Feature: Michael Henson Day 4

Winter

Season of silence.
Snow drops through the empty halls of air.
Silence builds
sedimentary seam upon seam.
By day, by night,
the white screen falls.
Tomorrow, the slush of labor.
Tomorrow, the rasp of blades.
Tomorrow, the clatter of silicon.
For now,
the loud,
the hard
are smothered in the fall of snow.
The white mouth
swallows sound.
A shotgun,
a man chopping wood
the vigilant cough of a buck
fall and die
in the bonecold air.
The truck that rattles the bridge floor
The hish of cars on the highway
A shout in argument
fall and die, fall and die.
All sounds rise to fall and die.

Now

listen:

sibilant lisp of the universe

© Michael Henson

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Q&A

Q: What is your writing process? Do you write every day?

A: In a sense, I’m always writing, even when I’m not “writing.” I work two jobs and have an active life, but there’s a space in my head that’s always working on whatever writing project is in front of me at the moment. I work incrementally, a little bit at a time. It’s slow, but I keep at it steady. I’ve written whole novels at the rate of one hundred words a day.

Q: Where do you write? Is Ambiance Important?

A: I write everywhere. I always have. I rarely have time to block out more than an hour to write, so I carry my writing with me and I work wherever and whenever I can. I love boring meetings. I can get a lot done in a boring meeting. People think I’m taking lots of notes, but I’m really at work on a poem or a story.

Q: How do you think your writing impacts the lives of others?

A: People tell me they are moved by my writing, and that helps keep me going. I publish a lot of my work in StreetVibes, the newspaper of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, so there’s this wonderful team of formerly homeless men and women who are out on the street peddling this great newspaper with my stuff in it. I’d rather be there than in the pages of the Partisan Review, because that way it gets to people who live close to the ground. I’d like to think that my writing moves people toward greater compassion and understanding.

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April Snow by Jen Pezzo