Mom passed gently into grace last week. We gathered and celebrated her life and end of her suffering, including Dad, who’s thankfully still among us. Our initial mourning rituals are complete, though I expect our grief will not finally end as gracefully as Mom departed.

I reach for Mom in my thoughts. She’s no longer there among the living anymore. Until we meet again, good-bye, Mommy. I’ll miss most your unconditional love. No one else can ever replace you in that most cherished regard.

I’m in a strange and dangerous space now. Not those kinds of dangerous; vigorously portent pending excitations. Here a year on since Bill and Dave began the Cocktail Hour conversation, I’m reflecting on where I am creativity-wise. The Cocktail Hour gave me a leg or two up in ways perhaps unintended, certainly in ways intended. I pray I’ve given back as good as I’ve gotten without being too intolerable a jack’s backside.

For now at least, I sense I’ve reached an endpoint for my independent writing investigations. It’s time for the bud to blossom, so to speak, come whatever whichaway may.

Of the multitudes I’ve learned, here and elsewhere, one, when the times are best to go the poet’s journey alone and when to travel among august company. I’m most in my comfort zone alone; however, no one is an island, I intimately know too well. A cognitive dissonance I’m learning to cope with hopefully more healthily and meaningfully than I have before. Anyway, it’s time now for me to move on for awhile.

A parting shot, as it were, if you will, of advice for fellow travelers and perhaps a trustworthy success metric. If there’s one paramount parameter for creative writing, it’s invoking an engaging participation mystique. How that’s done encompasses a gamut of methods approaching infinite enumerations, I’ve realized. To each their own according to their abilities and aesthetics and audiences. May you all realize your best expressions and outcomes and niches.

The regional public library hereabouts recently redirected its online catalog access to the Worldcat system, a comprehensive, global, online library catalog. Although Worldcat was initially a nuisance, more problematic than the in-house online catalog Worldcat replaced, I’ve come to appreciate Worldcat for its reach and depth.

Curiosity got the better of this cat. I checked for my sole, as-editor, modest public publication. Whether it’s there. If it circulates. Who’s got it. That kind of stuff. Imagine my thrill at finding I’m listed by name among the glorious opus of literature. One editing work in one publication in one language and twenty-six library holdings. Global enough for now.

I checked on a few fellow travelers library holdings as well, according to Worldcat (holding results include secondary discourse publications–publications edited and/or re-released by a secondary source and/or secondarily commenting upon a primary discourse–an original work);

Nina de Gramont: 5 works in 20 publications in 2 languages and 2,354 holdings.
David Gessner: 6 works in 10 publications in 1 language and 3,847 library holdings.
Bill Roorbach: 17 works in 40 publications in 2 languages and 4,073 holdings.

Mark Richard: 17 works in 41 publications in 2 languages and 2,249 holdings.
Jonathan Franzen: 94 works in 371 publications in 24 languages and 18,773 holdings.
Tobias Wolff: 187 works in 447 publications in 17 languages and 25,632 holdings.
Stephenie Meyer: 197 works in 846 publications in 36 languages and 52,494 holdings.
J.K. Rowling: 899 works in 3,789 publications in 68 languages and 172,662 holdings.
John Grisham: 513 works in 4,738 publications in 45 languages and 210,410 holdings.

Marjorie Rawlings: 315 works in 955 publications in 38 languages and 40,930 holdings.
L. Frank Baum: 1,036 works in 3,914 publications in 48 languages and 121,669 holdings.
William Thackeray: 5,091 works in 16,805 publications in 44 languages and 175,123 holdings.
Emily Dickinson: 3,816 works in 6,975 publications in 46 languages and 338,167 holdings.
Ernest Hemingway: 5,532 works in 16,094 publications in 80 languages and 517,505 holdings.
Jane Austen: 3,839 works in 16,501 publications in 50 languages and 525,406 holdings.
William Shakespeare: 67,348 works in 200,156 publications in 156 languages and 5,018,611 holdings.

Worldcat, an informatively useful, in my opinion, success metric having nothing patently to do with ephemeral commercial or mass culture interests and biases. And I feel it’s a tickle, a thrill, good to know where one’s creations are.