Why I Write

In 1938, John Steinbeck wrote in his journal, “Sometimes I write to promote social change. Sometimes I write to punish injustice. Sometimes I write to celebrate heroism. But all the time I write to help us try to understand each other.”

In my favorite story, “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “He had no mysticism about turtles although he had gone in turtle boats for many years. He was sorry for them all, even the great trunk backs that were as long as the skiff and weighed a ton. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.”

As a writer, I have a heart like the turtles and the old man. I have feet and hands like theirs, too.

Sometimes my hands get calloused and broken from trying to heal people who have been left on the side of the road and from trying to overturn the injustice that put them there.

Sometimes, my feet get tired and broken from going to places where no one else wants to go and writing stories no one else wants to read.

Sometimes, my heart feels cut up and butchered from going and being and writing.

But my heart keeps beating.

And it’s all to help us try to understand each other.

Hilcias in the Fields

 from fragments of Hilcias’ and Taki’s notebook

When he was two, his mamí talked with him in the language of poetry as she walked him tied to her back down the long rows of peach trees in the South Carolina sun. 

She reached up into a tree, took a peach in her calloused hand, and rubbed it’s fuzzy skin against his soft cheek. 

She whispered,

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres

porque de las praderas planetarias

otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites

la multiplicación del universo.

I love the handful of earth you are.

Because of it's meadows, vast as a planet,

I have no other star. You are my replica

of the multiplying universe.

She did.

She waited for him to talk back to her with toddling talk, to say to her with wondering words “mamí”and “amo” and “tú,” but he didn't say a thing. 

He only looked at her with wide, unblinking, brown eyes, the color of the deep parts of the earth, and jutted out his little, bottom lip as if to say, "There’s much I could say, but I can't.”

Now, people ask him, "What's your name?" or "How old are you?" or "How are you?" and he answers them with whistles instead of with words. 

They ask his abuelo, "What's wrong with him?" and the old man simply sighs the sigh of one who carries heavy loads on his back and in his heart.

“Dios sabe,” he answers. “God knows."

Writer’s Prayer

 Writer’s Prayer

I pray my book will appear in the bookstore.

I pray my novel will be published.

I pray my book will find a reader.

I pray I write a good novel.

Amen.

(from The Tale of the House of Physics by Yōko Ogawa)

Taki the Little Light

fragments of Hilcias’ and Taki’s notebook

The Iñuit word for caterpillar is aurviq.

The word for butterfly is taqalakisaq.

When I was a little girl, my aapaaluk, my grandpa, held my hand and toddled with me around the spring land of Point Hope.

The land wakes in the Arctic spring, when the sun moves higher and longer across the sky, after the Arctic winter, when it sleeps the cold, cold months, sometimes in twenty-four hours a day of darkness, under a heavy blanket of snow and ice.

“Ataguna,” said my aapaaluk.

Look.

It is a taqalakisaq.

A butterfly.”

Then he was silent.

He is always silent after he tells me to look at something.

“It’s because I want you to taaqsiulgu, Little Light,” he tells me time and time again, “I want you to see in the darkness.

And you cannot do that with too much talking.”

I was learning to look AND to see.

I am learning, still.

I saw the butterfly.

It was beautiful.

So very beautiful.

“It is an Arctic Fritillary,” he said.

“The yellow in it’s wings reminds us of the sunlight off of the Chukchi Sea, Little Light, the sunlight that brings us warmth, the sunlight that brings us hope.

Hope.

The taqalakisaq is born out of the aurviq, the caterpillar.

It becomes the taqalakisaq through ilimmaq, through metamorphosis.

The shaman metamorphoses to fly through the air or the sea to learn the old ways to bring back to the people.

To help the people.

The aurviq, like the shaman, metamorphoses.

Three living things, Little Light - the caterpillar, the shaman, and the bowhead whale - hold the world.

They hold the world.”

I held out my hand.

The taqalakisaq landed on my palm.

My aapaaluk was silent again. 

This time he was silent for a long time.

He looked at the butterfly in my palm.

He saw.

“Little Light,” he said, after the butterfly lifted off of my hand and flittered off into the sunlight. 

Atanya.

Listen.”

You cannot do THAT with too much talking, either.

Sometimes, though, when he really wants me to tusaanigluk, to hear and want to hear more, he uses the word atanya for listen, instead of the common word ‘a’, he will say a few more words.

“Your name is Taklaingiq. 

It is the old language for the agviq, the bowhead whale. 

Your name is similar to the name for the butterfly, taqalakisaq.

The agviq’s name is similar to the name for the caterpillar, aurviq.

The old way teaches that names are important.

The old way teaches that all things are connected.

What does this mean to you, Little Light?

What does this mean for you?

Ataguna.

Atanya.

He held my hand again, the hand that had held the butterfly, and we toddled on.

Tennesse

from fragments of hilcias’ and taki’s notebook

Hilcias’ eyes opened to the smell around him.

He rubbed the sleep out of of his eyes with the back of his hand and saw a wiry man with greasy, slicked back hair smelling of b.o. and cigarette smoke sitting beside him.

The man was directing a woman holding an infant in one arm and the hand of a toddler in the other to sit in the seat in front of them.

He was also directing a boy and a girl about Hilcias’ age to sit beside them.

None of them were paying any attention to him, but he kept on talking as if they couldn’t function without him.

“Lissen yere,” he said a bit too loudly. 

“Git yourselfs settled down now. We got a ways to go, and we don’t need no cryin’, wigglin’, playin’ nor poutin.’ Hope we’ll be thar ‘fore nightfall.”

The man had one bag, a tattered olive green rucksack that looked as if it had seen action in a war, that must have held the traveling goods of the whole family.

He tried to stuff it in the luggage bin above his head, giving it a hard whack with his bony fist as the driver moved toward him telling him it wouldn’t fit and that he’d have to put it in the storage compartment below the bus.

“Well god dammit then,” cursed the man, “Least let me git out the bottle o’ formla for the baby. Its momma cain’t make no milk so we got to feed it this yere ‘spensive stuff.”

The woman  turned bright red, her ears the color of the tomatoes he and his abuelo picked in the early summer on the Johns Island farms as the man looked away from her and back to the bus driver, who was wrestling the bag back up the aisle to the door.

The other passengers had to lean toward the windows as he passed by.

Hilcias wondered if they did this because of the size of the bag or the smell of it, for it had taken on the odor of its owner.

“Wait one more minute, thar,” commanded the man.

The driver ignored him in much the same way the family did.

“Well shit,” the man sighed as he collapsed beside Hilcias.

“I needed my Bible out from thar,” he whispered. “It’s good luck to hold it when our lives are in the hands o’ somebody like that thar driver,” he winked at Hilcias.

Within a minute, the man’s head dropped back against the padded seat of the bus and he was asleep.

Hilcias listened carefully and heard a crackling in the man’s lungs and a whoosh click in his heart.

“Hmmm,” thought Hilcias, “This man’s had a hard life. He’s too young for his body to sound like that.”

The teenaged boy who was sitting behind Hilcias leaned over the seat and put his hand on his head.

He pushed until Hilcias turned and looked at him.

“Hey, you one’nem Meckicans, ain’t you? You speak English or only Meckican?”

“You Meckicans ought’a go back what you come from,” exclaimed the boy.

“You just a bunch a pieces’a shit, ain’t ya?”

Hilcias looked into the boy’s cloudless blue eyes.

What he saw there surprised him.

The boy’s question was more out of curiosity than suspicion.

The boy had heard those words before, though not in a question.

He’d heard them in an accusation.

“Look at them damn Meckicans,” he had heard people say.

“They come here to ‘Merica and take everthin’ from us and don’t give nothin’ back.”

Hilcias smiled at him.

That’s all he could think to do.

Then he turned resolutely back toward the road in front of them.

He was very still and very quiet until the boy nodded off and slept fitfully as the wheels of the bus thumped the asphalt of the interstate into the mountains of Tennessee.

ode to beauty

I sit on the end of the old double bed, my bare feet flat upon the ground.

I look closely as you lower your dress to the floor see the cloth touch the wood without a sound.

I look closely into your brown eyes and see the stars twinkling in a stream below the mountains on a dark moonless night.

I look closely at your sonrisa and see the sunrise fill our small room with gentle morning light.

I look closely at your naked body and see breathtaking beauty so beloved

as you take me deep inside of you, an ode to making love.

- trevor scott barton, an ode to making love, 2023

Ode to beauty

I sit on the end of the old double bed, my bare feet flat upon the ground.

I look closely as you lower your dress to the floor see the cloth touch the wood without a sound.

I look closely into your brown eyes and see the stars twinkling in a stream below the mountains on a dark moonless night.

I look closely at your sonrisa and see the sunrise fill our small room with gentle morning light.

I look closely at your naked body and see breathtaking beauty so beloved

as you take me deep inside of you, an ode to making love.

- trevor scott barton, an ode to making love, 2023

Sento-me na ponta da antiga cama de casal, meus pés descalços no chão.

Observo atentamente enquanto você abaixa seu vestido até o chão, vendo o tecido tocar a madeira sem fazer barulho.

Fixo o olhar nos seus olhos castanhos e vejo as estrelas cintilando em um riacho abaixo das montanhas numa noite escura sem lua.

Examinando de perto seu sorriso, vejo o nascer do sol preencher nosso pequeno quarto com a suave luz matinal.

Concentro-me em seu corpo nu e vejo uma beleza deslumbrante, tão amada,

enquanto você me leva profundamente dentro de você, uma ode ao amor.

- Trevor Scott Barton, uma ode ao fazer amor, 2023.