Holyoke

The city that made him is twenty minutes north on I-91 and a different world.

He drives there sometimes — not often, not regularly, but sometimes, when he needs to remember the shape of where he came from. He does not go inside anything. He drives the streets. He sits in the parking lot of a Stop & Shop he used to ride his bike to and he watches the city do what the city does. He drives past the canal. He drives past the paper mills that are not mills anymore but have not yet become the thing they will eventually become. He drives past the street where he grew up without slowing down.

He always leaves before the light changes. Before it gets to the hour that used to be the hardest hour.

Holyoke taught him things no classroom had the curriculum for. It taught him how to move through a space that does not always welcome you. How to read the difference between a

threat and the proximity of a threat. How to carry yourself in a way that says both I belong here and I will not be easy to take something from — two messages delivered simultaneously by the way you hold your shoulders, the pace of your walk, the direction of your gaze.

He learned to read rooms before he learned to read books. He learned to read the specific emotional weather of the adults in his life — the tension in a jaw, the particular quality of silence before something, the way a body in a doorway communicates threat or safety before a single word is spoken. This is not a skill you develop because you want to. It is a skill you develop because the alternative is being caught off guard, and being caught off guard in certain rooms has consequences.

He does not hate Holyoke. This is important to say, because the narrative of a person from a hard place who made something of themselves tends to require hating the hard place, writing it off, using it as the villain in the origin story. He does not do that. He cannot. Holyoke made him — the edge and the radar and the specific endurance of a person who learned early that circumstances do not dictate outcomes, that you can be from a loud house on a complicated

street and still build something that outlasts both.

He loves Holyoke the way you love something that cost you something. With full knowledge of the cost.

* * *

His parents were not monsters.

He wants to be clear about this whenever he thinks about Holyoke, because the mind has a tendency to flatten the past into simple shapes — abuser, victim, house of horrors, rescue narrative. The truth was more complicated and more painful for being complicated.

His mother worked at the hospital, administrative. His father worked in maintenance for the city, early shifts that meant he was gone before Vincent woke up most mornings and home by four, tired in the specific way of a man who has been using his body all day. There was love in the house. He does not doubt this. The love was real. It was also — and this is the part that took him years to hold without it breaking him — sometimes insufficient. Sometimes expressed in ways that left marks. Sometimes absent in moments when its presence would have changed things.

He does not tell this story in detail. Not here, not in public. The details belong to him and to them and to the relationships that continue, imperfectly, in the present. He tells the outline: there was a house, and the house had a weather, and he learned to read the weather. He tells this because it is necessary context for everything else.

He tells it in the third person because the third person is the only distance from which he can see it clearly.

* * *

He was seventeen when he first understood that he was going to write for the rest of his life.

Not as a decision. As a recognition. He was sitting in the school library — not doing homework, he was never in the library doing homework; he was in the library avoiding the specific hour at home that had been difficult lately — and he was reading a collection of poetry he had pulled off the shelf without intending to. The poet was Frank O’Hara. He had never heard of Frank O’Hara. He read three pages and stopped and sat with the specific feeling of reading something that reconfigures your understanding of what language can do.

He checked out the book. He renewed it twice. He read it until he had absorbed it.

Then he went home and wrote for three hours in the notebook and what came out was different from what had been coming out before — not better necessarily, not yet, but more intentional. More aware of itself as language. He had seen, in O’Hara, what poems could do when they were not trying to be safe. He was not going to be safe.

He was seventeen and he was going to write the truth of his own life without apology.

He has been doing that ever since.

* * *

Holyoke in the morning is a different city than Holyoke at night.

He learned to love the mornings there. The light on the canal, which in summer does something almost painterly with the water — the specific gold of early sun on still water, the mills reflected, the quiet that exists for about forty- five minutes before the city starts properly moving. He would sometimes get up early just for that window. He would stand on the bridge and watch the water and feel something that

was not quite peace but was in the same family as peace. Was adjacent to it.

This is what he carried out of Holyoke: the mornings. The canal light. The knowledge that beauty exists inside hard places and is not less beautiful for the context. The understanding that where you come from is not who you are but it is where you start, and starting places matter, and the distance you cover from your starting place is a measure not of worth but of effort.

He covers distance. He has always covered distance.

He is still moving.

* * *

He has a specific relationship with cities that he has been trying to articulate for years.

Cities are not backgrounds, not settings. They are active participants in the life lived inside them. Springfield participates in his life in ways he can enumerate: the specific sound of State Street at 3 AM, which is different from State Street at 3 PM in ways that are not just volume. The particular way the city smells in different seasons — January concrete and car exhaust, May lilac, August heat and river,

October leaves and something underneath the leaves that is older. The demographics of the neighborhood, the faces on the street, the languages he hears from the apartment window, which are not all English and which make the world feel appropriately large and specific.

He has written about Springfield more than he has written about any other subject.

He has written about Holyoke more than he knows he has — it is in the writing in the way that childhood is always in the writing, whether or not you name it, whether or not you go looking for it. It is in the way he notices the exits. It is in the way he reads the air when he enters a room. It is in the specific vigilance that is not neurosis but practice, the practice of a child who had to learn to read his environment faster than other children because other children had the luxury of being surprised.

* * *

He is in the coffee shop on Main Street on a Thursday afternoon in late July.

He goes here when the apartment gets too quiet in the wrong way — not the productive quiet of a good writing day but the wrong quiet, the quiet that gets into the skull and becomes

something else. The coffee shop is the right kind of loud. The espresso machine. The music at a volume that is present but not intrusive. The specific sound of other people existing in their lives, which he finds grounding in a way he does not entirely understand but has stopped trying to understand.

He has a small table in the back, the one with the outlet and the sight line to the door. He always takes a table with a sight line to the door. He has done this for so long it is not a decision anymore; he scans the room when he enters and moves toward the correct table without deliberating.

He turns to a new page.

He is working on a poem about Holyoke that has been circling for three weeks — not the poem yet, the circling that precedes the poem, the accumulation of language and image and observation that eventually coheres into something he can write in a single session. He writes notes. He writes fragments. He writes: the canal in morning light / the mills that are not mills / the street that knew his name before he knew his name.

He crosses out the last line. He writes it again.

He orders a second coffee.

A man sits down at the next table with a laptop and begins a phone call in a voice that is slightly too loud for the space. Vincent moves his notebook half an inch to the left, which is a gesture of nothing but feels like something. He writes through the phone call. He has learned to write through noise. He has been writing in noise since the Holyoke bedroom with the door shut and the house loud outside it.

* * *

He thinks about the canal sometimes when the writing is going badly.

Not as a nostalgic image — as a problem- solving tool. The canal is the thing in his visual memory that most reliably produces a quality of attention he is looking for when the writing has gotten cluttered and needs clearing. He thinks about the specific light on the water in the morning. He thinks about the sound of the water, which in his memory has a particular quality of continuity — not the dramatic rushing of a river but the steady, unremarkable movement of water doing what water does, which is going somewhere without hurrying.

He wants his writing to do that. He wants the sentences to have the quality of water moving steadily and without hurry toward somewhere they are going anyway. He wants the writing to feel inevitable — not predictable, but inevitable in retrospect, the sense that each sentence could not have been different.

He is always working toward this. He has not achieved it for more than a few pages at a time. He thinks he may never achieve it in the consistent sustained way he is aiming for. He thinks this is probably correct and is aiming for it anyway.

He closes the notebook.

He closes his eyes.

He thinks about the canal.

He finds the notebook.

He continues.

* * *

The first time his writing appeared in print somewhere he did not control, he found out by accident.

He was twenty, sitting in the library at the community college where he had taken two classes that semester — not as a degree program, just because the classes were there

and he wanted to learn things that the libraries could not teach him alone. He was reading a literary magazine that someone had left on the table, a regional publication out of Northampton, and on page 34 he found a poem.

The poem was his.

He read it twice to be sure. The first reading: disbelief. The second reading: recognition. The line breaks were different — the editor had made changes he had not approved — but the poem was his, from a submission he had sent six months ago and had never heard back from and had assumed was rejected.

He sat in the library for a long time.

He took out his phone and found the magazine’s contact page. He wrote an email that was very controlled and very polite, asking about the process, explaining that he had not been notified of acceptance, noting the changes to his line breaks without characterizing them as a violation.

They apologized. The acceptance email had gone to spam. They offered to publish a corrected version in the next issue. They asked if he had more work to submit.

He submitted three pieces.

They published two.

He has not always controlled how his work appears once it leaves his hands. He has learned to make peace with this — not full peace, not the peace of someone who does not care, but the working peace of someone who understands that publishing is a collaboration and collaborations involve compromise and the alternative is not publishing.

He always submits his preferred version. He always notes his preferences clearly. He accepts what is within his control to accept.

He keeps writing.

He keeps submitting.

The work continues.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The practical meaning is this: time. Publishing costs writing time. He knows this. He has made his peace with it. The peace is imperfect. He will always prefer the page to the process. But the process is part of it. He does it anyway.

He lifts the pen.

He stays with it.

He looks at the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He is not editing. Not yet. He is reading. Asking: does this hold? Does it carry what it is supposed to carry? He reads the last paragraph again. The light has shifted. The afternoon is almost gone. His back is tight. He has been sitting too long. He gets up. Stretches. Sits back down. Ghost watches from the couch with one eye. Vincent looks at the notebook. The operating principle: the work outlives the moment that required it. The language is what remains. He pushes through. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

The page receives it.

He has never not written the next line.