In the corner of my room is a small suitcase, packed over a year ago, ready to tour the world. That was to be my traveling work, which never came to pass.
I am still here.
Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write. Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Meditations, crime novels, and poetry, hidden in stacks of notebooks, written in every stage of life. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes. Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community. Each week I will post my weekly ruminations, shards of poetry, music, and musings on whatever subject finds its way from thought to pen, news of the mind, pieces of this world, free to all.
On Tuesdays, subscribers will find my first serial, The Melting. No one has read these pages. A journal of my private pandemic. My first entry was exactly one year ago, on April 7th, the night before the full Worm Moon. Tonight, I am sitting at my desk, under my skylight, that same moon overhead. I will post the first few entries for everyone. Then, for my paid subscribers, I will post an installment every week, as well as posts relating to its expanding world, finally fulfilling my Jo March fantasy as she serialized her Gothic tales for the newspaper.
I offer The Melting, words known only by the pages themselves, to be given a new life here. In my Substack world, I hope that you, dear reader, will be my notebook.
I was in some other category, but I couldn’t find my way back. Not sure if you remember a small club in a small town in Connecticut….. The Shaboo Inn, Mansfield Center, CT. My best friend and I were Freshman in High School and we went to see you on the second date and my parents grounded me. My best friend’s parents were also upset, but he threatened his mother with a steak knife telling her he was not going to miss the Dead Boys, a couple days later. Stiv loved the story…I guess someone had told him and he invited Jeff (my friend) back stage. I was probably home dropping acid and listening to Television. FYI - you were amazing the night we saw you….the music through those years are some of my favorite!
Patti Smith Group
The Shaboo Inn, Mansfield Center, CT -
Jul 24, 1978
Jul 25, 1978
Dead Boys
The Shaboo Inn, Mansfield Center, CT
Jul 26, 1978
I used to see you around Pratt when you and Robert Maplethorp hung out aroujd Ed and Connie Hansen, but we never actually spoke.
Your comment about Ms March writing her weekly Gothic Tales resonated. I think of the Societies of Correspondence of the English woking classes. probably my ancestors were among them. They published a weekly paid newsletter, not in the newspaper, just a letter that was revolutionary.