A Few Words
Robbie Gamble
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What was the inspiration, or the seed, for this piece?
I’ve always been fascinated by odd juxtapositions. This one day I spent the morning sitting with my ninety-three-year-old father, who was recuperating from heart surgery, and at some point later in the day I came across the factoid that Hart Crane’s father was the inventor of the Life Saver candy. These two experiences set me to thinking about all the things that we receive from our forebears: experientially, materially, emotionally, symbolically. Some legacies being beneficial, some inconsequential, and some destructive. And my writing mind just started making associative leaps, and this little flash essay came out. I like how each succeeding paragraph receives some image from the previous one and uses it to launch off in a new direction.
People always ask how you got into writing, but what keeps you writing?
I didn’t start writing seriously until my forties, when I had accumulated enough complicated life experiences that I needed some way to process them and make sense of how I connected to this crazy world. But what keeps me writing is this startling journey in which I am perpetually falling in love with words; words as shimmering, powerful raw material, words as tools to transport one into previously unimaginable scenarios, to make the senses explode, to pull empathy from a disoriented heart. I think about words all the time, and they keep gifting me with fresh frameworks of expression to see the world anew.
Death is such an unknowable state that musings and writings on it have persisted throughout human history, and across all ages of people; I wanted to ask, how do you find yourself writing/thinking about it now, compared to when you were younger?
My brother died suddenly when he was forty-nine, which was way too soon. My parents are both intact and engaging in their nineties, which is happily longer than I had imagined. So time and death are becoming more elastic and unpredictable to me. I’m in my sixties now, and I’m aware that I likely have fewer years ahead of me than have already passed, but I don’t dread the inevitability of an eventual endpoint. As a nurse, I’ve been witness to a fair amount of suffering, and a number of deaths. Death is difficult, and it can be tragic or mysterious or a blessed relief, but it is also an intimately human passage, and I have been privileged to be present to some family members, friends, and patients along the closing steps of their journey.
And, finally, as an estimate (or the exact number, if you know it) how many books do you physically own?
That is such a difficult question, as they keep accumulating, and I never thought to count. Somewhere in the hundreds, possibly close to one side or the other of a thousand? There is nothing so simultaneously a luxury and a necessity as a bookshelf of well-thumbed books. We absorb so much writing from online these days, but I still find joy in the physical heft of a volume in my lap, the turning of pages, the freedom to riffle back through what you’ve already read to find a beloved passage.
You can read Robbie Gamble’s piece, Legacies, here.
Legacies appeared in The Mersey Review 2 (Spring 2024)
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems and essays have appeared in Post Road, Salamander, Scoundrel Time, The Sun and Tahoma Literary Review. He is the poetry editor of Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.