5/4 UPDATE
Blog announcement coming tomorrow at 10pm. Don’t worry, if you’re following the blog (anyone out there?) and a big fan (at least maybe a little fan?) it’s not going anywhere. The post for Pedro Paramo and Friday’s look a Walker Percy’sThe Last Gentleman and The Second Coming are all done. I’m just saving the Pedro piece for a special reason for tomorrow. If you’re a fan of what we do here (either big or little!) in these parts: I think you’ll be excited. The Pedro Paramo post and announcement will both drop at 10pm Eastern. See you then!
5/1 Update
It’s been an interesting 19 weeks in my life. When I needed people most, the systemic failure of every institution meant to help me went quieter than the darkest graveyard. Doctors, agencies, insurance companies, individuals — all of them vanished into the shadows when I was at my lowest.
Their silence will not go unspoken. Not today. But soon. And when I write that essay, it will be vivid, lacerating, raw — a reckoning carved in language. They will feel the weight of their abandonment the way I felt it: from the inside out.
For now, I owe you an apology. My Friday deep dives were interrupted — partly for reasons I wrote about in The Bell Jar, partly because of what these nineteen weeks have carved into me.
But one thing has never changed: I don’t quit. I don’t vanish. I don’t stop. I never, ever, ever quit.
The good news: the Pedro Páramo piece is nearly done. If you’ve stayed with me through this stretch of silence, thank you. Truly. Your patience means more than you know — and it will be rewarded. The post goes up Monday.
And next Friday, we return to our rhythm with a first time double feature: Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman followed by its sequel The Second Coming.
I hope you’ll be here.
Because I know I will be.
When this blog began, I made you a promise. I said we’d wander through books together using three lenses: the literature professor I once hoped to be, the working writer shaped by craft and an BA/MFA, and the survivor who has spent nearly forty years navigating the desert of darkness.
I promised that as we walked through the wilderness with our little flashlight, I’d try to make the journey bearable. That when we turned over the unpleasant rocks, we’d look for the humor where we could — maybe even laugh and poke some fun at the shape we’d discovered of the strange creatures hiding underneath. And when we couldn’t laugh, we’d face the shadows anyway.
But sometimes, even with a flashlight, the path gets rough. Sometimes you wander into the graveyard. And in the graveyard, the ghosts start to sing. The deeper you go, the older the stones become, and the names carved into them begin to sound uncomfortably familiar. Eventually you stop hearing the ghosts altogether — because one name on one tombstone rings louder than the rest.
That happened to me with The Bell Jar.
It was the first book on this blog I hadn’t read before, and I wasn’t prepared for what it unearthed. In reading Sylvia Plath’s manual of descent, I realized I’d been handed a manual of my own — one I desperately wish I’d understood decades ago. You may have sensed a bit of that rupture in the last post. The silence afterward probably confirmed it.
Some of you may have wondered if this was one of those blogs that simply fades away, myself a ghost taken by the winds. Maybe you thought I’d gone too deep into the shadows, that the graveyard swallowed me whole.
You’d be right about one thing: I didn’t expect the cut.
But I’m still here.
Let me be clear: the blog isn’t going anywhere.
I’m still standing — bloody, bruised, hurting — but standing.
I’m still holding the flashlight.
I just have a few more scars now.
And scars aren’t failures. Scars mean you survived. Scars mean you’re not one of the names on the tombstones.
The past few weeks have been the hardest of my life — and that’s saying something. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the deep dive the last few Fridays. But next Friday, I’ll be back, and I’ll be howling louder than any ghost in the graveyard. We’ll walk together again. We’ll laugh where we can. We’ll face the shadows where we must. Together, we’re stronger.
On May 1 the weekly Friday deep dives return.
I really hope you’ll be here. It’s easier to face the dark when someone’s walking beside you.
When I return, I’ll talk a bit about what happened — the personal, the literary, the theoretical. We’ll look at reader‑response criticism and why The Bell Jar hit me the way it did. We’ll talk about relationships, shadows, and the strange ways books speak to us. And we’ll head into the graveyard of Pedro Páramo, where the voices are many, the humor is strange, and the chills are real.
It’s going to be deep.
It’s going to be long.
And it’s going to explain everything.
Onward.
.
