My native landscape saved me. Often, due to my difficult brain chemistry, my psyche’s boundaries feel perilously thin. I am unusually sensitive to noise, to bustle. Cities abrade me. As much as I love to visit them—for the most part to ravish their bookstores and ethnic restaurants, to a lesser extent to visit their gay bars and luxuriate in the presence of My Kind—I cannot tolerate urban areas for long. I soon feel overstimulated, invaded, endangered. The rush, the traffic, the crowds turn me surly, paranoid, and impatient fast. But the countryside—Thomas Hardy’s “far from the madding crowd”—is another matter. Living in small towns among the mountains, as I have for most of my life, has kept me sane. The natural world is never far. The hills rise protectively about me. I can see the stars. Commuting back and forth between Pulaski and Blacksburg, I can study the seasonal changes in meadow, woodland, hillside and creek. I can bike through the countryside down the New River Trail, take in the view from the top of Draper Mountain, drive the tortuous emerald bends up to Mountain Lake and look out over the crests of the Alleghenies.

Universities saved me. I hope to emulate my father, who is reading and writing nonstop at age eighty-five, by spending my life in a constant state of learning and creating. I teach because I want to keep learning. I choose fresh materials for my classes with some regularity so as to read new stories, new poems. I have been connected with universities in some capacity, either as undergraduate student, graduate student, instructor, or professor, since I entered West Virginia University in August 1977, and that connection has kept my mind active, hungry, and enthusiastic. The liberal atmosphere of university towns has made living in Appalachia as an openly gay man a lot easier than it could have been. Mine is an unusual combination of diversities—“the Mountaineer Queer”—that might not be understood or appreciated off-campus but which is apparently valued by the university community. Thus my presence here today.

Romantic and erotic failure saved me. This seems counterintuitive, to say the least, since they also made me want to drive my pickup truck into the side of a mountain. But, past the initial and very lengthy suffering, with serious contemplation (great gift of the introvert) I learned a great, great deal. I learned how much turmoil can fuel poetry. All of my first poetry collection Bones Washed with Wine and much of my second collection On the Tongue were inspired by a particularly agonized affair I had in the early 1990’s. I learned that yes, one can love with the deep and half-insane passion one sees in novels like Wuthering Heights, and it is a blessing to have the capacity to feel that dangerously and deeply, no matter what the price (and the price will be as deep and devastating and sometimes far lengthier than the love). I learned that, for some of us, our hearts lead us to those who are incapable of or thoroughly uninterested in reciprocation. In other words, I learned that my heart can betray me. I learned that some of those who feel themselves beloved will take just as much as you are willing to give, but that casual acceptance of gifts does not evoke in them any sense of obligation or even gratitude. I learned that, for many of us, such passions, as is claimed so often in sentimental song lyrics, truly do come along only a few times in a lifetime, and that is good, for otherwise we might all die young. I learned that those loved so passionately and then lost will haunt you inescapably for the rest of your life, but being haunted is not a bad way to live. It is certainly an artistically productive way. I learned that, once you survive the loss of such a muse, that any other pain you encounter will be, if not small, then smaller, in contrast. You can look up at the gray tsunami of suffering foaming and cresting, about to break over your head, and say with confidence, “Well, I survived that, so long ago. I am certainly strong enough to survive this.”

My partner John saved me. He has created a safe space, a home, in which my overly sensitive soul might escape the world’s hostilities. He lends me support, humor, pleasure, and comfort. He somehow tolerates my mood swings, roving eye, and regular rants. We enjoy fine meals, quiet time by the fireplace, trips to San Francisco, Hawaii, Prague, Scotland, Scandinavia. Despite the hateful amendment passed last fall in Virginia, outlawing any form of same-sex marriage, we are married in every important sense of the word. Stupidity and prejudice have robbed us, and those like us, of legal recognition or benefits, but that only gives me reason to remain ornery, defiant, and outspoken in my protest.

So, to everyone’s relief, perhaps most especially mine, though this talk began as lament, it ends as a procession of blessings, a paean of thanks. As natural as it is for me to focus on what is lacking, what has been stolen, it is certainly salutary to remind myself of what is present still, what has been rescued, what makes continuing worth it. I write this, speak this, in order to give gratitude some enduring shape, so that, when the bleakness returns, I have my own words as evidence, as reminder, as driftwood for the drowning.

I want to finish with my lost and unmet brother Jamie. His body was returned to his native Barbour County for burial. Irene told me about his funeral. It was a mixture of folks who might not come together in any other context: gay people, mountain people, Native Americans, Catholics, and musicians. There, personified, were all the wildly disparate elements of his psyche, paying their respects, sitting down together in sadness, sharing a groaning board of funeral food. Those many identities must have seemed to him hopelessly fragmented and irreconcilable, as he stood there on that North Carolina beach staring at the welcoming waves. My guess is that, had he had all that I have been blessed with, he might have been able to give himself more time. Had he encountered as much kindness as I, he might have been kinder to himself. Had he lived longer, that slew of apparently incompatible shards could have been fused. Amalgamated, they could have provided an incredible, if always difficult, depth and richness. Unfused, they caused a fragmentation that destroyed him.

I understand fragmentation, the centrifugal forces that invite us to fly apart. As a child, I found a praying mantis egg case on a japonica bush in the back yard and kept it inside a vented jar. I remember the hatching, all those tiny insects crawling from what appeared to be a chunk of brown Styrofoam. I cannot forget that seething, how, trapped together inside the glass, they turned on one another, how rapidly cannibalism began. Even at that age, I sensed a metaphor for the deep and potentially destructive divisions of the human brain. Standing here in the winter wood, I can feel those opposed selves grappling for dominance in the dark inside my skull. Nevertheless, living the examined life that Socrates suggests, I know what has saved me and continues to save me, and now you know it too. Loved ones, literature, learning, music, and mountains: they have given me the strength to give myself time, and that time has given me a self strong enough to survive myself, survive the world, and to speak what I know. I speak to those like me, the dark and divided ones, those waiting in winter light, light the cold silver-gray of magnolia buds, those sad ones mesmerized by the swirl of snow, those hesitating, desolate, at the edge of the forest, the edge of the ocean. What I say is Stay.