Mood: Tired
Drinking: Tea
The time has come to party.
Tomorrow (Thursday), is the big shebang for The Secrets of Falling… Wine, women, song, possibly an interpretive dance from our friend Melissa. (But only if we spin some “Billy Jean”.)
Seriously, folks, it’s a big deal.
The fabulous miss Kathy Azada and I have been working on our book for over a year, and it feels like we’ve been planning our party for about that long, too, but that would be crazy.
We’re exhausted. We’re exuberant. We’re tired. We’re terribly excited. We’re both little bundles of sleep-deprived joy. (Perhaps that’s why I’m rambling so?)
Onward to the point! To all of my fellow San Franciscans and outlying Bay Areans, we’ll be so happy to see you tomorrow at Space 180 (from 6-9pm). We’ll be so thrilled to unveil our book. And show off all of Kathy’s artwork. And introduce you to all the other people who made this book happen.
For all our further-away internet friends, we promise that the book itself is almost as good as the party.
I’ve wanted to follow up Shedding the Angel Skin with a second book for years now, and Secrets is well worth the wait, even for me.
The theme of the book is the double-edged nature of hope. How impossible it is to live without hope, but how painful it is, how slippery it is, to hang on to hope. Secrets is built around a four-part poem titled “Spei Captiva Sum,” which means “I am a prisoner of hope.” (I have it tattooed on my right wrist as an ever-present reminder.)
Many of the 53 poems in Secrets were written for or about or around two of my very dear friends, who have both been on their own separate journeys to hell and back over the last three years.
I almost lost both of them, at different times. Watching them struggle and fall and climb back up and fall again — watching them, and struggling with them, and hoping against hope that they would get back up again — it inspired many of the words now printed on pages for others to read and maybe even take comfort in.
I think it matters, it makes a difference to know that in the midst of your bleakness, in the depths of your darkness, hope still flickers somewhere. Hope can be yours, once again.
I’ll be reading a few of my favorites from Secrets tomorrow, around 7 p.m. So be sure to stop by — new friends, old friends, internet friends and strangers. …It’s only a day away!
-Lo, who still knows all the words.
LaDonnaWitmer 