The Sound Is Its Own Thing

Six summers ago, in the span of a few weeks, I realized three long-standing dreams: 1) I started graduate school; 2) I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time; and 3) I started writing a book. 

I didn't know I was writing a book at the time. All I knew was that I had to write something to turn in to my advisor in a few weeks. I also knew that I wanted to incorporate more sensory detail and texture into my writing. So since I was sitting in a vacation home on Puget Sound, I wrote about what I saw, smelled, heard, tasted, and felt there. That little nature sketch led me to writing other sketches about seascapes around the world. 

Initially, I thought I'd collect these little prose sketches and self-publish them as a chapbook (similar in style to Lanterns). But when I put the essays together, I realized that something was missing. They were beautiful, but they seemed to lack heart.

Many pages and revisions and conversations with my advisors later, I realized that these essays weren't just about landscapes and oceans. What I was trying to do, without knowing it, was to write about spirituality, the topography of belief, and the longing for belonging in all its many forms. 

Slowly, slowly, a book was being born. 

That book is still taking shape, ever so slowly. (Too slowly if you ask me, but that's a topic for another time.)

What I want to celebrate today is the publication of that very first essay I wrote six years ago on Puget Sound -- and the serendipitous timing of its publication.

Last month, while I was back in the Pacific Northwest, my essay "The Sound Is Its Own Thing" was published in Flycatcher, a literary journal that explores what it means "to be native to this earth and its particular places." It publishes work that "engages the themes of empathy, ecology, and belonging, or that struggles with a lack of the same." Sounds like a good place for my work, no?

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of my essay: 

Floating in one of the southern fingers of Puget Sound, Harstine Island is like no other place I've been. It looks like the woods, but it smells like the sea. I come from the landlocked southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, all rolling hills and woodlands. I spent childhood vacations breathing in the salt air of a New Jersey barrier island. Here on Harstine, it's as though the two landscapes of my youth have been smashed together into one beautiful, interlacing juxtaposition. {keep reading}

This isn't the first time I've had one of my essays published. But this is the first one from the book to be published in full. I love that the first to be published is also the first that I wrote. And I love that I was back in the Pacific Northwest when it happened. 

The essays from my manuscript are some of the nearest and dearest to my heart, both for their subject matter and for the way writing (and rewriting) them have made me a better writer. They are true labors of love. I hope you'll read "The Sound Is Its Own Thing" and check out Flycatcher no. 5, Juneteenth, which is dedicated to the memory of those killed in the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Thank you to Flycatcher's editors, particularly founding editor Chris Martin, for their insightful feedback and for giving my work a home.