Coming Back Home

There’s a story in the New Testament Jesus tells of the prodigal son. It’s about a man who after squandering an inheritance and wasting a portion of his life returns home to his father and is forgiven.

In short it’s about a man who leaves home to search for home, only to find in his experience the stuff of whale bellies and darkness, before finally returning where he belongs.

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I used to write here on Prose pretty regularly under the username of Mfrobs. Why I’m back with a new name I don’t truly understand myself. I wanted a fresh start, or a clean slate for some reason although I cannot fully identify that reason.

I haven’t written anything going on two years now. I tried to put out my stories into the world of pristine literary magazines and it turned out to be a waters so deep whales swallowed me whole. I’ve learned I am not the writer I’ve always believed myself to be. This acceptance of information initially gave me an awful Blues from which I thought I’d never recover.

I am hoping that my return home means I’ll write again. I’m excited to write again for the first time in a long time. I remember that same stroke of electricity when I first came to Prose a couple of years ago before I left for deep waters I reckoned were greener pastures.

I believe Prose to be a home for the record of my prose, like a catalog of stories. Like a one man literary magazine of sorts.

It’s an act of joy, an act of creation and should be treated as such. I don’t have to make a living from it as I always dreamed it, I just have to do it so long as I’m living.

So I am back as the writer formerly known Mfrobs. Now as LeotieReview.

There are some writers on here who in my year-and-a-half or-so of absence never escaped my mind.

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Rlove327 is a professional. Plain and simple. When you read his work, you can tell he’s polished and published. You can trust him as a reader, meaning wherever the narrative goes, no matter what, there’s a great reward. It’s a simple concept and rare quality.

What’s maybe more than this is his determination for encouragement.

He was the first to comment on one of my stories.

The first time Southern Icon of a writer Barry Hannah read Flannery O’Connor, he was immersed in her abilities to deliver grotesque imagery with such power and grace.

I felt the exact same when I delved into the stories of BonnieBoo. She can do it all. From highly technical prose to the trashiest of narrators, she always swings for the heart and always lands.

It’s a cliche but has never been truer than when speaking of Huckleberry_Hoo that he is the last of a dying breed. He writes with a Mississippi mud and gritty punch that I strive often to do myself and fail just as often. He makes it look easy.

KMCassidy is a common soul, like a long lost sister. I always look forward to her posts because they stir the soul and expand the mind. She is unafraid to speak her truth and always does it with grace. She inspires any who read her.

There are many more writers on here I know that I’m missing and I could delve deeper in describing each of the ones I’ve mentioned, but it is enough for now to honor those who I’d say are the reason I could not stay away forever.

Wherever I stray I reckon my home will always be here at Prose. It gives me that fantastic energy so necessary or vital for a writer, that you can write anything, that anything is possible, if only ever-so-briefly, in that moment of the act of writing, that feeling of the world being released from the weight of your shoulders and being slid down into the weight of your palm.