So Much Depends Upon

I hated poetry.

That's probably an odd way to begin an essay about a poem that has followed me for twenty-seven years, but it's true. I was a college freshman in 1999, and the longer a poem was, the more likely I was to hate it on sight.

Then someone put sixteen words in front of me.

William Carlos Williams' *The Red Wheelbarrow*.

I read it.

And laughed.

*Wait. That's it?*

But something strange happened next.

I didn't dismiss it.

I got curious.

Why did these sixteen words matter? Why had someone bothered to publish them? Why, nearly eighty years later, had someone decided they mattered enough to put in front of me?

I didn't know it then, but that question would follow me for the next twenty-seven years.

What I couldn’t know then was what would come from that moment. Isn’t it funny how life does that? Sometimes life changes in ways that we can see instantly: a birth, a new job, a death. And then sometimes life changes in ways we don’t even know until years or even decades later. That poem is impacting me still, today. But I don’t want to get too ahead of myself here.

What happened immediately after reading that poem was I wrote my own. I called it *The Writer’s Creation*. It was an onomatopoeia poem based entirely around the sounds of a keyboard. I was at work and the clacking sounds registered in my brain. I was watching myself type a document and it hit me that I was literally watching a writer’s creation happen.

I was so excited about that silly poem I took it to my English professor the next day. All carefully typed out and printed with my name at the top. Without even a thought of what she would think, just desperate to share it with her.

She read it and then gave me such a grin. Her name was Mrs. Cook which in an ironic twist only life can recreate was the same as my own grandmother, deceased for ten years. But her words floored me: you could publish this.

I looked at her and said, “You really think so?” I was a student at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida as a creative writing major. She talked me through the process and helped me understand how to submit. So that’s what we did. Then it was accepted. In January, it was published.

I remember an elation I almost couldn’t believe holding the magazine in my hands. But also a certain unreality. It almost didn’t seem real. And soon enough life moved on in the way life does. Not long after I was voted Journalism club president and began leading the school newspaper. Under my leadership it evolved into being called *Vibrations* to help better capture the purpose of the journal.

In 2002 I was laid off from my job and school was diverted into survival. I waited tables for a while. Moved around. Became homeless. Left Gainesville for Cedar Key for a year thinking maybe I could find answers in the ocean.

I kept writing. Delved into fantasy. Found Terry Brooks and his *Sword of Shannara* series and an obsession with fantasy.

I started playing with novels and short fiction. I created characters and stories around them. Experimenting and exploring. No plan, no purpose, just going wherever my mind took me. I did that for a lot of years. Life kept tossing me around like a buoy in rough seas.

Eventually I found myself in Irving, Texas as single mother to a precious three year old daughter named Liberty. Life had tossed me a priceless gift and I came to Texas to put down some roots and build security for us both.

One day, while making my first ever pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving my daughter and I were role playing. She wanted to make me famous. But to do that I had to create something. In a moment I couldn’t even see the impact of I said, “What if I write a story about a snowman village in trouble?”

We finished the game. Ate pie. She went to bed. And I dreamed that night of a snowman named Morty trying to save his village and Christmas.

I woke up that morning and just had to write it. I figured it would be a cute short story I could read to Libby before bed. I wrote all day. And the next. I wrote for a week straight before I ran out of steam.

I got stuck for a while. Somehow I had written myself into a corner and couldn’t figure out where to go next.

I talked it over with Libby. She was delighted I was writing the story. I talked her through the whole thing. She loved the characters and we talked about what they could do next. Then all of a sudden it clicked in my head. I knew how to solve it. I returned to the keyboard. This repeated in various ways for about ten months.

The day I finished the story was both beautiful and sad. I sat at my desk and cried. I couldn’t believe it. Nearly 16,000 words to create Jason, Lizzy, and the Snowman Village.

Like my poem, it wasn’t long before it was published. Reviewers loved it. My daughter begged me to read it every night. And less than a year later it won a Readers’ Favorite award. And that still doesn’t feel real even today.

And from there came a career spanning almost two decades. Literally almost by accident from one little idea about a snowman village.

Now, in 2026, that poem from 1999 is still with me. Living inside me. Helping me see the world differently. And today I realized something deeper that maybe the poem didn’t even realize it made possible.

So much depends Upon …existing

Williams chose a wheelbarrow, some rain, and some innocent chickens but that whole moment existed. And everything that happened as a result has existed and depended upon it since. His poem was published in 1923.

103 years later, much of my writing exists because it depended upon a sixteen-word poem that forever changed how I saw the world. Which now begs the question: what changes because my work now exists as a result of his?

So the next question is this:

What now depends upon you reading my stories and what you do after?

Will you share it? Reflect upon it and let it reach you? Will you learn from it? Will you allow yourself to be changed by it like I was by a wheelbarrow and some chickens 27 years ago? And what depends upon it?

I may never know the answer in the end. Williams certainly doesn’t know how much he changed me. But I don’t have to. Because the moment existed. And everything depended upon it.

And in the end, nothing had to come from it. Existing was enough. **Existence was all that mattered.**

With warmth,