From a Single Word to Breathing Life...
It usually begins the same way. A word. Just one. Sometimes it arrives uninvited—sharp, insistent, flickering in the half-light of half-awake thought. Sometimes I have to hunt for it, turning over stones in the mind until something small and alive scurries out. From that word, a sentence cautiously takes shape. Tentative. Testing its own weight on the page like a fawn finding its legs. Then—almost without permission—a paragraph emerges. Suddenly there is momentum. Thoughts that lived curled tight inside my skull begin to uncurl, stretch, reveal their true size and color. They spill forward in a current I don’t entirely control. For me, it begins here: in the private miracle of something internal becoming external. A quote. A poem that finds its meter. A post that expands ever further. Sometimes the thing grows larger than I expected and a book might be birthed. It expands, it contracts. It breathes. Long languid sentences followed by short sharp ones—like a heartbeat finding its ...