a P.S. (sorta)

So, I took the Lawrence poem in my last post from The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, which was edited by Kevin Young, and published by Bloomsbury--my second publisher.

This is the good news I was alluding to around two posts ago. My second novel, tentatively titled Salvage the Bone, should be appearing in fall of 2011, and a nonfiction work, partly about my brother, will be published shortly afterward, both bought forth by the wonderful folks at Bloomsbury.

There are at least two places I tear up whenever I watch The Neverending Story. (Just follow me for a moment, here.) The first is when Artax sinks into the Swamp of Sadness and dies. I've cried at that part every time I've watched it since I was around seven or so, and I saw it for the first time in the library of DeLisle Elementary School. The second part that I cry at now that I am an adult is when Atreyu meets the rock-biter at the end of the film, just as the last bits of Fantasia are being ripped asunder by the Nothing. The mountainous rock-biter sits with his legs spread, his hands lying palm up in his lap, and he is crying. He looks down at Atreyu and says, "They look like big, good, strong hands." He tells Atreyu that when the Nothing came, he was not able to hold the racing snail, the nighthawk, the stupid bat, that the Nothing ripped his friends away from him. The Nothing erased them. The rock-biter looks at his hands, his face sad, so recently convinced of his feebleness, his failure, and he says, "They look like good, strong hands, don't they?"




Let's hope I can hold on to my stories and tell them well. Let's hope that these are good, strong hands.