Don's uncle Jim lived another 15 years after aunt Beulah died, nobody’d thought he would. The house was run down. He died there, on the farm, it was all they’d really had during the depression. They blew fish out of whitewater creek with dynamite. At least they always had food. Someone (not me) said the secret to writing is getting outside of your own brain. Your own brain's a messy place, full of overly dramatic emotional stuff and catch phrases and misconceptions and doubts and fears and preoccupation with stuff that just doesn’t matter. And your own brain gets distracted a lot by bright lights and smells and levers and buttons and (most of all) mirrors. So then the thing to do is wander outside of your brain, onto the front porch, or stoop if you like, of your brain, and sit or stand or hang around there, and talk to other people's brains, by which I mean talk just enough to where they'll talk and you can listen, and don't “write about” what they say, but just really listen, and enjoy the feeling of hanging out there on your stoop with them, and you can go over to theirs sometimes too, and you'll sing their name up toward their window (just like my mom & her sisters did when they were kids in Methuen) and they'll hear you, and so they'll know you're there and ready to play, and they'll come down & come out and you can play together, and that's the secret. Oh yeah... what was it the secret to again? What were we talking about? Writing, right? Well I mean but what is that? After the singing, and the talking, and the listening, and the dancing, and the adventures, and the bold mistakes, and the traveling across the country, shyly and bravely looking out for each other, and getting into situations together and learning to be honest with each other... after all that, what the hell is this writing thing, after all? Well here's what I know. You don't have to make it folksy. Don't make that mistake, just because you decided to give yourself permission to work on getting out of your own head. Getting folksy is just a way to make it *look* like you got out of your own head. Trying to retell someone else's story as if you were really there is just a weird mix of arrogant and pathetic. It's like saying “I understand” to somebody who deep down knows you couldn't possibly understand. It's condescending. Or else it just means you didn't honestly look or listen or see and you tried to draw a picture *of* a frog instead of looking at the frog and drawing what you saw. So instead, what the writing is, is your own little celebration. It's your way of practicing being able to say Look Look here Look at this This is cool This is so amazing I can hardly even believe what I'm seeing Except I have to believe it Because I'm seeing it And I wanted to share it And I wanted to share it with you And you might as well do it now, whenever you have a quiet alley in between the buildings of your brain. You might as well do it now, including the dumb, the pointless, the uninspired, the embarrassing, the incoherent, and the brilliant bits. You might as well treat it like a mundane job and just do it—it's so easy you convinced yourself it's hard—and just do it now, and if you want to you can say that that's the closest thing you have to “faith,” but you don't have to say that if you don't feel like it, I don't care. But you might as well do it now, because now would be a good time, my friend, listen, I'm not trying to scare you, but I'm trying to tell you, now would be a really good time. (2016)