A sentimental piece on writing and writers I should probably have reread in the morning instead of posting at 1:30 AM.

Sitting in the faculty workroom halfway between midnight and one making copies… need to organize some thoughts before I sleep tonight. Not gonna bother to proofread, so… sorry in advance.

I’m up so late in part because I went out to a poetry reading tonight instead of staying home to do the necessary work. One of my students was the featured poet before an open mic night at a coffee house a half hour away. She moved to my beloved, backwards area upstate from Queens last year, and asked me shortly thereafter if I knew of any place where she could perform slam poetry— not a common request in my land of active farms and deer hunting. But I put her in touch with the local librarian and the librarian organized an open mic event around the work of our young Queens transplant, and it turned out, she’s legit. So the librarian reached out to the local Arts Council, and so…. half hour set of slam poetry for a 17-year-old tonight.

I’m twice her age. The six poets who followed her at the open mic before I had to leave (Dad duty called) could all have been my parents. I assume most of them have heard a slam poem or so in their day, but it’s hardly their genre. Little local open mic group tend to be welcoming, but these are still somewhat intimidating circumstances. Did I mention my student started slamming as a therapy method for stuttering?

There’s really only one way to say this: she killed it. I’ve seen a lot of people, from kids to accomplished professionals, squirm behind a microphone, and even for most of the good speakers, it’s simply a necessary audio tool. But when this girl is behind a mic, she is alive. Alive in that way that you sense she feels deeper and fuller than most mortals dream of, and if you’re in the room, you feel pure joy to get to borrow a tiny part of it. She’s vibrant and not a little anxious in daily life, but behind the mic she’s full on fire in the arteries.

So then I came home, and I heard that a writer had died. Never met the person, never read their work before, but disparate though we may all be, there’s still a sense of fellowship among us scribblers, and I felt compelled to look a couple pieces up. The fire blazed hot there, too, and I wish I had known the man. I wish I had gotten to see the fire blaze in the present and not just in memory.

I’m not a mystic, and this is not a piece about passing a torch. Writers don’t pass torches. Each writer gets handed a stick, and if we’re very good and very lucky and very dedicated, we might make it into a brand. And once every so often, somebody makes that brand into a real, honest-to-God torch and sets up the sort of blaze that gathers a fellowship in the dark. It burns for a while, and we might borrow a little of it to kindle our own nascent flames, but the torch is and always will be in the sole possession of that writer. As such, it will someday go out. We can read the remnants and remember, and that torch might have lit a hundred other fires that continue to burn, but the fire itself is gone.

But damned if it isn’t all descended from the same spark.

“People don’t read anymore.” “Readership is in decline.” “Look at the crap on the NYT bestseller list.” “Longform prose is dead.” “Poetry is dead.” “Theater is dead.” “Kids are too buried in their phones to read or write anymore.”

Bullshit. Stories of the death of literature have been greatly exaggerated. The fire’s still spreading; I saw it tonight.

There are people on Prose who have been writing since before I was a zygote, and they write some wonderful stuff. But this post is for the young ones. Do you realize how good some of your stuff is? Sometimes I’m reading pieces by 16, 15, 13 year olds (sometimes aware of it, sometimes have no idea), and I get to a particular spot, and all I can say is damn – that was a line.

There’s a lot wrong in the world, and we all know it. But I’m telling you, that fire is in good hands. The hands of the old guard; the hands of the young guard. The hands of the 70-year-old at the open mic tonight in that coffee house. My student’s hands. Your hands.

Burn on, Prosers.