Certainly has been an "undertaking"...

(har har har.  Because that's the name of the poem.  "The Undertaking")

But it really has been.  As I sat here editing the (hopefully, maybe) final draft of this 16-page, epic poem, I got a little nostalgic for how long these characters had been in my head.  I'd pretty much been working with them since, oh, sophomore year of college, when I wrote the first story (more like anecdote, in the large scheme of things) that involved them.  It's such a funny thing when you write things about characters you create (i.e., not yourself), that I'm sure every writer has said over and over again but it still feels novel when you experience it yourself, how they actually have a place in your heart and mind like real people do.  You think about them, you turn them over in your head a million times, you create all sorts of anecdotes about their past, little moments and memories that never even make it into what you're writing, but informs their person and their experience being that person, in those places, at those times.

I remember when I was first coming up with these characters, it was almost sort of easy for me to find the voice and the motivations for the main character, because I was basically putting 10-year-old me in this situation and writing what I would have done and felt.  But I spent a lot of time trying to get into the head of the father character.  I remember I had a song that I assigned to him- "My Good Gal" by Old Crow Medicine Show- that I decided I wanted his character and his life to reflect the feel of.  I would play that song over and over again, trying to get inside his head, trying to feel what it was like to be Bill McGahey from Star Tannery, Virginia, whose wife had left him and whose son had died, who was trying to keep moving forward in life with his daughter but who seemed partially paralyzed in spite of himself.  Who tried to, at all costs and in every way, be a Good Man while not really sure how to define that very thing.  Who was essentially a resilient and level-headed man, but who nonetheless found himself going through each day with some amount of tugging sadness running through everything that he didn't know how to resolve or what to do with.  I got kind of attached to him.

And happy these people finally have a place in a poem that I feel does their (made-up) lives-lives that I feel like I spent so much time in myself- justice.  Not to sound like I'm taking myself too seriously or anything.  Because at the heart of this whole people-creating, doing-justice-to-made-up-lives thing, it's really a whole lot of giddy fun.