Mending Lives

Jane_Houng: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Jane Hong, and this is Mending Lives, where I'm talking with people from a patchwork of places. Some have had their lives ripped apart by loss, some are in the business of repairing others brokenness, but we're all seeking to make this world more beautiful.

Tim Tomlinson is an American poet, author, and teacher who was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. After a troubled young adulthood, he has since lived in many other countries, including the UK, Italy, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and the Bahamas. Tim is a professor of writing for New York University's Global Liberal Studies program. He's also the author of the chapbook Yolanda, an oral history in verse, the poetry collection Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, a collection of short fiction called This [00:01:00] is Not Happening to You, and most recently Listening to Fishes, Meditations from the Wet World. A hybrid collection of poetry and prose in which he explores the world of the coral reef through the lens of personal history.

Tim co founded New York Writers Workshop and we first met there around eight years ago. We recorded this episode at its latest workshop, which was held in Nepal last June. It was a fascinating trip.

Jane_Houng: So I have Tim Tomlinson here with me. I've always thought your name. Tim Tomlinson. It's a very kind of catchy name. Is it a pen name?

Tim Tomlinson: The [00:02:00] name is Timothy Kenneth Tomlinson. My parents had a, an affinity for the th sound. When I was younger I thought how inappropriate to ask people to say three syllables when they could just say one. Tim. Actually my friends, as a grammar school, junior high school everybody referred to me as Timmy. But Tim is not a, it's not a pen name. It's just an an abbreviation of Timothy, which I use more and more now.

Jane_Houng: Oh, okay, so but you've never been called Tom Timlinson or anything.

Tim Tomlinson: Almost all the time and I've given up correcting or getting bothered about it.

Jane_Houng: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway over the past 10 years, we've met in numerous places in writing workshops, right? I was thinking we've been we met in Hong Kong, Australia, Macau, Athens and now here we are in Nepal with the New York Writers and you're the founder. You must be very busy with the organization of all this.

Tim Tomlinson: At certain times I am, yeah. Planning something like this is a [00:03:00] significant endeavor. I think if we don't have conferences on the horizon my, my workload is minimal.

Jane_Houng: So what keeps you wanting to be on the road organizing these kinds of wonderful, by the way, events?

Tim Tomlinson: I love to travel. I love to go to new places and dig in a little rather than just pop around. And doing a conference enables one to get inside certain doors that wouldn't be open if you were just staying in the Holiday Inn. Thank you. And meeting people that you wouldn't ordinarily meet if you were just t touristing. If I can use that term. And the conferences, very often we bring people somewhere that they've never been. And it's really gratifying to see them so thrilled.

Jane_Houng: Hey, I just remember we met in Sardinia as well. That was extraordinary, right. Yeah.

Tim Tomlinson: Right. Communities build around these ideas and we've maintained friendships and yeah, it's just overall a win.

Jane_Houng: [00:04:00] After the investigation.

Tim Tomlinson: We won't get into the money.

Jane_Houng: Oh, Tim. Yeah. Yeah. I note that you've also lived in a variety of places in Bahamas, China, England, Italy, Philippines and of course the US. You're now based in New York, aren't you? Your writing career that kind of kept you on the move?

Tim Tomlinson: The longest residencies I've had abroad have been through New York University. Obviously, writing got me the position that got me those positions. Before I began teaching the, my idea of what it meant to be a writer was in part what around from various locations, I I embrace the idea of the writer being reckless and at the behest of the wind so to speak, and to blow anywhere the wind took you and to, Take risks and seize opportunities. So I wound up in various places because certain things [00:05:00] materialize, the Bahamas, for instance, I was living in New York living in Boston in the dead of winter. And my dear friend's sister called from Miami. She was living on a boat and they needed a crew. And so it was so cold in Boston and I thought, okay living on a boat, working on a boat, going to the Bahamas to me that's something that a writer would do zip right on down there and wound up spending half a year living on board that ship and that, that changed my life. It introduced me to what what had be, what became a passion something that I took utterly for granted while I was there to a certain extent and that's diving at the coral reefs. I'd never been in the water like that before, never seen anything like that before. That was my first experience of I think something truly psychedelic without any drugs.

Jane_Houng: Okay maybe we'll come on to that later. This is a good moment for you to share a little bit about your latest book. Scuba diving has [00:06:00] informed your life in a major way and your most recent book is called listening to fish Is this a good time? Could you just read a little excerpt from it or a beautiful poem?

Tim Tomlinson: Sure, I'd love to. I think I mentioned this to you that the final prose section is called Wreckage. I'm there it is. Misremembering my own book. The one dives at wrecks.

Jane_Houng: Yes, I've done so myself.

Tim Tomlinson: Oh, okay. The It occurred to me at a certain point that, I had so deeply loved scuba diving. But I also loved self destruction. And scuba diving and self destruction don't really go together unless you're an idiot and you want to go down to 500 feet. I didn't pursue diving avidly. When it was so available to me and it was only later that I came back years later and realized that I had really nearly foreclosed the opportunity to explore [00:07:00] something that was deeply connected to my spirit. I, this section called Wreckage is actually a literal event. I had completely wrecked my life and then I found myself back in the water not long after at a wreck. Yeah, but this is a prose section and.

Jane_Houng: It's fine. Yeah, whatever. I know you're a poet but more and more you're writing prose, right? You're writing short stories. You're winning major awards. But anyway, please go on.

Tim Tomlinson: Okay So this is called Wreckage. This might sound pretentious, but it's the truth. When my life unraveled at the age of 32, When I'd lost everything, which wasn't much, but included my money, my girlfriend, my television, my imagination, my will to write, my father, my dignity, and my ability to live on my own and pay my own bills, I returned home, which means I moved back in with my mother. The fiction I constructed, or we constructed, around this [00:08:00] return was that I'd agreed to help my mother navigate her abrupt transition into widowhood. When, of course, it was she who helped me by providing a roof and food and little, if any, criticism. And making few if any demands a wise and sensitive choice since I wouldn't have been able to satisfy any substantive demands in any meaningful way. My condition was limbonic, as in stuck in limbo. Is that a word? It should be. Aside from me, no one knew if I was going to be able to rise again. I was quite certain I wouldn't. I was quite certain I couldn't, I would continue sinking. That Christmas, I agreed to travel with my brother, his wife, his stepdaughter, and my mother to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. There, on their dime, I had my own cottage on a hill overlooking Smuggler's Cove. And I can pop forward to what happened to me on that on that [00:09:00] trip. Brief references to, bringing along Bob Dylan and a volume of Proust on this trip. In the mornings I'd join the group for breakfast and retreat to my bungalow for a day of Proust. When my identification with the despair became too acute, I'd slide down the rocky bluff to Smuggler's Cove. There, in a beach shack, someone had left behind a mask and snorkel for public use. A pair of beat up fins, too. Smuggler's Cove didn't have much to look at in the way of marine life. White sand, a few sergeant majors, a couple of urchins. Out about half a mile sat a small stone island, and sometimes I'd kick on out to that. The lee side was girdled by a fringing reef of modest dimensions, and there I might find grunts and snappers, small ones, and tangs and butterfly fish and varieties of juveniles that would grow up, if they grew up, looking nothing like they look now. I found it calming and dreamy to watch this relatively [00:10:00] tame aquarium. It felt familiar. It felt, in a way, like a homecoming. I got a special kick out of the crabs. Sargassum crabs, pea crabs, urchin crabs, tiny little suckers the size of nickels and dimes, but with this hilarious amount of fight in them. Hovering above them, I'd make threatening gestures. And watch their pincers go up, ready to tilt in any windmill, no matter how large. I'd lose whole mornings watching them, the sun scorching my back. On the return swims to Smuggler's Cove, I'd wonder about the years between now and the last times I'd gone diving. How could I have stayed out of the water so long? What precipitated such a radical turn away from what I'd once loved? And then I go further with

Jane_Houng: Okay, let's stop there for just for a second. If you don't mind, my goodness, me I, I never realized that things had been so bad. You were 32.

Tim Tomlinson: Right?

Jane_Houng: And [00:11:00] from the sounds like unconditional love of a mother and a dear brother and the sea, the white the sea life. It got you through so so what can you share? I don't want this to be a confessional or anything, but I was indeed very surprised that That all those things that you listed as difficulties or losses whatever right at the beginning, but you were 32. What happened?

Tim Tomlinson: I was living in new orleans Which to me was a romantic culturally vital place but You Super dangerous for anyone with certain predilections, and I had them. I remember Robert Stone's first book A Hall of Mirrors, takes place in New Orleans, and there's a moment where the narrator, a couple of people are hanging around a bar on Rampart Street, and one of them says see those fellas over there? They showed up for Mardi Gras. I hadn't gone for Mardi Gras, but I went down with the mistaken notion that I would buy a piece of property. I loved living in the French [00:12:00] Quarter. And I went down with a lot of money, for me. I'd sold an apartment in New York City and took the money and ran and went down to a place where the economy, they, at that point, the economy was okay. And everything was for sale in New Orleans because down there, the economy had been terrible and then it started to come back up. So I could have purchased something,and then about t probably less than 18 months, I lost all my money.

Jane_Houng: So wait a minute we are talking about early 1980s something like that?

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah 1985 1986, just withdrawing money all the time, never earning. And nearly all the I drank like a new orian. I'll tell you, when I first went down there, maybe with, within a, I don't know, a week, I was at a bar very close to my pad. I loved the place I lived in. Went down to have a few drinks and there were two women in the bar. Pam, who was from, I think, Mobile, Alabama, and Jackie, who was from [00:13:00] England. And they were both they were hilarious an odd couple. And they were teasing me saying Oh, look at this guy, he looks so Ivy League. And at the, near the end of my stay, about 18 months later on a Sunday afternoon wandering around going to one bar and another I saw Pammy, who I'd see now and then and she was out in front of a bar I was just about to go into at around three o'clock in the afternoon, and she said welcome. So I said okay what do you mean? And she said now you look like one of us. So there was a physical transformation as well. I had just drunk myself stupid. All my standards evaporated most of them. And I do remember having this epiphany that didn't open an idea or a window onto an idea of escape. It just an epiphany about where I was and what had happened. I was reading it was Sunday afternoon, early afternoon which for me always [00:14:00] began by going to buy quarts of valentine ale and then cracking a couple of hard boiled eggs and eating those with Tabasco sauce. That would be my breakfast. And drinking those two quarts before I went out to start drinking. That was usually what I would do. So in the midst of that, I was reading the New York Times and there was an account of a guy who had gone down to, he was talking to Allen Ginsberg and Ginsburg was describing the final weeks of Jack Kerouac, who died of cirrhosis. And he was a pathetic mama's boy drunk. There's just no other way to put it. And when the writer of the piece was asking Ginsberg what about that what had happened and he said something that Made me Literally explode in tears. I get emotional just thinking about it now that that you know rather than frame it as unforgivingly as I just did that he was a pathetic mother's boy. That Kerouac you know [00:15:00] believed in some kind of You risk some kind of an alternative approach to living that involved, the risks of substances without really knowing what the pivot point could be, which is always the case with addiction, right? By the time you're addicted you passed the point where you could do anything about it and I understood myself to be right there that because Ginsburg framed it as being heroic and but irreversible and I thought I swallowed that whole myth hook line and sinker and here I was.

Jane_Houng: Okay so you thought what you were doing was most anti heroic. And you wanted to reverse things.

Tim Tomlinson: It was a failure at being heroic. It was an attempt at taking risks I always thought that you had to go into the wreckage and be but you had to come back out. Otherwise, what was the [00:16:00] point?

Jane_Houng: You read about Mozart writing all night, the Requiem, and he's bringing, his wife bringing drinks to keep him awake. And you read so many cases of great artists who are right under the influence, right? If he's not drugs, it's drinks. And there's something very alluring about that, isn't there? And actually, there's something, not that I've done much of this, I, but, the psychedelics, they get you in a different zone. At that stage, you were writing, were you? Or, yes, you were.

Tim Tomlinson: I was writing. I had intended to go there and write a novel. And I referred to that that and a lot of the other writing I had done before a certain point as detestable impertinences. They were the novel I wrote there, and I wish I, I may still have it, I don't know. It was an abomination. And it was so thoroughly half assed because, I fell into the slipstream of the drinking life without without maintaining the discipline of a writing [00:17:00] life. Mistaking one for the other, really is what began to happen.

Jane_Houng: So you had this period of time, you were back with your family, with your mother. Crabs. Crabs. You were obsessed with crabs. Why do you think that was and how, what led you to, to becoming clean? Cause, and I know you haven't had a drink for decades, right? Can you share that story too?

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah the water was just an astonishing, when I had all that money, for me, all that money uh, I could have become a master dive instructor. I could have gone off, and now I know so many guys that, live by going around the islands, they never put on anything more than a speedo and a pair of flip flops. That to me is a way to live. I could have done that. I could have financed pretty much anything. And didn't. Instead, I drank, with how did I turn it around? Coming back home, I I started to [00:18:00] taper off, but and when I say taper off, somebody once asked me what would you drink? Somebody in new Orleans asked me how much do you drink? Like on a a Tuesday night or a Thursday night. And I said, I don't know what case of beer. Something like that, which was astonishing to him. That, those were the easy days, because on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I would have to bump everything up with spirits. Of a certain kind, whatever was around. And Sunday was just a terrible waste of remedial drinking.

Jane_Houng: How long were you in this kind of state?

Tim Tomlinson: I was in that kind of state. Cyclically, I would say so this wasn't the first time but this was the longest time Okay, it was the time that I could sustain it the longest I would say the worst stretch was probably close to a year of very solid drinking no responsibilities whatsoever. And enough coin to keep that going or so I thought. That was also astonishing, to go to the ATM and see the balance or to go to the ATM and have Insufficient funds. This was I thought I was set up for life [00:19:00] with selling the apartment. I knew nothing about money and it's it still amazes me that I was so stupid and so naive You were 32 yeah I, you know what would happen to you now you're asking me there, there was a specific moment, right? I had tapered off. And then I thought I'm going to drink maybe one or two beers on a Saturday night. And then one Saturday night I did drink one or two beers and I actually felt it the next morning, which was really surprising. And then I just thought, you know what? I'm too old to do this shit. So I stopped and That was on June 16th

Jane_Houng: You remember the date?

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah.

Jane_Houng: That's significant.

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah.

Jane_Houng: That was the willpower involved. I can't imagine.

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah at the same time then I got a job, working with some kids from An underprivileged area in near where my mother lived all black kids, teenagers I would say 14 to 16. And I love them. They were hilarious. We had a great, I [00:20:00] called me slim. And I, one of the things I was told was that I could never If I went to the beach with them, they could only go about maybe 12 feet from where the poison ivy ended. They couldn't go anywhere near the water. None of them had ever, they didn't even know the ocean existed, 16 miles from their homes. I taught them to body surf. Oh, yeah. But one day we were down there and we'd brought a football. And we'd brought a football. And we stopped the work, whatever that was, and we were playing football. And I remember they were incredibly gifted athletes, right? So the only way I could win or compete with them was to cheat like crazy. I'd throw them in the water. Which they complained about, but I was the boss. And, I just remember that day laughing so hard and having the revelation there's absolutely nothing I want from these kids. I'm not trying to work an angle on them in any way whatsoever, and I would never have been in this position if I'd [00:21:00] been drunk. Because if I was still drinking, Everything connected to the drinking life would have been on my mind and nothing that was wholesome and unpolluted by Elements of the drinking life would have interested me whatsoever. And if I told that story to somebody who was among my crew at any point, they would have snickered with cynicism as I would have not believing that a pure moment of That kind of joy could happen outside of, snickering at the unfortunate from the, from behind a bar window. And then that very day, that same day, maybe 10 minutes after I'd have, I'd had this revelation. I saw on the beach, my third grade teacher a man that I loathed with a passion and that was shared. But I have to. I have to say, he was the first one who as a young martinet he refused to allow us to do the punishment assignments of [00:22:00] I will not speak out in class.

Jane_Houng: Lines.

Tim Tomlinson: Right?

Jane_Houng: Yeah. So 200 times.

Tim Tomlinson: Right. Instead it would be a 50 word composition And it was a hundred word composition.

Jane_Houng: You found out you're pretty good at it hey.

Tim Tomlinson: I'd be before they were outside for recess. I'd have the 50 words bing So the facility for bullshit I think was cultivated by this guy. And I saw him there and I just thought, what an astonishing, synchronous moment that I'm having this revelation about kids and then here comes this guy who I always thought of as a child hater. Now I recognize that he probably hated me for very good reason.

Jane_Houng: The joy of spending time with these young men, all men.

Tim Tomlinson: But there was one girl who felt a little left out. I have to say,

Jane_Houng: I'm sure you included that, but yeah. Okay. So yes, pure, something very pure. Laughter.

Tim Tomlinson: Athleticism, mutual appreciation. And I love those guys. And I felt it was reciprocated cautiously.

Tim Tomlinson: one [00:23:00] can't help noticing that you have a particularly loving relationship with your wife, Deedle who I understand you met in your forties.

Yeah Another ludicrous idea I had, well, I guess it wasn't ludicrous. I was 49 when I got married, and at a certain point I thought you know, here I am at this age, I gotta keep it going until 50. I don't want to be married until I'm 50. No. Yeah. Okay. And but there, there came Deedle and that spoiled that plan.

How much has she been a part of your. Let's call it redemption, right?

Yeah. Well quite a bit. I mean, I've often said that getting with deedle was the first smart thing I ever did you know, I actually I actually asked her father for her hand this was thoroughly unlike me because you know so much of my attitude, as a young man was so ludicrously rejecting of anything that existed prior to my [00:24:00] own desires. So I, I would never have done so. I would, I would be the kind of guy who'd honk the horn in the, in, in the road and wait for the girl to get in and open a wrong door, right . So I thought if I was gonna do this full reversal, I better do it. And that was such a humbling and hilarious experience actually. But I'm glad I did it.

Aw. And what about yoga? Because I, you know, we will put photos of you as promotion for this podcast, but our listeners will see that you are a well shaped slim guy. So, is yoga being part of your keeping fit? You're not drinking, right? You don't smoke. Yeah. Oh, you're pure now Go on. What about yoga?

Well yoga I had a very good friend now deceased my best friend Who lived downtown manhattan and he had access to all these great studios that were opening in the In the era when all these celebrities were going to them, right? So jiva mukti and then a whole bunch of [00:25:00] yoga studios that spilled off These Lower East Side mom and pop kinds of studios. And he was like the fittest, strongest guy I ever knew. And most people would say that too. Never went to the gym and I was a gym rat. You know, so but, but my going to the gym was to, to me just, you know, almost like high school. And I'd always wanted to get into yoga, but there was nothing near me. And so, when I did begin yoga, I was doing these long commutes that, that just became ridiculous. It was just so intrusive to the overall health Managing of the day, and then a great studio opened up right around the corner from my house. In my apartment in Manhattan. And I started going there, fell in love with it, and I was going three times a day. I remember there was an instructor there who played Only Van Morrison during the sessions. And I hadn't listened. I had gone through a period where I stopped [00:26:00] listening to anything other than classical music as a means to learn classical music better. And it was during that period that I went into that class and suddenly I had this really an out of body experience with Van Morrison. He was playing Country Fair. transcript Emily Beynon While we we're doing Savasana and I really literally felt myself lift off the pad. Yeah It felt like there was about six or eight of space between me and the mat. And I began to think, you know, Van Morrison was writing for yoga. So much of his work, especially inducive to something during Savasana at the end of the sessions. That was and then, you know, so yoga just became a way of life.

Yeah. And I skipped the gym completely. Then I stopped the gym for about three years, but then I started to get injuries. And some of the yogis that I trusted the most, most of my teachers, that was a rare male most of my teachers were women and I, I love their approach. And you know, they told me, [00:27:00] well, you know, the gym is really, it's, it's, it's a good idea. Because a lot of what you're doing is stressing those joints. And you want to maintain their viability with strong muscle structure around them. So I got back to the gym as a means to sustain the yoga. And at this point I'm doing the gym more than I'm doing yoga. Although it's still a symbiotic relationship.

Jane_Houng: Tim, you've written so much poetry and but you've also written short stories and a whole range of forms. But which one in your mind is the one that you most you find the best form to actually express? Your current state of mind in your wisdom. Is that an interesting question?

Jane_Houng: I would say the same thing. I think if you had asked me 20 years ago and that's fiction. And although my idea about fiction has changed over the years maybe I would [00:28:00] say prose narrative of any form. The work in Listening to Fish is takes great liberties with boundaries and categories and I quite enjoy that. There's nothing I like more than, especially if a writer says this to me. A writer saying to me Did that happen to you?

Yeah we get this all the time, don't we? As writers and you, maybe you deny it, maybe you don't, but

Tim Tomlinson: You get that from the lay reader, but from another writer who understands that this is probably not the case. I love that and I get that where I, somebody reads something of mine and they say, Oh my God, I didn't know that happened. And I, my answer is always everything I write happened just not to me.

Jane_Houng: But going back to listening to fish, that is autobiographical.

Tim Tomlinson: Very much it's autobiographical, memoiristic, but it's also in certain instances, creative nonfiction.

Jane_Houng: So when you imagine people reading or even listening on this podcast to what you just wrote about, what do you as a writer [00:29:00] want them to understand about you and why you actually write about, with some honesty, about what happened in the past?

Tim Tomlinson: The shape of this book was nebulous would be too specific a plan. Really. I had no idea where this was going. And where it wound up was quite a surprise to me. Originally it began as a Both a shout of joy, but also a cry of alarm. Where I learned to dive Andros Island, the Bahamas. The when I first went in the water the seabed was 50 feet below The corals broke the surface and if you flew over you would see a kind of mustard brown streak for the whole length the andros has the maybe the third largest barrier reef, in the world so the coral structure was actually 60 to 65 feet of densely tangled coral, all filled with animals. [00:30:00] Now you have to go down 50 feet to reach the coral bed. Everything's been wiped out. So this was almost something of a mission to sound an alarm from a witness. I've actually seen so much decimation of something so unbelievably beautiful, but then also I find this is a cliche, but such redemption in nature. To be connected to animals, to be invited really as a guest into their home and trusted on a certain level. This to me is spiritually redemptive and a great joy, but also, especially now, a great responsibility.

Jane_Houng: Oh, yes. The careless indifference. The recklessness of human kinds. I can resonate with what you've just said, but I went to the Maldives on my honeymoon and I still have dreams about how exquisite that was just stepping into the water and. Even without scuba diving, you could just see another [00:31:00] world. It was so exciting. And then living in Hong Kong from since the 1980s, when my kids were young, we often went to the Philippines. They could swim, and then I learned to scuba dive. I did a number of courses and who then we stopped for a while. And then I've been back more recently and I just can't believe the bleaching.

Tim Tomlinson: Yeah. Climate change is just wreak havoc. It's truly heartbreaking. There's a great book called Song of the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina. He takes a couple of marine biologists down for a dive in jamaica and in a place where they had Worked maybe 15 years earlier and he said when they came up both were literally crying. Everything's gone. In Jamaica, there's no fish. That's one of my poems in this, snapper reef. There's no snappers.

Jane_Houng: We should try to avoid ending this podcast on such a sad note, but For me interestingly this amazing workshop. We've been on. Unless i've missed something there hasn't been [00:32:00] very much. Conversation or work about climate change and I tend to just harp on about losing my daughter, but actually for me climate change is something that concerns me very much indeed. So I really look forward to reading your latest work. And my only hope is that that the younger generations, that they will read passages of great beauty about nature and how it Used to be or how it could be when it would inspire them to take better control of what's going on the politicians seem to have lost it, right?

Tim Tomlinson: Absolutely. You can't trust any of them. The only thing that you can hope for or the only thing that has worked is when it's demonstrated to island governments, let's say that preserving the reef is in the interest of their economy. So for instance, there are still quite a few sharks in the Bahamas, but there are quite a few sharks in the Bahamas now because they [00:33:00] stopped killing them. It the Bahamian government became convinced by organizations like Reef and others that every shark represents a potential 50, 000 of income per year alive. And There's a lot of shark diving going on, which is reckless and dangerous, and we're starting to see casualties from that but they're, if the sharks are around, then they're helping preserve the reef. Biodiversity is what it's all about. As soon as you move one thing, then other bad things happen. Like the crown of thorns.

Jane_Houng: Could you please think of a particularly beautiful poem that you've written in your latest book and we just end with that?

Tim Tomlinson: Ah, let's see. There are some upbeat moments. But let me go to the contents There is a recurring section called emergency files and the news there isn't too good.

Jane_Houng: I think I remember something about an angelfish a [00:34:00] few years ago when this was a work in progress and you stood up.

Tim Tomlinson: Maybe the octopus but that's a little bit long.

Jane_Houng: Up to you.

Tim Tomlinson: Oh, I can do something really short. Why don't I do this one called eagle rays? Eagle rays are a beautiful form of the ray family, right?

Jane_Houng: Like manta rays?

Tim Tomlinson: Like manta rays. They're but a manta ray can have a wingspan of 18 feet. An eagle ray might have, a large eagle ray might have a wingspan of let's say eight. And they're gray brown on the top and they have white dots in patterns. So this one is called eagle rays.

Eagle Rays. Ascending in a wedge through blue water, near the reef, ignored by everything except me.

Oh, that's it. Oh, look at the shape. Lovely.

The shape of the poem attempts to capture the sense of the rays body, but also the way that they move in wedges.

Jane_Houng: Beautiful. Oh [00:35:00] Tim. Thank you so much for your time I really appreciate if people only knew how busy you've been keeping us all in order in the last few days and we have an ongoing trip to Chitwan Park tomorrow. Look I'm having a wonderful time here. So thank you everything you do for us writers and yep, look forward to catching up later.

Tim Tomlinson: Thank you.

Jane_Houng: Thanks again for listening to Mending Lives with me, Jane Houng. It was produced by Brian Hou. You can find relevant links to this show in the comments section. I would not, could not, be doing this without many people's support and encouragement. So until next time, [00:36:00] goodbye.