John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023) and Dead Photographs, (Stubborn Mule Press, 2024). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
In Eleanor Vincent’s latest memoir, she quotes a therapist who describes marriage as a joint project both partners need to look after, like a puppy. The “puppy” becomes a third character in Disconnected. Eleanor and Lars both have individual life stories, but as they interact, the partnership takes on a life of its own.
The story follows her late-in-life relationship: meeting, dating, breaking up with, reconciling with, marrying, and ultimately divorcing Lars. Bits of backstory or asides that inform the present but aren’t quite long or relevant enough for full chapters get combined into “Things I Left Out,” in each of the memoir’s three sections.
These asides, and short chapters, fill out Vincent’s story and reflect her willingness to do self-analysis and examine her background and her relationship in full. Vincent describes where she lives, a “wealth-adjacent” SF Bay Area suburb, near things she likes: trees, order, quiet. She acknowledges that her surroundings might represent the peace she craved growing up in a high-conflict family with an abusive father and parents married to each other to conceal being LGBTQ. On a smaller scale, we see how her psyche and childhood background give her a need for order inside the home. This helps us understand why staying tidy and organized is important to her, and how it becomes a conflict with Lars and his need to feel secure by holding onto things.
She also does some work to understand Lars by talking with him as much as he will allow and reading up and joining support groups for partners of autistic people. She shares information she has read about how many autistic people think and feel and applies that to her husband. Her efforts to understand his point of view and his preferences give the book depth and fill out the story so it’s the tale of a marriage “puppy” rather than a lonely wife’s monologue. Other societal issues, such as age discrimination, further weaken the fragile “puppy,” as they can no longer afford marriage counseling when Lars gets wrongly fired from work.
Vincent varies sentence length and starts chapters at points of dramatic tension, then fills in backstory to catch readers up to that point. The whole book isn’t overly long, but covers an entire relationship’s life cycle. It includes bits of humor amid tragedy, usually through witty after-the-fact observations. For example, Lars would go silent or discuss random scientific facts during moments of tension. Once, desperate to be heard, Vincent beat his chest, then brought them both inside her place so that “the neighbors would not see the spectacle of an old woman beating up Bill the Science Guy.”
Disconnected is one story of one marriage with one autistic person involved. Eleanor and Lars do not represent every mixed-neurotype marriage out there, and Lars is not like every autistic person. While Lars does share some traits with many autistic people, everyone’s experiences will vary. Vincent conveys this through focusing intently on her own life and relationship for the first two-thirds of the book and only bringing in information on autism near the end as part of her desperate journey to understand Lars. This highlights that this is a memoir, not a textbook illustrating the inevitable struggles within all intimate relationships with autistic people.
As Vincent mentions, many experts now say that we should think of autism as a different neurotype with strengths and weaknesses, like a different and equally valid culture, rather than as simply a less able version of the neurotypical brain. And Lars shows some solid strengths: in situations where social expectations are cut and dried, he can navigate a whole room with ease, he is excellent with travel logistics and phone repair, and a gifted zydeco dancer.
Still, while the neurodiversity model may make sense on a broader cultural basis, and a human rights basis, if a particular person is in a situation where they need to do things to function that are difficult for their neurotype, they (and those close to them) can experience autism as a disability. And Vincent underscores how it’s important to honor people’s personal experiences and struggles without judgment, which would apply to autistic people as well as their neurotypical relatives.
As Vincent painfully discovers, sometimes love and the desire to make a relationship work is not enough when varying neurotypes present clashing emotional needs. And sometimes there isn’t much one person can do when their partner has already given up and checked out of the relationship. Sometimes people are just better off apart, and it’s best to separate with dignity and let the “puppy” go to a good home elsewhere.
Departures
losing CO2 in the Jet2 queue,
staining Carhartt with heartache,
barcodes beep & promises pall
between staff & sightseers
& parents cheering up children
& new lovers arriving
chinos & eyes empty
into a grey tray, passing
Saint Peter with an automatic
& cutting through pictureless clouds
to arrivals, you were waiting,
& you opened your arms, like wings
Villa Diodati
like a leaf, you were ambered,
acquiescent, ambling the grounds –
gravel crunched with Converse
& a tableaux daydream:
Byron sailing, or the Shelleys
in love – & then, the villa doors
unveiled untouched antiques
& portraits eyeing every word
like the porcelain it was spoken over –
& sobering outside, ringtones
revealed Omicron will part you,
for months or more, before
the sun left for another city,
& the stars began to emerge
with the shyness of spiders
Geneviève
there you were: star-crossed
& stark, nipping the neck
of Calvinus, flicking Winstons from windowsill,
scribbled MA sonnets
& scrunched love letters smothered
under feet & frown,
Twelve Carat Toothache
cutting the silence,
your rib cage crushing, lungs
heaving in the June heatwave
with undiagnosed pneumonia
& pleural effusion,
coughing blood
& wheezing cheater
Light Years
another spin around the sun, & since, I’ve learnt that every mirror needs light: if light is c = 1/(e0m0)1/2 = 2.998 X 108m/s (James Clerk Maxwell, circa. 1864), it’s the magnetism keeping us close – if light is electromagnetic radiation (Wikipedia), it’s the life of moths – if light is a wave, it's scattering most from our hearts of silvered sand & limestone – if light is The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), then it’s you refracting all my colours – & if light is a distance, it’s always between us, because I have realised there is not a greater love poem than a blank piece of paper, or the cursor, blinking for us to begin, reflecting me in the screen where you have been waiting for light years
Capetonian Dillon Israel’s dream: on starting out, the unproduced playwright and his city
Dillon Israel is a South African actor, creative, storyteller and an unproduced playwright. He lives in Ravensmead, a quiet suburb in Cape Town, near Tygerberg Hospital. He enjoys cooking, baking cakes, making desserts and he loves the outdoors. He reached out to me. He was looking for a mentor. He has a lot of energy. I can hear it in the sound of his voice as I listen to the voice messages he sends me. I came into contact with Dillon Israel in September of this year.
He is twenty-nine years old and wants to “make it”, like so many people in this country in their twenties, hungry to work in the film and television industry. He loves watching South African television, Chinese films and Turkish shows. He asks me to explain the meaning of his dreams. I tell him that there’s symbolism and meaning behind everything in a dream. We have become friends. He shares with me his hopes and his dreams. I tell him that he was born with a gift, but whether he believes me or not is another matter.
We talk about our struggles and depression, loneliness and hardships, the church, mindfulness, having an “attitude of gratitude” and prayer. We talk about our problems, the major issues in our lives that we have in common, we laugh, discuss the antics of our dogs. We tell each other that our mothers find it difficult to say they are proud of us but that we know they are proud of us anyway. We have brought happiness into each other’s lives.
By day he attends a college situated in Bellville in Cape Town. He loves his mother, his dog, Snowy, watching films on Netflix, his niece, writing, listening to Adele and gospel music, making malva pudding on a Sunday, going to the shops with his mother and, like the North American writer John Irving, being alone. Dillon Israel is a young man who prefers his own company to that of others. He lives faith and has a spiritual outlook on life. He prays, has taught me to remain prayerful in my own life and encourages me in my own faith.
This Capetonian storyteller is soft spoken, thoughtful, highly sensitive, an empath, what you would describe as a dreamer and he thinks before he speaks. Nobody has encouraged him to pursue this dream, writing for the stage. Not his family, not his teachers in high school and not the “drama people” he reached out to in the industry. Most certainly, no one has ever told him to become a poet. When I tell him that he can achieve this, he is nervous. He says that he doesn’t believe me. I hope his thinking will change his belief system.
This is why I text him on a daily basis and motivate him. I want to inspire him as much as he has inspired me. I can’t understand the world we live in where teachers do not encourage their students to read and to write. Both are difficult to master but can increase the learner’s self-confidence and help develop personal growth, improve self and lead to an individual having a fulfilling life. I want his dream to come true like mine did. I don’t want him to struggle as I did in youth in making my dream to become a full-time writer a reality. I tell him he has his entire life ahead of him. That he has enough time for the inner vision that he has for his life to manifest and become a reality. I ask Dillon Israel if he reads. He doesn’t like reading, he says. He prefers watching television and series on Netflix. I can’t relate.
I grew up in a house filled with books, rarely watching television. Books were my university, my school of life. It was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that inspired me to go back to writing after a period of illness and hospitalisation for manic depression. I found a message of hope in Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, in the novels of Fitzgerald, the masculine power of Jay Gatsby, John Updike, and in the poetry of Rilke. These authors, Rilke, brought me back to life. We come from two different generations, Dillon Israel and I. We are as different as chalk and cheese, two polar opposites. I tell him that in this industry you can’t take rejection personally.
I tell him to always be humble and kind, like the country musician Tim McGraw’s song. I give him life advice. I give him writing advice. I tell him to write what he knows, that he should write from his own life experience, that he should make characters out of the people he knows, passersby. I tell him to do a poetry course with award-winning South African writer and poet Finuala Dowling. I tell him that doing an online course in creative writing will help him. Already his English is improving. I talk to him as if he was a younger sibling just about to start out in the world. I talk to him about looking for opportunities, I talk to him about responsibility and the writing life, seeking daily inspiration. He tells me I’m changing his life. When I think of Dillon Israel painstakingly writing in a notebook on his desk I think of the poetic genius of Ocean Vuong.
Today he is listening to Jimmy Swaggart. We don’t have much time to talk. I’m working on a novel with both a modern and historical context and perspective and he has a project that he’s working on for college. I send him links to poetry by Russian Anna Akhmatova (“Memory of Sun”, Austrian-German Rainer Maria Rilke (“You Who Never Arrived”) and the North American Charles Bukowski (“Bluebird” and “So Now”). He is excited about writing. So far, he is making a lot of progress. He has disciplined himself and I am impressed by his confidence, his style of writing and I’m just happy that he is happy, that he’s starting to believe in himself.
It’s such an honour and a privilege to help another person, suffering for their art, to help them achieve their dreams, to tell them that absolutely nothing stands in their way. He might not know who Athol Fugard is, the late Taliep Peterson and Dawid Kramer’s productions that made it to New York and the United Kingdom, but I can inspire him to reach those heights. Maybe one day he gets to “pay it forward” and mentor someone of his own.
I confide in him my love of Barbra Streisand films, Yentl and The Way We Were. He tells me his parents used to enjoy watching films like that. I feel my age. We forget about the lonely journeys that forge our poetic and literary forays. The childhood that we create in our imagination, the childhood from memory. I feel that mentorship is a calling. I fear that people think there is no more reading of books to be done. Now there is the reign of social media that has taken over our access to information. I believe in dreamers. I too was a dreamer once upon a time. I say good night to Dillon and his Snowy and finish watching a documentary on Anna Akhmatova. Afterwards I write a poem on aspects of the personality affected by loneliness.
The music in the poetry speaks to me, speaks to my soul. Tomorrow, Dillon Israel will set off for college, nurture the dream of being a playwright, and writing for the stage full-time in his heart. I’ll be at my desk working on my latest novel.
David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
Just like the embedded fragrance forever in my mind
Invisibly color the uncolored
And fade away the veiling blurred
Sparkling eyes having visions inside
Innocence offers ravishing rides
O’ The fragrance of generosity and humble
Regards, Respect, and dignified dale make it a bubble
A feeling of expressing is now double
Fragrance of all styles
Fragrance that touches the unheard miles
Grooming the dimness into eager lights
O’ the Dazzlingly fragranced like a hearth
Dispersal at the end of your breath.
Tajalla Qureshi, a radiant literary gem from Pakistan, stands as a beacon of creative brilliance. A wordsmith par excellence, she masterfully blends introspection, devotion, and creativity into compelling narratives that transport readers to enchanting dimensions. Her art lies in weaving words into wonders.
Additionally, a true polymath in the literary world, Tajalla’s portfolio spans poetry, creative columns, essays, and flash fiction. Each piece is a testament to her unyielding passion and finesse, intricately designed to evoke profound emotions, spark vivid imagination, and inspire the human spirit.
On the flip, celebrated as an international interviewer, columnist, and editor, Tajalla’s voice resonates far and wide, captivating audiences around the globe. Her unique perspective, lyrical style, and profound insights have cemented her place as a leading figure in contemporary literature. Furthermore, her work exemplifies the transformative power of words. With every sentence, she crafts an intricate tapestry of emotions, ideas, and lived experiences, inviting readers to embark on a journey of introspection, growth, and boundless wonder.
a Gothic French princess on a hill overlooking the Sunset Strip a white stone beauty with a casual toss of gray head of slate roofing earthquake proof, turreted the castle still stands almost a hundred years of tread and wear parties, scandals, affairs of musicians and actors of writers making history.
They came under cover of darkness entered silently through the garage, no need for anyone to spot them no bright-lit lobby their shame, their value in the critical eyes of a culture where privacy not guaranteed but at the castle they could mourn, drink, create inspired and protected by the knowing kindly staff.
A glamorous shabby-chic version of the Loire Valley’s Chateau d’Amboise opened as apartments on the teeter edge of the stock market crash cheap rooms with cachet.
The movie studios funded Chateau suites for cheats to preserve their stars’ gleam the new owner made it safe for Hollywood royalty the hunchback manager the in-house phone operator the Garage Boys valets and maids always silent on the misfits, iconoclasts, outcasts, deviants, gays after the drunken fights trashed rooms, broken hearts the news had no clue.
The New York writers came uncomfortable in LA at home in the Chateau Hollywood-on-the-Hudson and they wrote scripts Rebel without a Cause, Sunset Boulevard, Music Man, Ben-Hur articles by Dominick Dunne on the infamous O.J. trial and so much more.
Run by eccentrics for eccentrics the castle fell to careless hands holding companies, banks threatened foreclosure the downslide of the aging belle at the seedy top of the hill shag rugs patched with tape peeling paint in shreds, must furnishings broken fixtures shabby-genteel, a place outside of time.
The new owner updated an elegant conversion with old-world charm a historic cultural monument where hijinks could continue: Jim Morrison fell off the roof a lyricist shot himself John Belushi overdosed the hideout hit the papers the Chateau an open secret of legendary, fashionable funk.
A new era, a new owner New York nightclub magnate full restoration upgrade to a chic upscale loftiness a buzzy bar scene, swanky showbiz party exclusives splashy bashes for the stars their premieres and awards.
So now the old girl looks down a long nose from her perch on the hill over the new Hollywood still classic, still historic with a modern LA brand.
The Chelsea (1884-present)
“You’ve got a great future behind you.” —old billboard in Times Square
New York’s most illustrious third-rate hotel the place Leonard Cohen made love to an unforgiving Janis Joplin and Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again and Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur Miller the play on his iconic ex-wife Bob Dylan the lyrics for Blonde on Blonde and Dylan Thomas drank until he died young.
The largest, longest lasting creative community in the world designed as a haven for artists in the old theater district a cooperative building twelve stories of red brick in Queen Anne Revival style with wrought iron balconies a homey atmosphere in-room fireplaces a rooftop terrace a basement kitchen with dumbwaiters private dining rooms and a public café.
Attracting a cross-section of all social classes the rent affordable the rooms soundproofed for musicians and writers north-facing windows in studios for painters short-term or long-term a friendly residence an experiment in living in harmony with others.
By 1905 the co-op failing financially forcing subdivision from 125 rooms to 300 smaller spaces then bankruptcy after the Depression and Hungarian émigrés purchased and protected the hotel and the artists for 75 more years.
The theater district gone meant a downhill slide a rundown neighborhood seedy offices, tawdry bars and gradual hotel decay clanging heating pipes shabby rooms, dirty rugs with further subdivisions to 400 dingy rooms still popular, still housing knowns and unknowns long-distance truckers pensioners, burlesque dancers novelists, crackpots, drunks.
A miniature Ellis Island of the odd and avant-garde through the ’40s and ’50s the bohemians, the beatniks Kerouac and Ginsberg and the drug-fueled ’60s Christo and Warhol Pop artists, rock bands Jefferson Airplane, Janis slugging Southern Comfort Alice Cooper with a python wrapped around his neck.
Marijuana smoke wafting tattered halls, tattered tenants paying overdue rent in art displayed on lobby walls and hiding from hustlers pushers, hookers, pimps holdups, gunfire, junkies room fires, overdoses, leaps from the roof or out windows.
A city no longer doable for artists, the young or old the hotel sold, closed down the power of the creative community forgotten as history made way for the fortunate few rooftop gardens torn up the wall art torn down rooms gutted and enlarged into 155 elite suites a lobby full of new art a lobby bar full of chic.
In the city of ashes the city of gold, the Chelsea on the Register of Historic Places the icon casts a glitter sheen for influencer appeal.
Key West
The southernmost isle once called Cayo Hueso the island of bones— bones from a battle or Indian burial ground so there was always this legacy of lawlessness: pirates, wreckers, smugglers drugs, drinking, wilderness only reachable by boat the glistening white sand water jade green and aqua where ocean and Gulf met.
Pirates hunted for booty until the Navy arrived built a base, a busy port for Greek sponge divers for Cuban cigar makers treasure hunters seeking shipwrecks and sunken gold then the hotels and shops cottage homes and bars the Conch Republic born of Caribbean and Cuban influx and escapees from elsewhere creating a rough culture.
Henry Flagler linked the chain Palm Beach to the Keys the East Coast Railway and a hotel for visitors escaping winter storms Prohibition’s restrictions to where liquor flowed the Conchs smuggling in fat boatloads of booze after a deadly hurricane blew down the railroad the Overseas Highway the route to Key West the tropical oasis otherworldly, exotic a seaside sanctuary where art could flourish.
Hemingway in residence fishing, drinking, writing his most significant works he nicknamed his island the St. Tropez of the poor and Tennessee Williams bought a bungalow refuge brought gay friends to stay in the laissez faire outpost of the next literary star Thomas McGuane filming his rock ‘n’ roll novel Ninety-Two in the Shade his pal Jimmy Buffett on the soundtrack with no real music scene in the eclectic bars where everyone gathered, all types: politicians and criminals hippies and rednecks artists and bums and he sang for free drinks began to write story-songs on the laidback island life.
When “Margaritaville” hit the charts and the tourists flocked to the happy hours cheeseburgers in paradise cruise ships, mad crowds crime, trash and trinkets new rents and home prices nobody could afford so the writers left the millionaires, developers vacationers and wannabes an alcohol-fueled theme park the old island of bones the legacy of pirates seeking others’ treasure blind to it themselves.
Provincetown
A finger of land at the very tip a sandbar to mainland Mass a salty spit of gray isolation after the Mayflower anchored the women washed, their men stole Indian corn, skirmished before moving on to Plymouth and Portuguese whalers arrived harpooning thick pods to sell whale oil, bones, baleen, the cod catch plush so they sent for family the railroad down from Boston and the Cape Cod School of Art in the diverse community of immigrants, artists, outsiders.
Ensconced in a lunar dunescape in the old Life-Saving Station young Eugene O’Neill penned 19 short plays, 7 long, his first performed in a decrepit fish shed Bound East for Cardiff giving birth to modern American drama Anna Christie about the fishermen on the island: a grand place to be alone and undisturbed.
John Dos Passos down the street on Commercial faced the harbor and Norman Mailer’s house where he wrote the majority of his books in summers and spent his final years in: the freest town in America that was naturally spooky off-season a place for murderers and suicides with cold sea air with a bottomless chill.
Painters came for the crystal purity of the aquatic light, translucent fleets of squid, flocks of white gulls drafting faded scallop boats squawking terns chasing scarlet crabs red-faced men on creaky piers inhaling deep the briny scent the slap of foamy waves against the rocky shore.
Mary Oliver wrote for decades lush poems on the beauty of the island she called home the skittish skunk, rusty fox glistening sand and scrubby pines the endless surf, the unending call of the foghorn’s haunting note winters windswept and desolate and summer’s blast of blues sunset orange on the salt flats soft music in the misty dawn of inspiration and retreat.
