WORDS STACKED ON TOP OF OTHER WORDS

DRAFTS OF BETWEEN TIDES ARE PILED ATOP MY grandmother’s dictionary. A foot thick, the dictionary is too big to set on my desk, so it’s found a home on the floor of my study. I found it in the barn at my grandparents’ house in Suffolk, Virginia, and asked if I could have it. My grandmother said it came from her parents’ house in Lynchburg, where it lived on a tall stand slanted at chest height. For now, I like seeing my words stacked on top of other words, but soon I’ll set them free. This batch of drafts is from the summer of 2015, so it’s past time to clean up this pile now that some 60,000 words have been written, cut, rearranged, rewritten–by hand and then typed and now typeset–for their debut in the pages of a book.