A note about the work “So Like a Waking” from Peter E. Murphy for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue:

1. Eight years and almost fifty drafts, writing "So Like a Waking" was a pain in the ass.

2. I couldn’t . . . wouldn’t accept that I was an alcoholic. Bums shitting themselves on a park bench or in the gutter, they were alcoholics, not me. Sure, I woke up on a park bench . . . I woke up in a gutter, but I only peed myself.

3. Drinking was the only thing that made sense to me. Make that poetry and drinking. I loved them both equally. However, drinking was trying to kill me. Poetry was trying to keep me alive.

4. At a writing retreat I led in Spain several years ago, a woman who had just lost her mother said, “I’m sorry. She’s all I can write about.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “My mother died sixty years ago, and she’s all I can write about.”

5. I think of my high school years as Early-Derelict Period. I trudged from bookstore to bookstore in Greenwich Village, brown-bagging a quart of Ballantine Ale, searching for Ginsberg’s Howl one week, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind the next. Then I graduated to Mid-Derelict Period. Then Late-Derelict Period when I hit the proverbial rock bottom in a flophouse in Wales.

6. “Hi! My name is Peter, and I’m . . . um . . . well . . . you know . . . .”