If I’m telling the truth, I’ve also been thinking of narratives of origin because this summer I am returning to fiction writing after time away to write a nonfiction book and to parent a chronically sick child. For three years, our little boy cried (what seemed like all day, every day) and he did not sleep the night. As a baby, he didn’t even sleep in our arms. He fussed and howled. We didn’t know what was wrong, and unable to diagnose him his doctors denied there was even a problem.

It wasn’t until last summer, after having moved cross-country from Nebraska to Massachusetts, that a gastroenterologist performed an endoscopy and a colonoscopy and figured out our boy had an enzyme deficiency which prevented his gut from breaking down sugars. There were also eosinophils where there shouldn’t have been. His whole GI was inflamed. But mercifully after introducing meds and some changes in diet, he slept the night. That didn’t, of course, solve his problems. A child who hasn’t slept well his entire life, who has had a stomach ache just about every hour of every day of his entire life — you can’t expect him to just snap back. He has a language delay and gets terribly frustrated. He has trouble focusing his attention. He still cries and suffers extreme anxiety, a holdover, we believe, from having been in so much pain.

Through all this, I focused my energies on being his dad, on supporting his mom and him through this period sickness and rehabilitation, and working hard at my day job as a professor to keep providing the proverbial food on the plate and roof over the head. A daily writing habit, the kind necessary for me to produce any sustained creative project — it hasn’t been in the cards. But this upcoming summer finds us in a much different place. We’re still working on language and anxiety issues, but the little guy goes to preschool now. Two days a week in June, July and August — months I am off from my teaching duties — I’ll have the entire house to myself to write. I hardly know what to think about this development. It seems to good to be true, and every day I leap from idea to idea. I want to write this, no this. No: THIS! My wife and others have warned me: Take your time, wade in slow — as though I’m an athlete returning to the playing field from injury. And as much as I hate to admit it, I know they’re right. Good fiction won’t be hurried (or worried) into existence. So I’ve got to take my time. Breathe. Abandon intentions. Abandon ambition. I’ve got to be that kid I was in college again: a lowly apprentice to each new thought.

In the first chapter of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, there is a blind desert mule in a corral. It hovers close to its water trough, dipping its lips into the water to make sure the water is still there. That’s what my summer of fiction writing looks like, except I plan to spend my days hovering over memories — of people and places and worlds long gone — and to touch my lips to the words that bring them back. Like water, stories are elemental, life-giving. I say this because the story that someday I would write again — the very story I will inhabit this summer: it delivered me through the darkest hours of my son’s sickness, when I feared my writing life was over.