Gina DiPonio

Essays

Then There Were Three Hair Trigger 33 – David Friedman Memorial Award Winner

Who knew that a three-acre property with a stream in the back and a spacious two-story home with a slate fireplace and all could squinch up into hardly an inch of space and be sucked up and back into the galaxy as if it never existed in the first place?  The climbing tree in front of the house folds and twists until it’s a speck of flashing phosphorescence like the inside of a firefly.  The tulips along the driveway splinter into butterfly wings and retreat in a fury of flutters.  Whoowit.  All of it sucked away. . .

Writing TriumphBleed                                                               

The year my dad died, I was taking writing classes at University of Chicago. I was twenty-two and I wanted to be a writer. But let me clarify. I didn’t want to write. Writing was fucking hard. Writing meant sitting alone in my apartment, something I already did more than I wanted to. But being a writer — being responsible for the pages clasped in the hand of readers as they run off to catch the bus or to find a quiet nook where they can thumb through the pages and pick back up on listening to this new intimate, this writer, this voice in their heads. I wanted someone to take in my words with the same longing and satisfaction that I felt when I read Hemingway or Austen or Tim O’Brien. I wanted to be one of them, only I wanted to do as little as possible of the actual writing. Every time I wrote something in those beginning years, it felt like the most dramatic triumph. Up to that point, not writing was what I knew. I didn’t know anything else. . .