Embedded Files
January 2026
How It All Started
Welcome to (drum roll, please), my inaugural personal blog!
Personal? Wait a sec. Shouldn’t an author and poet write about, well…writing, poetry, and other literary genres and issues? Yes, but not exclusively.
Under the umbrella of searching authors’ websites and blogs, the common theme seemed to be how to structure a blog with an eye toward SEO, driving people to your site. I understand that, but what about the author? Who is the person behind the words? The likes, dislikes, and life experiences. What motivates someone to compile short stories, poems, and novels? Is it a career path? Side income? Or, as Stephen King puts it in his book, On Writing, “I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
Let me tell you upfront, I’m in the “do it for the buzz” group. But I wasn’t at first.
No doubt you’ve heard the term “black swan” moment, which is a metaphor for a major life-changing event…be it for better or worse. For my family and me, it was Sunday, June 21, 1998...and it was for the worse. That evening, the Geneva police came to our door informing us that the oldest of our three children, Thomas, a senior at Eastern Illinois University, had taken his own life.
Enter the black swan.
Following that horrendous day, the soul-crushing sorrow and pain in the ensuing days, months, and years defy description. My purpose is not to chronicle the details surrounding Tom’s death and the aftermath. Suffice to say that my family survived—survivors of suicide, a title I wish on no one.
After the loss of a loved one, from whatever cause, the ensuing healing process is unique to each of us. Counselors in the field define it as “grief work.” Believe me, it’s work…hard, exhausting, mental, and physical work. There’s no set time that it ends; you’ll know it when it does. For me, writing poems became part of my healing process. My grief poured out in rhymes that were raw, undisciplined, and spiritual. I didn’t search for them. At any time during the day or night, the words found me, as if they were already there, waiting for the moment to be part of my grief work, my healing. I didn’t fight them. Like tears, I let them flow. My poems helped. They still do.
I don’t know exactly when, but several years later, I began to expand my “grief” poetry to write about whatever came to mind. The “buzz” crept into me. I found joy in writing. I needed those fleeting moments of joy in the years following Tom’s death. Twenty-one years of writing poems culminated in my first poetry book, Things That Come To Mind, published in 2020. Over the next five years, two more poetry books and my first fictional tome, a collection of ten short stories, followed. (More about them in future blogs.)
I often wonder if writing would be part of my life if Tom were here. I don’t know. What I do know is that writing has connected me to some great people and places I may never have met or known about otherwise. When I write, my soul is in a good, comforting place. When that happens, perhaps his soul is, too. At least I like to think it is. However, I would give it all up to have him back.
Tom
Leave a comment at:
tbonine.books@gmail.com
February 2026
The Serenity of No Gates
While preparing to write my next book, I came across an observation that struck me. Vanishing Breed, by William Allard, is a small coffee-table book that explores the story of the modern American cowboy through striking photography and the stories behind each image. In his Preface, Allard tells of an old cowboy who spoke of the Montana range when it had “…fewer fences and gates to slow a man down…” Contemplating that, Allard writes: “There seem to be gates in our lives that we never get open. But if we’re lucky, we have a place, each of us, that is special. Others may see that place differently, of course. They can change it, and they probably will; they can even take it away. But if we love it deeply enough, there is a part of it in us to the end.”
Gates and fences are two things cowboys deal with every day. Metaphorically, regardless of our station in life, we all do. However, there are those special places, unique to each of us, that never require a gate to enter. They are embedded in our souls—places to return to, if only for an instant, for solace and comfort.
Much of my poetry and short stories emanates from my special place: my uncle’s and grandfather’s small cattle ranch outside of Bayfield, CO. In fact, it has served as a gate-free time portal for my love of genealogy and history. My forty years of researching my family lineage began by sitting with my grandmother, looking at old black-and-white polaroids of Bonines and Davies (my grandmother’s family), dating back to the late 1800s. Expanding the ancestral lasso, I roped into my research my mother’s family as well. My special place opened doors to multiple “sub-places” that I otherwise would never have known or used in my writing.
In my short story book, Rocking Chair Tales, eight of the ten stories exist because of the ranch and frontier culture that surrounded not just me and my immediate family, but all my ancestors from England, France, Scotland, and Germany who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to an unknown land and future, searching for a better life and a place with no gates.
Do you have a special place seared into your being, free of gates and fences? If so, embrace it. See it as it was when you first saw it and lived with it. It’s a cherished reminder of a moment when the unexpected happened—a gate in your world opened, a gate to a place that would never be closed again.
Tom
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse