BOSTON LITERARY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2026
- Big Table Publishing
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
~ Carl Sagan
Well, Carl, I'm feeling you, as I did get help, and it did come
from within that lonely speck called Earth, because I
couldn't get it done without other humans
right here.
~ Timothy Gager
There’s a story many writers tell. They tell it at readings, usually standing in front of people with their books stacked like evidence. They say they always knew. That writing was inevitable. That it was a calling, a destiny, a clean line from childhood to now.
That wasn’t me.
I didn’t like writing, didn’t like being told what to do. I didn’t trust it. It was like trying to sort twenty things at the same time. My ADD didn’t know what teachers or professors wanted. I didn’t come to it because I wanted to be a writer. I came to it because someone died and the silence afterward was unbearable. A close friend disappeared, and the words started and didn’t pause. Grief didn’t arrive with instructions. It just sat there, heavy and dumb, and demanded a keyboard to go to.
Writing was the place it landed.
At first, it wasn’t art. It wasn’t craft. It was damage control. I wrote about women I couldn’t reach and drunks I understood too well. I wrote in short bursts because attention fractured easily. Those early pieces—what would later get gathered under titles like Treating a Sick Animal and This Is Where You Go When You Are Gone—weren’t trying to be books per se. They were trying to be statements. If something was written down, it could stay forever, not disappear.
Loneliness came earlier than language. Not the romantic kind, like the brooding actor but the dull, grinding variety. The kind where you realize you are lost, no one is coming to get you, and you are facing eternity in the exact place you are now. You either move or you calcify. You either speak or you disappear inside yourself.
But you forgot, To remember
It rains cats and dogs
and images of baby animals
made the blues go away
Billie Holiday scratched
to the end, the needle dragged
never piercing her center, which
was glued on, nevertheless,
I related. Her story intrigued,
I never understood the song’s
connotation, why the singer’s depths
of despair, strung me along with
desperate notes, desperate measures.
Lady-you once spoke to me,
but never knew me, all the times
I slipped this record into the sleeve
Alcohol helped give me a solution. Until it didn’t. Social at first. Then habitual. Then necessary. It made people tolerable. It made me tolerable to myself. The lie I told myself—like everyone tells themselves was that I wrote better drunk. The truth was I was afraid of living without being drunk. This included writing. Writing as a sober person meant no escape hatches. Writing sober meant seeing exactly what I was avoiding. My writing got better after that. Cleaner. More brutal. There was nowhere to hide in the sentences anymore.
Books began to accumulate in sobriety. I wrote about the closing doors of the past in The Shutting Door (Ibbetson Street Press), Anti-Social Network (Red Neck Press), These Poems Are Not Pink Clouds (Propaganda Press). Titles of me trying to stay upright when literally I was falling on my ass.
The Shutting Door
We are solid oak doors that shut
on our past, close on dead mothers,
sons, daughters. These doors swell
often, won’t open. One midnight
we walked towards woods, the moss
cold under our toes, as we were,
caught in the light for a moment;
a glimpse of half full. We are dim
lights on dark nights, sending out calls
to the wolves howling at the sun
because the moon hanging there,
yet never seems to hear them.
If I should need to step back to see
how you glow in this light,
illumination, I can be at one with that,
us, growing like violets in the dark.
Loneliness never announces itself. It shows up when the bars close and you don’t want to go home because home is too damn quiet. A.A. and writing became the places I went instead. Sometimes poetry. Sometimes flash. Sometimes whatever fits inside the day without breaking it. That’s how books like Chief Jay Strongbow Is Real and Spreading Like Wild Flowers happened—not as statements, but as accumulations.
Sobriety
It can exist
drink coffee
milk, three sugars,
stirred with a straw.
Sit on the sofa,
legs curled under
view the oil paintings
hung boats and fields
thousands of brush strokes
thousands
I didn’t grow up imagining the literary life I have now. I didn’t have a plan. I wrote short Flash fiction and poems when ideas came in bursts. Eventually novels, because some ghosts refuse to stay short. The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan came out of that. He was a man circling his own damage by routine. The chapters were written like Flash fiction.
Sometimes I wonder if I should work on my inflexibility. Maybe, I too,
need a therapist. Maybe my life would be easier or better. But what’s
the use? At this point in my life, I can’t see what good it would do.
It seems every day is the same, and the best way to get through
the routine is not to give much of a shit.
Grand Slams: a coming of eggs story followed, which read lighter than anything I’d ever written. The fact that it was autobiographical made it easy to write, and funny. Humor is and will always be a part of my make-up.
Debbie doesn’t stick around to hear the rest of it. She yanks the zipper
down on her brown, dowdy, polyester uniform, to display a white tank
top, and advances aggressively to the back. It’s an angry walk, one
the graveyard shift has seen before when drunk customers are about to
throw down with each other, and Kenny has to rush in and break it up.
By the time Maloney heads to the back to console her, the top
of her waitress dress is folded down to below her waist and she is
crying. “If I could sit here in my fucking underwear, I would! I swear,
I’m just going to sit here until my check comes.”
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“I just got fired,” she cries. “This place can eat a dick.”
“Wednesday’s Blue Plate Special: Eat a dick,” Maloney adds.
Every Day There Is Something About Elephants leaned into that directly, but it was a mix of emotions, a mix of all the styles Flash fiction can take. It was mostly work that had been previously published in journals and there were a lot of them.
At some point I formed a relationship with Big Table, a publisher that put out the last four titles mentioned, and many more. They came from the same instinct that made me write in the first place: truth. Refusal to wait, and a place where the work, mine and others could be housed. Eventually Robin Stratton of Big Table gathered The Best of Timothy Gager, which felt strange, like seeing your life condensed into a before, during, and after while knowing exactly what got left out.
Somewhere along the way, a salamander crawled out of the wreckage which embraced my ASD.
Joe the Salamander wasn’t planned. He arrived intact from a piece of Flash fiction, carrying more meaning than I intended. People recognized him immediately. Survival. Persistence. The small ash still glowing after a fire. Joe became the book people mention first, the shorthand, the reference point. There’s an audiobook now, which still feels unreal, my words traveling without me in the room to explain myself.
Weeks later, when Millie received Joe’s official evaluation in the mail
from Dr. Ogden, she was furious. Most pediatric neuropsychology
evaluations for infants or preschoolers usually take four to six hours.
Dr. Ogden had only spent a half an hour with Joe, where he concluded
that Joe’s language development was within the bottom one percentile.
Ogden based his conclusions only after Millie told him all the words
and sentences Joe could say, which he hadn’t observed. “He’s very
smart,” she told Odgen. Apparently, he hadn’t believed her, and
certainly didn’t take the time to draw anything above his appalling
conclusion.
Later came Shadows of the Seen, which didn’t come from cleverness. It came from staring too long at the news, or reading The Onion, whose parody about mass shootings and the most powerful country acting powerless. It showed the things people avert their eyes from, mass shootings, mental health, and realizing that shadows don’t disappear when ignored. They grow and get worse. They follow. They demand deep sadness.
Abby also didn’t like that Lucky had purchased a gun and was building some
sort of larger gun storage rack in the basement. The heavy-duty handgun
he kept in the car “for protection” as he put it, could be slightly justified.
Him keeping one in a car wasn’t something she could wrap her head
around. She was not a gun person, but who was she to prevent anyone
else from owning one! The basement build was something she didn’t
understand. Lucky must have some reason for the oversized storage cabinet,
which looked to be able to house more than a few large weapons. His
demeanor suggested that he had thought this out, and it was going to
be a hobby or to be used for another activity. Lucky’s friend Shawn had
guns, but he used them for hunting, and as far as Abby knew, Lucky
had no interest in that. Lucky did purchase some strange novelty t-shirt with
a picture of what looked like a Mother Superior holding a machine gun,
with the words Guns for Nuns placed above that. When she questioned
Lucky on the odd choice of a very Pro-gun garment, he just laughed and said
he thought the shirt was hilarious.
Time as a writer can be your friend. I’m often asked, How did you manage to write twenty books? Truth is that I write every day. In 2026, a new and different book of poetry, “These New Orbs,” will be released, and the theme is everything and anything orb. Renowned poet Richard Hoffman has already read it and I’m doing the right thing if I get a review/blurb like this from someone like that:
Grounded in humility, These New Orbs is a book of reckoning and radiance, conjecture and contemplation. In this brilliant collection, Timothy Gager draws
on astronomy, myth, memory, family history, and contemporary life to fashion poems of exquisite imagery and sonority. The “orbs” of the title become, as one experiences the whole collection, recurring emblems—of loss and survival, desire and distance, and the poet’s dead who remain with him, with us. Angels, eggs, planets, memories, eyes, ghosts, regrets and promises, the emotional range of
these poems is vast. Gager is a sensible mystic, desirous of the light, searching, skeptical and earnest. As he writes in “Signs,” Maybe the light only finds/ those who have stopped looking. Fierce, tender, funny, and unafraid, Gager’s work conjoins vision and craft to offer us if not consolation, clarity. I feel grateful for
these poems.
In 2027 my next novel, The Murder Gene, should also be out, and I welcome the opportunity to be asked about it. Though the rough draft is down, I’m not sure, quite yet, where it’s going to land in terms of revision, and what legally I can put in there.
Also, for fun, I’ve began playing music out in venues, just me ad a guitar. Long gone of the old band days, but those times were remarkable. I’ve had a lucky life, one which I’ve appeared in a Billboard Magazine’s Top 10 in 1983, sharing a regional list with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Melloncamp, and also had a book shoot to a Number 1 seller within an Amazon category, but enough about me. I get energized now by other writers, either giving them space and opportunities to present their work, or just being in conversation with like minded scribblers. I’ve spent years in rooms with other writers, basements, bars, libraries, Zoom squares and what bonds us is that we are writers. When I ran live readings, when I watched writers step up to a mic with shaking hands, I recognized the look. This is what I have. Please don’t look away. People that believe writers belong in tiers are the ones that feel they don’t fit in. I despise that. The writers I respect the most welcome all.
Loneliness hasn’t vanished, but that’s not why I write. I love writing and being around writers. I enjoy everything being quieter now. More familiar. I write and doubt still circles. I write and silence has become kind to me.
Writing didn’t make me whole.
It made me honest.
Some days, that’s enough.
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