CAR ACCIDENT AS INSPIRATION
The May edition of Quartet Journal will publish my poem “Failing To Yield,” which is about an auto accident that occurred at Fairview Crossroads some years ago. The Crossroads has been the scene of a number of accidents, in part because it is the intersection of four roads: Hwy. 178, Neely Wingard Rd., Calks Ferry Rd., and Wagener Hwy.
I didn’t view the accident, but I was there when the EMS arrived. There were a number of us standing on the sidelines in silence. The hush was broken by the wailing prayer of the grandmother who had been uninjured in the accident.
A car accident has been used as a point of departure for a number of writers, I’m thinking of novels. Here are several examples of writers who took an auto accident and went into diverse plots:
* If I Stay by Gayle Forman – an accident leads to a common trope of memory loss which gives rise to mystery and discovery.
* Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor – five people are killed in a car accident which develops into a story about organized crime.
* The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal – a car accident begins a story about a heart transplant.
* Home Stretch by Graham Norton – after a car accident involving a wedding party, the driver can’t face living among the mourning relatives and friends.
The publisher of my poem, Quartet Journal, is an online poetry magazine with three issues a year—Winter, Spring/Summer, and Fall. Linda Blaskey is the usual editor, but on the masthead for 2025 is guest editor Franetta McMillian.
One of the things I enjoy about this magazine is the authors' comments about how they write and what has meaning for them. In the most recent edition, poet Deidra G. Allan wrote that a theme she comes back to is “the great interplay of hope and despair, grief and joy.” Her poem speaks implicitly to this theme and ends with “like a child’s laughter through the open window of a house in mourning.”
More of Quartet Journal at - https://www.quartetjournal.com.