... Dead Letters for Living People, was published in April of 2008.
After the initial excitement of having my very own book available to the world and in my hands I flipped through the pages once again and discovered that in the past two years of constant revisions and re-formats to make the piece ready for print I had lost focus on the material. A lot of the beginning now struck me as dated and the arrangement of the stories didn't convey what I had in my mind...
I threw the book to a far corner of my mind and entered into a painting cycle, focusing my attention and will on the visual creations of paint on canvas, which I have been on ever since...
... With a break in my focus on painting, and some extra time at work, I took to re-editing the piece, Dead Letters for Living People. Without having to re-format the text, simply re-arrange the content, my entire attention was on what the collection would say and not how it looked... I wanted to make the book a piece onto itself, a collection of work that was in itself "the 25th poem in a collection of 24."
Looking through it all, I feel, that I have achieved that much.
What can I say about Dead Letters for Living People? It's a collection of short stories and poems that I have written over the last eleven years. It has been said, by good friends who have read the first edition, that the work can be dark, sometimes gruesome, other times melancholy, best not read straight through from beginning to end. But 8 times out 10, the people who have read it tell me that the work resonates, touches, even moves them to think, that the descriptions and metaphors are creatively beautiful and at times has the sense of a memory unawares. Much of it comes from personal experiences, but not all my own, and it's all fiction... or is it?
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