V. H. King's Ink

On this day, two years ago, I had brain surgery. Some of the people who are most proud of me will say releasing Late in the Midnight Hour today is a triumph, proof of my enduring strength, evidence of overcoming tragedy. That take is a glossy cover-story, a highlight in someone else’s reel. It is a win for them, because it means their duty is done. I’m “fine” now.

You’d have to blatantly disregard everything I’ve ever written about this project to get to that conclusion. Fact-checking is synonymous with treason these days, so who am I to correct them? If you read LitMiH, you will know that I’m not okay. You’ll realize that I haven’t been okay for a long time. I did not write LitMiH to promise things would be alright. I wrote it because I was still alive when I desperately wished (and prayed) otherwise.

In 2014, I knew for certain that I wouldn’t be able to work full-time. I barely survived my undergraduate coursework, but I went on to grad school anyway. I managed to work part-time, and then full-time. Meanwhile, a brain tumor would wreak havoc for an entire decade before finally getting forcibly removed. But it wasn’t just the surgery that took me out. It was everything before it, and everything that happened after, and all the things I learned along the way.

If you asked me what period of my life was the Midnight Hour, I’d tell you: all of it. The whole of my life, looked at in the right light, is a Midnight Hour. All of history, too. Whatever you do or don’t believe in, that belief gets tested every day in any number of ways. How, and why, do we endure? For me, it’s art and story and mystery. It’s sharing those things with you, in case it helps you too.

I consider myself very bad at pep talks. I can’t make you feel better. Most of the time, when I point out some added complexity or nuance, I make people feel worse. (Just ask anyone who’s ever been in a classroom with me.) I will tell you it’s bad, but I will also tell you that you’re still here. And you’re allowed to hate that, by the way. You’re allowed to feel nothing, anything, and everything.

Revising the poems and art from my first draft of LitMiH took me two years. Halfway through 2024, I decided I would release the collection either by the end of the year or by early next. January 19^th became my release date because, when I counted backwards three months, it landed me at mid-October—and that was just around the time I felt like I needed to say something about what I’d been working on. Not much of a marketing strategy, but it gave me time to figure out how to talk about LitMiH, share my thoughts, and give a few sneak previews.

The month before I announced LitMiH, I lost a friend unexpectedly. Their passing is still felt deeply in the community we were part of, and I’ll admit that it pushed me to be more vocal about LitMiH than I might have otherwise been. Because this book is for them, and it’s for me, and it’s for the rest of our community.

Two and a half weeks after announcing LitMiH, the U. S. election results were in. I can’t say I knew it would happen, but I can’t say I’m surprised. This too, pushed me to speak up—because it was everything happening all over again, and I was slowly starting to realize just how many ends of the world we keep surviving. Even when we don’t want to.

Two years ago, I had brain surgery. Two weeks ago, I lost my uncle.

His death was completely unexpected, and I found myself caught in a scramble. I had already expected a bit of release-day chaos, finalizing the logistics for a move over the same weekend that LitMiH came out. I’d hoped staying busy with the move would keep me from obsessively checking how well my posts were doing.  Instead, I found myself wading through insurance snafus and administrative hell while we got more snow than we had in the last fifteen years and the cold clamped down on my joints.

It is still the Midnight Hour.

My first impulse, when I heard the news, was to make art. It is all I think about, and it is what I was least able to do for the first week. I had to give myself space, without words and tasks, to find my way to the place where I could work on what I’d originally planned. And I’m not there yet.

I’m still releasing Late in the Midnight Hour because I know the importance of having space to grieve. I also know there are so many things to grieve. Past and present, and whatever is coming—it’s going to hurt. Maybe it’s always going to hurt, in new and tender and surprising ways. I can’t make it better, but I hope this gives you a way to feel. However you need to, whenever you’re ready: grieve, and know you are not alone.