I was in bad shape. Mourning a lot of things all at once.

Sometimes life is an open highway. Sometimes it’s a mourning pile-up.

I felt like the middle car in the crash.

I was casting about rather aimlessly, searching for a way out of all the mourning, when I met a local writer, Alix Klingenberg…in a Facebook writers group, of all places.

Alix had just published a lovely book of poems called Secrets and Stars: To Love Me, You Must Also Love the Dark and had a gazillion followers…not on Facebook, but on Instagram.

Seriously, a gazillion followers.

I’d never been on Instagram, but Alix told me that’s where she found her audience, her people.

I was in desperate need of an audience and some people of my own, so I gave it a try.

As I now know, Instagram is a dangerous place for day-dreamers like me, who have dozens of interests and a curiosity about every damn thing. And it was especially dangerous for me-in-mourning. I saw little bits of my life—past, present, potential future—everywhere I looked, with every click and scroll.

At first I recoiled (Why am I burying my nose in stuff!) but then I started to do what I always do, in sickness and health: I started to write about what I was seeing.

Before I knew it, I had a group of poems and fragments that seemed related in some way, if I could just find the right order for them. Before I knew it, I had I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram, my very first little chapbook. It was part autobiography, part family history, part ekphrastic exercise, and a possible template for future work. A weird thing, to be sure, but the first thing I had ever written that really felt like me.

I find it hard to read sometimes, a reminder of difficulties, but it’s surprisingly joyful too, alive with wonder at the big, wide world. And it’s the book that gave some shape to my mourning. I’ll always love it.