Billy Merrell, 2003
Poetry Memoir (Scholastic, 2003)
From the Publisher: This is a memoir that is lived in moments. The moments you know – when you see your parents’ marriage dissolving, when you realize you’re a boy who likes boys, when you speak the truth and don’t know if it will be heard. The moments you don’t recognize until later – when you leave things unsaid (even to yourself), when you feel your boyfriend letting go, when you give up on love. And the moment you get love back.
Background
In 2002, I was invited to spend a summer in New York, interning at the Scholastic offices in SoHo. It was the summer after 9/11 and the summer before the fifth book in the Harry Potter series would come out (by Scholastic). All of Broadway seemed abuzz with the power of literature for young people.
My new mentor and editor, David Levithan awarded me the inaugural PUSH Writing Internship, a dream experience for any young writer: I would sit on the roof of the building, soul searching and writing poems. When I finished, I would bring my notebooks down to a computer and type them out. And then I would get feedback on the poems from an editor, often the same day I wrote them. When I wasn’t writing, I was reading–or learning, hands-on, about the publishing industry, reading submissions, checking proofs, etc. I was absorbing New York and city life itself for the first time, missing my then-boyfriend/now-husband Nico, and remembering things about my childhood. Connecting the dots.
That summer, I wrote 70 or more poems. Roughly 30 of those, followed by others written over the course of the next school year (my Junior year at the University of Florida), became the manuscript for Talking in the Dark, a work in which I aimed to articulate and make sense of how the love had materialized for me over the course of my life: learned through family, perfected through loss, and appreciated through faith in the people around me.
Hear more about my life and experiences at the time my debut was published by reading an interview with me at the website of the PUSH imprint.
Praise for Talking in the Dark
“An affecting memoir told in verse, this work launches a promising young poet… His sophisticated verse and compelling story will capture attention as it stirs compassion.” – School Library Journal
“He has also packed away a lot of wisdom about life, death, self-acceptance, and the vagaries of love and lust. Likewise, he has honed his writing craft, and his free-verse memoir is rich with metaphor, words carefully chosen to say enough but not too much…” – Booklist
