producing make-believe

eyes blurring, it is time to stop

editing between a somewhat final

version by the publisher

the sensitivity reader’s suggestions

and my earlier proofing

but it is dawning on me

that we may be on the last lap

producing Exhalation

plagued again and again by illness

editor after editor experiencing

delays due to sickness in this real world

far more important than the production

date of my world of make-believe

warning in the early pages of Exhalation

Is this helpful as a warning in the early pages of my newest novel,  EXHALATION?

The NANDRIA Series has been my attempt to capture characters from the 1940s and early 1950s that created my world and my assumptions about what was valuable and who was not. As a child, i heard, and maybe repeated, words like colored, pickaninny, jigaboo, darky, coon, spade and spook if not niglet, bootlip, burrhead and monkey. I did not know they were slurs, but the Black people around me heard and knew the humiliation that these words and others were meant to deliver. I held so many assumptions i now know were invalid, but which i understood as the way the world was. Being family, i love both sides. It is my hope that these stories may give insight into the foibles and fears of each of us. Perhaps we may see each other as humanly vulnerable rather than evil.

too many tears

too many tears

at first revealing, then relieving

but a story—or a life—loses buoyancy

when sodden with remorse or self-pity

so i’ve needed to edit out many

wet cheeks and glistening eyes

sobs, wails and weeping moments

in Exhalation, my newest novel

i believe it stands stronger now