Last week, I submitted a piece from my novella-in-flash (NIF) to John Brantingham, poet, writer, and teacher, for his journal The Journal of Radical Wonder. He wrote back declining that piece, but asked if I’d like to meet him on Zoom the next day to talk about the NIF. As we chatted, he read the first piece of the NIF out loud, and asked if he could have that piece for the journal instead. My mind was blown. Of course I agreed! And we set a time, Tuesday morning, today, for us to meet again and talk about whether we wanted to take the NIF on a publication journey together.
This morning, instead of meeting with John, I’m memorializing him. He died suddenly Sunday night.
I got to spend an hour with John Thursday morning, and two more hours Friday afternoon as part of a working writers group he held. In that time I had his undivided attention for maybe 45 minutes, an hour, tops, during which his listened to me chatter excitedly about my NIF, read some of my work, and talked about places we could take it. 45 minutes, and he made me feel like the only person in the world. Like what I had to say was genuinely interesting and worth listening to. The rest of the time I took reams of notes as he talked to other writers about how to improve their own work and treated them like they were the only person in the world.
Three hours is what I got with John Brantingham, and then he died. I would have liked many more hours, but just that bit of time was such an incredible gift. After his wife announced his passing on Facebook, I saw hundreds of other people talking about how they felt the same way.
Three hours, but oh, how he opened my heart! Just by being fully present, just by looking for radical wonder in the world. Those three hours made me a better writer, and made me want to be a better person. I’m so sad for his loss, but so grateful I got to meet him.
It’s hard, right now, being a human in this world. I don’t have to go into the reasons why; we all know them. You may think that with everything going the way it is, you don’t have anything left to give. But you’re wrong. Maybe you don’t have three hours to spare a stranger, but can you spare five minutes? Can you spare a smile? Can you say to a fellow human, Hey there, I see you? Can you find a moment of radical wonder?
I hope you can, and I hope you’ll share it. Because John would have, and I think he was really on to something.