The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song

I was four when I started writing stories. Mom said I would take a piece of college ruled paper, fold it in half, turn it sideways, draw a picture on the front (usually of a boy's face), write a title beneath that (something like The Boy), and then open it to write the story on the two inner "pages" (something like The boy cried love Mom), and then present it to her as the book I'd written for her. She kept each one. I counted them a couple weeks ago. There are four dozen such books, give or take.

I was thirty-two when I first started sending my stories out to journals and magazines. Now I'm forty-nine and I've had a lot of books published - novels, story collections, poetry, memoir - but it's still the same. I'm still writing books and handed them to people hoping they'll like them.

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Mom has my twelve published books on a shelf in her living room. But the shelf doesn't start with my first published book, the 2012 short story collection The Same Terrible Storm. No, sir. It starts with those handcrafted, often crayon-based titles from 1980. 

The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song.

And that grounds me.

It does. It grounds me every time I see them. 

More lately than ever before, I've needed something to do that, to pull me to the side, ease me into a chair, put an arm around my shoulder, and say, "Here's why you do this. Here's why you do this thing you do by yourself in a quiet room unsure if anyone will ever read what you've written." 

I have to be told, "Don't forget how it felt when you finished The Sun or The Tree and handed it to her and how happy she was to see it, to read it, to hug you when she was done."

I need to know that the reasons I do what I do remain as pure and honest as when I first started. Because if I lose that uncontaminated clarity, the last word I'll ever write will be this one.