“While finishing Summerlong, I found myself in perhaps the bleakest emotional landscape of my life, negotiating a blindsiding divorce with my wife of seventeen years. While my therapist and well-intentioned friends suggested I do happy things, I knew my work-in-progress required me to go into the darkness that self-help wisdom told me to avoid. Always exhausted and sleep-deprived, and on more than one occasion hung over, I would wake up from terrible nightmares each morning, get the kids off to school, then get the dog from his kennel, and wander the timber and pastures behind my house. In those months, I listened to one song on perpetual repeat, “RE: Stacks,” off of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. Very often tears fell down my face when Justin Veron’s plaintive falsetto finally asked, “Whatever could it be. That has brought me to this loss?” Every morning that song destroyed me a little more than I was already destroyed, and put me even deeper into the terrifying darkness. I would come back to the empty house, feed the dog, brew the coffee, and with lines like, “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization,” echoing in my head, I could stay in that sad space until well after lunch, working at my desk, reworking a book that had become unintentionally autobiographical. Somehow, it made a huge difference to me that another artist, also in the deepening cold of the rural Midwest, had felt the same kind of heartbreak I was feeling and had made something beautiful out of it.”
—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Summerlong (Ecco, 2015)
Photo credit: Christina Campbell