I lost a pocket comb yesterday. It exists somewhere without me now. It was a black pocket comb, purchased in Anchorage, Alaska, to replace another comb that I lost there. I usually don’t lose combs, but now I’ve lost two in two months.

*

Loss informs so much of my writing. I’m forever interested in what’s been lost, or what might be lost. Maybe it’s because my father lost his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He became a different man, a man of temper, a sometimes violent man. While he was in the hospital, I stayed with my aunt and uncle. She told me in her late years how she would take me to the waiting room at the hospital, and my mother would come down to see me. I wouldn’t let her hold me. I clung to my aunt. I suppose my entire world had been disrupted. I had a home and then I didn’t; I had a father with hands and then suddenly I didn’t. Loss is the legacy of my family. I come back to it again and again in my writing.

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I wrote my first novel, Quakertown, because I was fascinated with a lost African-American community in 1920s Texas. A renowned gardener, Henry Taylor, lived in that community before the city of Denton forced it to relocate to inferior land a few miles east of its location. I started my novel with the desire to figure out what it meant to call someplace home and to what lengths someone might go to preserve that place and the family that he was a part of there. I’d just moved to Texas, and I missed my native Midwest. I missed my connections to family members who had passed on, to those who remained, and to the places we’d always thought of as home.

*

The house where I grew up in the small Illinois town I’ll always think of as home is vacant and in disrepair. Like so many of the homes that I remember from my boyhood, it’s disappearing. Shrubs grow wild around its foundation, the grass is long and in need of mowing. Someone has taken a chainsaw to a fallen tree and left it in sections in the driveway. The garage is falling in on itself. The town itself is disappearing. . .at least the town as I recall it. My high school is gone. I was a member of the last graduating class before consolidation with the school in the next town over. The school building now houses an elementary school. The barber shop where I got my hair cut is gone as is the sundries store where I bought candy and comic books, and where my mother bought my first baseball glove, making the mistake of buying a glove meant for a southpaw, thereby making me ambidextrous. The nursing home where my grandmother lived the last years of her life is gone. The hardware stores where my father went for whatever he needed are gone. I can count at least five grocery stores that no longer exist, and the list goes on. I like to think of all those places and the people who passed through them.

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Which leads me to this: Writing is an act of preservation. No matter if we’re creating fictional worlds, we’re saving something, holding onto something, honoring something even if that something is roughed up and ugly and scarred, even if it’s something we wish we’d never known. When we write, we invite some piece of life to return. We’re not just telling stories–real or fictional–or working with language and image in poems. We create in order to contain something, so a reader can say, “Yes, yes. This is how it is, was, will be.”