for me. She did it for her. Because she saw how much the silence had eaten away from her. From us.

As I said earlier, I've been pulled in two directions all along. I felt compelled to do what was best for Karen to help her heal, and to make sure no one else became a victim. Those were conflicting goals, often impossible to juggle on the tightrope and keep my balance. I'm not sure I’ve succeeded in either. I should have been able to pass off the second responsibility to Karen’s family. But they seemed unconcerned from the beginning that her brother might rape another minor.

They were more than interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt. I was not.

Every instinct in me screams that I should have buried him by shining daylight on this from the onset. In that, I failed. Whether he left another victim in his wake haunts me every day.

So why am I writing this now? Partly because I can share my part in this story now that Karen has made it public. Partly to honor her bravery and the bravery of too many others who have come forward just like her. And partly to tell anyone else who has been through the same, as a survivor and as their supporter, you are not alone. We’ve been through the wars and understand your pain. We may not have suffered the worst wounds, but the scars run deep enough.

Mostly, I hope it serves as a reminder that even on the brightest day, darkness still remains. All we can do is shine a light upon it and hope the shadows scurry away. Even knowing that one day all too soon, the darkness will return. Yet, even then, we preserve a little light to fight it back.


© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III