October 10, 2024
Sometime in the spring of 2022, I was looking through some old poems I had written, searching for inspiration, and found a couple of lines I liked in a harshly scrawled poem I had been using as a bookmark in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. They read, at the time:
“She’s got the implied motion of a cloud that’s already formed
But hasn’t decided if it’s going to rain yet.
They wanted to see what poor really looks like.
They were right to know they could find it here.
Maybe they were hoping I’d be the next victim of the opioid crisis,
Right there in front of them—and maybe I was considering it too.”
The trio of couplets formed a part of a poem which will never be published, but there was something in them I liked. Not the two characters I was trying to describe, but that pesky little narrator whose voice I hadn’t quite found.
I turned those lines into prose and started writing. Eventually I found that narrator, a tough little nut from Bellwether, Virginia named Jesse Strotherton. Eventually she told me her story and over the course of two years I wrote it down. That story became what releases today as my debut novel, 𝘼𝙣 𝘼𝙥𝙥𝙖𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙉𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙚.
bell hooks once wrote, “Poetry is a useful place for lamentation…poems are a place where we can cry out.” Maybe this book is my sixty-thousand-word attempt to write a poem which cries out in a way with the meaning I have been searching for. It’s fitting, perhaps, that I used a quote from bell hooks as my epigraph.
I am immensely proud of this book. It took a lot of late nights and tears and doubt. A lot of moments of being sure it would never be a book; and moments of knowing it would. I started it in an apartment in Radford, Va. and finished the first draft on an airplane somewhere over eastern Tennessee. It was a journey of discovering a part of me I didn’t know existed, and it was a labor of love.
The book, more than anything, was a place to pour a piece of my soul. It’s a love letter to Appalachia, where part of my heart will always live, and takes on hard subjects that are important to me. Hopefully it does that in a way that’s enjoyable to readers, I don’t know.
What I do know is that the book no longer belongs to me. It belongs to the reader, and I hope you like it.