Vern smiled at all the loves of her life. There was Howling. There was Feral. Now there was Gogo, too. She almost cried, so grateful she was.
“You okay?” asked Gogo.
Vern nodded and wiped away the single tear threatening to fall. “I like the woods,” she said. “In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn’t matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms. It turns sorrows into flowers.”
They both sat down, sweaty arm to sweaty arm. They remained until the woods were black but for patches of moonlight. They remained until they could hear the night calls of one thousand living things, screaming their existence, assuring the world of their survival. Vern screamed back.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book on a full belly, with shelter over my head and the love and support of friends and family. For many, these things are far from givens, and I wonder what opuses we are missing from people who want to make art but are too preoccupied with basic survival to spare time on it. I could not have written this book without the basic necessities of life, and I’m thankful for the many who supported my family financially when the income I made from writing wasn’t enough to keep us afloat and I was unable to work other jobs.
I’m thankful for Bunny, the most wonderful of friends, who’s there and there and there, who fights. I’m thankful for Martha, my love, who minds the children, shuttles the children, and feeds the children while I work, who adds joy to dark days with her humor and tenacious spirit.
I’m thankful for my agent, Seth Fishman, who is simply the best and has changed my life in innumerable ways, and for my editor, Sean McDonald, who helped Sorrowland metamorphose into its final form with his wisdom and insight. I am thankful for everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MCD, and for everyone at #Merky Books, especially my UK editor, Jason Arthur. There are many, many more at these respective imprints whose work goes into the business that is making a book, and I’m sorry to not name them all. Suffice it to say, Sorrowland was not a solo effort.