Why I Write in the Margins
Notes from beside the page
I fell in love with poetry before I fell in love with prose.
Edgar Allan Poe came first. Emily Dickinson followed soon after.
I loved their melancholy, but I think I also loved that neither of them seemed particularly interested in keeping words where words were supposed to go.
Poe was famous for his marginalia. He filled the edges of what he read with thoughts, arguments, observations, fragments. He eventually turned the idea itself into Marginalia, a series of published notes that didn't need to become something larger in order to be worth keeping.
Dickinson was even less obedient to the page. She wrote on scraps and envelopes, across folds and around edges, sometimes turning the paper when the thought required somewhere else to go.
They colored outside the lines.
Sometimes literally.
I think that stayed with me.
Because not everything that matters to a story belongs in the story.
Sometimes I find a photograph and a novel begins.
Sometimes I learn one strange historical fact and it changes something I've already written.
Sometimes I see a name carved above a mausoleum door and know immediately that I haven't seen the last of it.
And sometimes something catches for no reason I can explain yet.
I don't know what it is.
I just know enough to keep it.
That's why the library in When Walls Weep is called Marginalia.
And when I needed a place on this website for the things that live beside my writing, Margins felt inevitable.
Not essays about the work.
Notes beside it.
Where something came from. What changed it. What I found while looking for something else. The things that may eventually become part of a story, and the things that never will.
Poe wrote in the margins.
Dickinson wrote wherever the words would fit.
I suppose this is where mine go.