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Hello readers and welcome back to this (very) occasional series I started for the blog three years ago with varying results. As noted way back then, this series began as a file in my Google Drive entitled “What’s a writer for?” and morphed into these posts in a somewhat organic manner. First involving my science fiction novel and then looking at other items such as failure and listening to editors, the most recent post had to do with productivity in a time of global pandemic.
As I noted in a recent website update, I was diagnosed late last year with bipolar disorder, and it has cast a wide shadow on all of my writing these past months. I wanted to share some more about this experience and show how even when tasked with such seemingly insurmountable odds writers can still overcome them. But as I am in the middle of doing so I thought I could at least catalog a bit of what it’s like to write with such a diagnosis. I took a recent writing day to get down the events of my breakdown and ended up with ten-thousand words added to a document that I hope will turn into another book someday. Getting it down helped me to own the events, some of which I will share here for the first time. The hardest lesson for me to understand was this was a year(s)-long event, beginning in the final months of 2020 and spreading through spring of last year and exploding in the winter. I was having major issues in the relationship with my wife and made the (in retrospect) rather stupid decision to set all of my fiction writing aside for half of 2021. I also became quite controlling over the communication side of my marriage but did not realize this until about a year after the fact. Thankfully I have tons of manic inspired notes written down from that time to always make me remember how this started. But the real breakdown occurred in December of last year, when I spiraled into a series of paranoid delusions about a neighbor recording me through my phone and other devices, which then expanded to my maintenance guy and then to other entities at large. I won’t go into the details as it’s still hard for me to reckon with but suffice it to say if my wife Mary had not intervened I would have been in an even worse position. I spent almost a week at Saint Joseph’s hospital in Saint Paul, and by the end of it I was put on medication for bipolar disorder. After trying various other medications (and finding their side effects to be even worse) over the next months I wound up back in the hospital this past March and on different medications. Finally as I write this today I am back on the original meds I was put on in the first place, which seem to be the kind that now work for my life. All of this is to say, how does one possibly work as a writer when such events occur? It’s a good question and one I’m still grappling with in my life. The diagnosis and aftermath was the most difficult period and now that I’m back on a stable medication regimen I am beginning to figure it out. I attempted to re-draft my manuscript during the worst of it (when I wasn’t sleeping very well at all) and I am quite dissatisfied with the result. I had a lot of notes from my editor and while many of them were well-founded, I did change parts of the manuscript a bit too much and wound up with a draft that is going to need more re-working this summer if I am going to be ready to submit it to agents. I did want to delve a little into what it’s like to have this disease. Imagine having your brain running on overtime and then that it attaches itself to any little thought you might have and blows it way out of proportion. That is just a slight example of the racing thoughts that manifest themselves daily if one is not medicated. Also imagine your emotions flown way out to either end of the spectrum (either manic and feeling great, or more often, depressive and feeling horrible) and that may begin to explain how I am dealing with this every day. This is indeed the most difficult thing I’ve faced in my life as a writer, and just trying to express it here is not going as well as I’d hoped. But I wanted to explain a little bit about the diagnosis so those of you who do follow my work can know what’s going on with it. I may be back with another update in the coming year and I hope to return to the Writing Life series overall as I have plenty of other topics to cover in the same sporadic fashion. Thanks to those of you who have read my stuff for years, and please take care of your own mental health. It really does matter.
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Hello to those of you on my email list or following me on social media. I know it’s been a long while since I’ve updated my website about my writing career, so I thought I’d do a quick one.
Where the heck have I been? You might recall the Reading List took a hiatus last May. I have a new batch of novels to read this year and will get to them after I finish the incredible nonfiction journalistic work Manufacturing Consent. Speaking of journalism, in case you missed it I was lucky enough to work with Mel Reeves (RIP) and the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder last September on an important piece concerning the Minneapolis Charter Commission. I’m now finishing up a final piece that will (hopefully) drop within another month or two. A major event that happened last December was my having a mental health crisis over the holidays. Thankfully my wife Mary helped me through it, but it did raise some uncomfortable questions about my life and how I endure it. I was diagnosed as bipolar and am now on medication, but the path has not been easy. Please take care of your mental health as we experience this pandemic on a societal level. I know it’s cliché to say “if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything” but after living that for a while I’d have to say it’s true. Finally, the novel. I am diving back into the twelfth draft of Spheres of Influence, using my editor’s notes as a guide to expanding it. I will have more updates as I finish the draft. I am also planning on revising and writing new short stories once I get to that point. I mentioned on Twitter recently that I've been working on a blog post called “What’s a reader for?” This dovetails with a similar query to my readers on a possible new series: A Note on Sourcing. That is, what are the many (many) sources that we as writers (or readers) try to take in each day, week, or month to understand what is going on in the world? Personally I try to focus on Minnesota/Minneapolis news and then expand to national news, but it’s a constant struggle to keep up with everything (else). So for a query to you: what are the most important sources you follow each day? This could be email newsletters, actual newspapers, websites, blogs, whatever. Heck, it could just be Twitter or Instagram. Not everyone uses “old school” services like Feedly or Instapaper as I do. Feel free to respond to this with your lists, and I hope to compile them into a blog post someday. And if you’re looking for something to read you can check out either of my novels, which are available from North Star Press or as e-books through B&N as well. Thanks to all of you for reading my work over the years; there will be more blog posts in 2022! - jA Hello readers and welcome to this installment of the Reading List. (ICYMI: As I stated in the final “reflections” post, this will be an ongoing series for the rest of my career.) Starting out this year will be a continuation of the genre detours I have established over the last few months, and last time I looked at a very interesting poetry anthology. As promised I am now going in a completely new direction, reading a (according to The Wikipedia) “young adult coming-of-age epistolary novel,” Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 book The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
This isn’t exactly an unknown title, being made into a quite successful film by Chbosky in 2012 (and the original impetus for my wanting to read the book), but I had forgotten in the intervening years how much the story is similar to my first novel from North Star Press. Before I get too deep into the comparisons I must say Chbosky wrote a far superior book and I’m glad he got the accolades. I also think he made a good call in using the epistolary form (something I tried to do with a diary) to tell the story as it allowed for a very intimate look into the main character’s life. Also (somewhat *trigger warning* if you need that) there is an incredible and sad revelation about abuse at the very end of the novel that made me think about how to layer in such an impactful moment and have it resonate. Regarding those similarities, major themes in common would be (*spoiler* for my book, I guess?): suicide, drug use, and being an outcast (albeit a more religious way in my novel). But striking more to the core of it, despite the turgid anger of my Twitter feed these days, I was like Charlie for most of my life. Observing people rather than “participating,” trying to be someone I was not, and in general feeling sensitive toward the world rather than being active in it. I tried to wrangle all those things (much more a part of me in high school) for Our Senior Year along with some of the other crises I was facing in my “real” life at the time circa 2013. This “young adult” novel, despite a few quibbles of my own, does an incredible job of displaying what it is like to navigate this type of world and make it. I wish Chbosky had focused the narrative a bit more on the “major” themes, but even that’s pretty personal. I also was a lot more repressed about homosexuality growing up and perhaps that understanding continues to limit me. That being said, growing up believing I needed to be a bigoted jerk about it does explain why in the novel (and played so freakin’ well in the film by Ezra Miller) Patrick needs to be careful with his identity. For those people in my own high school who felt that type of loathing from me, I know it’s far too late, but I am sorry. Up next I’m switching over to a genre I haven’t returned to in a few years, the graphic novel. To wit, one of the utter ground-breaking classics of the genre: Chris Ware’s 2000 opus Jimmy Corrigan. (FYI the text is very small and a recent trip to the eye doctor confirmed my continuing addled decomposition, so this one might take a while.) Thanks for reading and following my work. -ja I have tried to craft this #WritingLife essay twice. Once with the title ending “Covid” the other “George Floyd’s murder.” And then both events have merged together and represent so much more broken within our society. It’s almost quaint to think that a month ago the biggest concern with a lot of writers was “productivity.” The question of: am I creating enough during this down time? Should I be taking advantage of it more? As someone who has been laid off for a while now, I can say from a decent vantage point that none of that matters.
For some inspiration on this topic I conversed with Ed Simon, who has been running a phenomenal series on pandemic writing for The Millions.Here is part of what he had to say on the rise of “pandemic productivity:” “Maybe they offer an alright corrective to people who feel anxiety about those things, but they sometimes do an over-correction, and are a disservice to people for whom that advice doesn't apply.“ “If I don't write, I get antsy, and I have to actively not write sometimes to recharge. I'm a recovering alcoholic, and not coincidentally my productivity shot up when I replaced getting black out drunk with actually writing. No clue if that's healthy, but it was certainly healthier, and in a very literal way I simply need to write. So the ‘You don't have to be productive’ stuff is probably good for people who DON'T have to be productive, but I kind of do.” I thought this was a very interesting perspective and shows how a reliance on just putting words to page often backfires. You need to know what you are writing down in order to create something. I know there have been a lot of pieces on “productivity” and writing in the time of these earth-shattering events. But I’m here to tell you even if you read all of them you are not guaranteed to find the road to success cranking out your novel during this time. You may find more success doing nothing at all. I am planning on delving into this more on the blog over the next year, but getting laid off (again) felt like an odd mirror to how this whole writing career of mine changed five years ago. And instead of thinking I must go back to wage-slave work and do another pointless job for five more years (this time with the added benefit of a pandemic), I have decided to use the little financial resources I have and (for real this time) do this as my career. I know it’s a stretch, a gamble, but it’s also the most freeing thing I could have done. So be as productive as you want to during your quarantine. I could go on about how I’ve been re-writing my science fiction manuscript over and over in the hopes of this societal upheaval being my big break and whatever. I am more stunned to see my life from the perspective of never having to answer to anyone for my work. Ever again. (I should add as opposed to last time when I kind of stepped aside from the journalistic side of things, in the wake of the MPD murder of George Floyd I don’t think that’s going to be an option. Those who know me might remember I used to cover City Council races and do investigations and stuff. For now it’s been more shouting on Twitter, but I may write some longer stuff at some point. The important thing is to make people aware.) Writing in the time of...whatever it may be, don’t feel you must be productive. It’s far more important to understand what you want out of life, and then figure out how to get it. Write during all times, for all reasons. Thanks for reading. Hello readers and welcome to another series on this here blog I’ve been struggling with for years: shorter pieces focusing on the writing life and its challenges, daily affairs, and all it entails. That was initially what this blog was going to be all about, but it sort of got hijacked by the reading list and my “how to write a book” project. The first essay is here if you missed it. And without further ado, here is the second installment in the Writing Life.
Embrace the failure. I know, it sounds counterintuitive and perhaps like every other piece of writing advice you’ve encountered on the internet and elsewhere. But there is perhaps no other more important part of the writing life than this one. Because it will be all consuming, and inescapable. Forget the general people out there who may be repelled by your work, or never even find out about it; there are yet to be legions of lit mags, online outlets, editors and publishers who all will reject your work for various reasons. This is a huge part of refining our skills. I suppose I should lead all this failure announcing that I am finally going to have a short story published this October, after a half-decade of writing them and not getting anywhere (more on where to find this particular story coming soon). This represents the culmination of getting an idea, drafting a basic concept story, showing it to a few people, getting some great feedback, rewriting and rewriting it, looking it over a few more dozen times, submitting it and receiving (at least) ten rejections, from lit mags in Minnesota and beyond, until finally it will be published by an outlet that has also published my editor, Libby Copa. Speaking of Libby, a while back she pointed me to this essential LitHub article by Kim Liao about the importance of seeking 100 rejections per year. I know that I didn’t even get close to that with this story, and that feels pretty great but doesn’t make me underestimate the amount of work required to get even more published. If the dream is having some kind of story collection ready to go by the time my other manuscripts can get shopped, I will need to get hundreds of rejections piled over a dozen stories (at least). I have come to find the necessary rotation should be around five-six stories sent out to as many places as you can, while keeping track of them through a spreadsheet or document. And while it felt odd to have to withdraw the piece from other places I’d submitted it, I didn’t mind the reason. This essay was also inspired by some thoughtful reviews of my books on GoodReads, which is another great resource for feedback (even if they point out errors I too have gone on about at length). And as much fun as it was to see someone created a profile just to give my first novel a one-star review, it is all a part of dealing with the fact that some people just won’t like your work. It seems hard to overcome that at first, but the more you embrace it, the more you will see how it doesn’t define you but is used to make your writing better. I have a lot more confidence now that an independent party has verified that I might know what I’m doing. This will in turn help me get my current manuscript in the best shape it can be, and eventually get it published as well. So learn to embrace the failure, for your own good. Hello there readers and welcome as I finally get to another series on this here blog I’ve been struggling with for years. After working on the initial blog post (still entitled “What’s a writer for?”) for months and seeing no end in sight (but there are gonna be tons of links!) I have decided to try something different for this series. And that is, shorter pieces focusing on the writing life and its challenges, daily affairs, and all it entails. I mean, that was initially what this blog was going to be all about, but it sort of got hijacked by the reading list and my “how to write a book” project. So without further ado, here is the first installment in the Writing Life.
I’m writing a book about climate change. It’s not like I haven’t said this before, but I think it deserves its own post because it’s pretty much all I have worked on for a solid year. And the entire thing needs to be re-written, because the perspective is wrong. By next year I might have a solid draft to show people. But until then, I can talk about it. So, why climate change? If you somehow haven’t heard about it by now, the IPCC reports essentially spell out what is rapidly becoming the challenge of my generation: climate crisis and how little time we have to do anything about it. While this issue has waffled over my lifetime as something Americans care about, and then don’t (remember #climategate? No, I’m not going to link to that), it seems that we have reached a relative tipping point with legislation like the Green New Deal reaching massive audiences and people my age realizing this is going to affect the rest of their lives. It’s important, and if you have been following me online for any length of time you’ll know how much I scream into the void about it to little result. This is my attempt to rectify that in what I feel is my greatest capacity: writing. Specifically, a story about climate change, how it may be manipulated into use via geo-engineering and how that may lead to an utter division of the planet. And that just scratches the surface of this beast, which also tackles AI, religion, technology, cloning, environmental catastrophe, time travel (can you see why it is kind of a mess at this point?), and other stuff. Oh yeah, journalism too. Cuz that’s what I’ve devoted a lot of my time over the years, and informs a lot of this book. And as my editor stated, this book pushes a lot of buttons. I come from a conservative religious background that ultimately didn’t take, and I want to examine it through my fiction. But I also want to examine a culture that allows the generational selling out we’ve witnessed via the climate crisis, and how it’s up to us to do something about it. Again, in the real world we have maybe a decade to reduce emissions to the point where human survival is a possibility. In my novel, that is not quite a foregone conclusion, and for the hell of it I will give away a major plot point in the hope it may interest you. I conclude that the only thing that may wake up the populace is the sudden loss of half the landmass of Florida. Again, sitting here reading this you may not believe it. But the science tells us enough ice is melting rapidly that something like that could happen, and in my lifetime. Speaking of my editor, she was also right to point out that this is merely one way to get involved. Contact your representatives, create your own art about it, get involved in the protest movement that is growing by the day, and try to use as little fossil fuel as possible. I know it sounds hyperbolic but this is truly the challenge of our generation, and we need all hands on deck. Thanks for indulging me as I shine a light on my manuscript, and I hope you’ll one day be able to read it as I publish it. Some other topics I have lined up for this series include: failure and why we should seek it out, how to learn to listen to others (i.e. editors), time management, and some other things. And of course I’m still working on that (initial) blog post about what writers are for, which takes on new meaning by the hour of teh #Drumpf tweet. On that note, thanks for reading and writing. Hello readers and thank you for sticking with me as I jam the last bit of the 2018 Reading List into January before taking it in a little different direction. Last time I got through the Salinger collection Nine Stories, and while I am still planning on re-posting a short story to the blog I am wrapping up the collections in favor of novels for the next few months. But before I get into the 2019 Reading List I wanted to get to a type of work I had on deck for last year: the graphic novel.
Being a comic book fan for most of my life I have been familiar with the superhero genre in this area for years, but have yet to read much of the more “serious” fare that has gained national attention for decades. While I’ve caught up with a few over the past years (Maus and the first part of Persepolis for two examples) I have yet to actually write about one. So I chose an author and a work with which I thought I’d have some affinity: Craig Thompson and his 2003 mastework, Blankets. I want to try and do the usual thing here with respect to the lessons writers can get out of a work like this, but also want to say a little about the emotions evoked out of the story. The use of illustration. This is one of those lessons that, especially in this medium, probably gets a response of, “well duh.” And while that’s kind of the entire point of the medium, Thompson is a genius of the form. There are full page spreads devoted to various images such as angels, regular humans, humans in trees, and multitudes of Biblical images flowed on pages seamlessly into the “actual” story. In between these are the regular frames, filled with gorgeously rendered dialogue and exquisite character interactions. Use your pain. This ties in with the overall message of the book, which struck home with me in a few ways. Apparently Thompson wrote it as a way of telling his parents he was leaving his faith, which I have also had to do in various ways over my life; the way he tells the story resonated with me in ways few other pieces of art have. It didn’t hurt that he also grew up in a cold farmhouse, and with pressures coming from his family church and the places he would hang out, and youth group trips (similar to themes to those of my first novel, *cough* shameless plug *cough* Our Senior Year). This story is one of the best examples of using details of your life to make excellent work. This piece worked for me on several levels, I guess mostly because of the personal turmoil I have gone through in the last year, but really in my whole life. I too have struggled with leaving the Christian faith and understanding myself to be atheistic, and both Thompson’s art and the way he described his journey made me consider my own in different ways. While there were some bits I wish he would have explored more (what happened to Raina?!) overall this was one of the best graphic novels I have ever read. Well, that officially wraps up the 2018 Reading List! This series will continue in the new year, going back to novels written by females beginning with Ann Patchett's 2011 novel State of Wonder. I am also hoping to do a post on lessons learned this time around, similar to what I did at the beginning of the 2018 list, and pointing the way forward for this series. I am going to keep the type of works included as broad as possible, while changing up how I approach the posts at this juncture in my career. But more on all of that later. For now, I’d like to say thanks for coming along with me on this journey. When I started this as a series of experiments in 2016 I never could have imagined how important it would become to my career, and my life. Thanks for reading, writing, and thinking about all of it. Here’s to a happy and healthy (and maybe better?) 2019. Back in 2015 when I started this blog, I wrote a piece about vacations that comes to mind every now and again. I penned it about a month after getting laid off and moving to a new apartment, and was quite uncertain about the direction of my life. My point here isn’t to really mess with that post (it holds its own lessons from the first time I went camping), but to rather find out how much I have changed since then. This week we got to spend the entire week at the resort near the Chippewa Flowage. My mother-in-law was kind enough to rent two cabins this year so my wife Mary and I got one pretty much all to ourselves. The view from this cabin was extraordinary, and I found myself doing little else than sitting around staring at the lake for parts of the day. While I enjoyed every minute of being out there this week, I did learn some more about myself as a human and as a writer that I thought I should detail here.  So without further ado, more lessons to be learned from the wilderness above and beyond my earlier post on vacations and how they matter. I may be going out into the woods for the third year, but I still have no idea what I’m doing. This became apparent the longer we spent out here, as the woodsy mentality accumulated by my wife’s family continued to overshadow any initiative I may have eked out. Most of them were constantly surveilling the fire pit making sure it was always going, they all knew how to get a rod ready for a line, and I wouldn’t have known the first thing about setting up a tent like their cousins do every year. I also almost hurt my wife in a dumb stunt with a canoe that taught me to listen up and pay attention to the people who are out here and know what they are doing. The woods are a great place to unplug, but you don’t have to all the time. I made a big point in the previous vacation post by saying how I turned off my phone the entire trip. While that worked back then, I decided to take a different tack this time around and not only leave the phone on (this was partially to keep in contact with the cat sitter each day) but to document some of the trip on Twitter. I also brought my laptop but managed to check my email once the whole time. Previous inebriations don’t do the trick. I once had a pretty unhealthy addiction to both cigarettes and alcohol, and while I have conquered both, this trip is always a gateway to getting back into both things. After a week I have it pretty well decided: I don’t like drinking and never will, and same with the smokes. I may have thought I needed such substances to have a good time (that was certainly my mindset circa 2006, and even somewhat circa 2015) but today I know that I don’t. I love my life. As mentioned, the previous post regarding this Wisconsin trip was written at a time in which my life felt very much in flux. Just got fired, new apartment, going out on vacation where I don’t know a thing (not everything has changed). This time I had a bit more of a revelation: we tried to plan out stuff to do all week but even though we had seven days of pretty much nothing to do, we still didn’t get it all done. This made me think differently about our own lives and how day-to-day we try to cram in as much as possible. We think this should be done in “real” life but in actuality, if most of us had all the free time a week could offer we still couldn’t prioritize it all. Part of the trick is to just enjoy it, and this trip has taught me all the more how to do just that: I love our apartment, my wife, our kitties, and my career. Getting away from it all is important, but so is understanding what “it all” really is. The next step now that I’m back in Minnesota and back to work, is continuing the work with a new perspective. Vacations (still) matter. It’s all in how you use the time, and what you get out of it. Hello and welcome to this installment of the 2018 Reading List. Last time I pondered the various meanings of White Noise. After the intensity of that novel, I decided to pivot toward some “lighter” fair, picking up an author who I hadn’t read in ages - Nick Hornby and his 1995 debut novel High Fidelity.
I’ve wanted to read this one since I saw Stephen Frears’ film of the same name years ago. I must say the book is many times better, and I found myself questioning why the movie took the story to America, because the humor does not translate as well. The story is about Rob, a middling, 35-year old record store owner in the UK who ultimately comes to realize his fear of death makes him jump in and out of relationships over the whims of a song, or a person’s reaction, or just because of his “itchy feet.” As I am turning that age this year, the book made me feel glad that my life has settled down and I have moved beyond the things that hold Rob back in the story. I want to take a look at some of the lessons writers can gain from a book like this. Use of humor. This is arguably the novel’s strongest suit, and once again I felt this aspect didn’t make it into the film version (which is funny in its own, depressing Americanized way). Hornby deftly wields the voice of Rob, and interjects tons of statement that indicate the author himself sees this character as the pathetic shell of a man he is. There is a ton of self-deprecating humor that deals with the various situations, and I thought Hornby was quite spot-on regarding the man-child aspects of our modern age. Switching up the narrative. This is something the film also tried capturing (to better effect IMO), the long monologues in which Rob is speaking to the reader/audience and pleading his case. At some points he even addresses the reader during a conversation with another character. Done right, this can be a very interesting way to tell a story from various angles/perspectives. Overall while I did enjoy the work, I don’t think I will be revisiting Hornby for a while. Reading the travails of a thirty-something Brit who hasn’t gotten any part of his life figured out may have resonated with me back in my twenties, but as a married (for almost eight years) man it struck me as a gigantic excuse for men to act their boorish selves way past that era of their lives and to expect women to pick up the pieces. In the age of #MeToo, this message doesn’t resonate as it once may have. But, if you’re looking for an easy read, Hornby does the job, and you’ll have a few good laughs along the way. Up next, I’m diving back into the female author recommendations, this time one who is very established by this point but I have never read: Joyce Carol Oates and her masterful 1996 novel We Were the Mulvaneys. Stay tuned for more updates as the Reading List progresses through the year! Mary and I met at Target in 2008, a year after we had both moved to Minneapolis (she’s from the Iron Range and I’m from *ahem* Iowa). A year later, we began dating. I still remember one of the first times we hung out. I drank some fake Absinthe and ended up crying because I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. Oh yeah, in her bedroom. Still not quite sure why she didn’t just leave me high and dry back then.
I was a drunk. Thankfully I had the good sense to make the right decision. Haven’t had much taste for alcohol since. For most of my life I didn’t know how to express or show emotion. Coming from a very cloistered, cultish and indoctrinating family I learned to substitute ritual and superficiality for actual feelings. This led to some early calamities. I almost broke up with her in New York City, for goodness sake. I was a moron, and wasn’t even aware of what I had. Each time, I knew deep down inside that this woman was the one for me. I had to trust that instinct each time, and it always worked out for the best. We moved in together in 2010, got married the next year. A small ceremony attended by a few members of each our families. Reception at Bunny’s in St. Louis Park. Challenges since then. She has bipolar disorder. She chose to take her medication, feeling I was worth it. She helped me finally break free of the influence of my family. Helped me see my former job was making me miserable. So many memories. The Law & Order weekend, and the food poisoning weekend. Going to dinner at that terrible Italian restaurant near 50th and France. Watching your reactions to certain movies, like in Ted when the bear starts getting ripped in half at the end. Seeing you struggle with that Kirby game, and with your addiction to cheese. And the heartbreak you’ve had in dealing with your (new) egg allergy. There are so many things with eggs in them! It’s not fair. You love our cats, Marble and Morrison with a passion I at first did not understand. That was until we had to say goodbye to Scout last year, and I realized I was really going to miss that feline. Seeing you fully as a person who is special enough to contain such a wide range of emotional territory. Mary’s birthday has been a challenge for me, as I’ve been pathetic at picking out gifts. Now I recognize it’s more in the spirit of what she means to me. This marriage goes so far beyond that. She is the real gift. She is an amazing, loving, caring woman who also happens to have a mental illness. I made the decision that the only way to handle it was to just love her unconditionally. No matter what. Happy birthday, baby. I look forward to many years of happiness with you. I love you. (Long time readers may consider this a companion piece to a previous note I wrote to Mary four years ago.) |
AuthorJohn Abraham is a published author and freelance journalist who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Mary and their cat. He is writing a speculative dystopian novel and is seeking representation and a publisher. Archives
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