I have had valuable input and encouragement from many of the usual suspects. Josh Perz. Ted Kosmatka. Rachel Mork. Mary-Tina Vrehas. My dad, Don Poore, basically told me how he thought I should rewrite the first chapter, and he was right.
As always, Mom and Bill have been a source of encouragement and support. Plus it’s nice to go hang out at their house, which has a pond and a cool indoor-outdoor porch kind of thing, which is a perfect place to write and watch the ducks.
Sometimes a book’s friends are groups of people.
I’d like to thank Janine’s group of writerly students from Purdue, the First Friday Wordsmiths, especially Kevin Shelton and Kayla Greenwell. I started this book during a FFW retreat on a farm in southern Michigan, at a farmhouse table full of young people drinking coffee and tapping away on laptops. In the evening, there was a bonfire and stars and lightning bugs. What a fine setting for starting a book.
There’s a group of people in Muncie, Indiana, who have been so good to me I don’t even know where to start. Writer and professor Cathy Day and I exchanged books and became friends some time ago, and she got poet Sean Lovelace to invite me down to Ball State for a reading. That evening remains one of my favorite nights ever. Cathy, Sean, Silas Hanson, and several of the young writers I met that week—Brittany Means, Sarah Hollowell, Jackson Thors Elfin, Jeff Owens, and Jeremy Flick—have been with me in my head and heart ever since.
As always, the writers of the Highland Writers’ Group have been a trusty source of criticism and support.
And the Mean Group, the meanest and most snack-eating crit group ever. We’re back together and meaner and snack-eatinger than ever.
And thanks to those who have read and continue to read. I offer you a courtly bow.