Origin Stories

But the narrative of a person’s history is never quite so tidy as we might like. It’s impossible to trace things cleanly back to a single bolt of lightning that changed the course of our own human drama once we admit all the forces and decisions coalescing around us, “knowing how way leads on to way,” as Frost reminds us. Maybe that’s why I think it’s so important to reflect on our own beginnings as writers, to remember as much as we can of our origin stories, recognize and distill those residual energies so that we can keep learning from them. In Origin Stories, originally published in the literary journal Passages North, Nate Pritts writes about his own beginnings as a poet and writer, his steps and missteps. In the process, he discovers how poetry can help us all find "a sensitivity to, and appreciation for, [our] own lives: the surroundings and the emotions, the locations and the associations." Nate Pritts is the author of seven books of poetry - most recently Post Human (2016) which Publishers Weekly says "leads readers through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human relationship with technology. Weaving his poems together as a meditative critique of technology and its numbing effect on the everyday, Pritts asks readers to imagine other possibilities amid 'this daily flood/ of ephemera, this electronic life.'" He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York.