https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Zh9v6yRwCD5jofnlr3l3uxMqqeyIpmDnEHMGpVsDBw/edit?hl=en&pli=1

I used to read my work occasionally, around the bay area, circa 90’s. I once read in the East Bay at a café and I brought my recording equipment. It was me, John Noto (a guy I knew who liked my work and got me the gig), and a girl named Jesse Taylor York. She read last.

Honestly, John’s work was … tepid. I tried to keep things interesting and novel, whatever the result. Jesse, however, immediately demonstrated a whole other order of power and insight. Not just her writing, either. She could deliver like lightning.

I found her work compelling, and I got a bunch of it on tape. After the show, I told her that she had completely blown me away, and she pleaded with me to rescue her from my friend, something easily enough accomplished. I think we actually went to her place, and, it wasn’t really a place. It was… more like a storage place? It was a box. With some lights.

I was puzzled by the distinction between her powerful authorial presence, which amazed and educated me, and her awkward expressions of herself as a woman, person, and mind. She was childlike and dark. But her brilliance stuck with me. I remember her introducing me to her typewriter, which, really, I took as a sacred gesture.

We didn’t spend a lot of time together. I got her number though, and a couple of months later, when I was having some poets over, I called her to invite her. She begged off, sounding distant. A few months after that, I called to repeat the invitation, but Jesse was gone. She took that lonely flight too many have taken too young, from the precipice of greatness to the pragmatism of earth. Too far. Too fast. Too fiercely.

Jesse, I remember you. Thank you for the one night of deep fellowship, we shared our fascination with the impossible songs of the mortal singers we are. I remain your friend, and tire of your long and early absence. Before too long, I expect I’ll join you in fate’s result. Until that time I sense that traces of your voice are somehow found in mine. And I am glad of this.