"No Turning Back" by Bruce Spang

 – What was I doing here? I’d been a fool to come.

Too much of the past haunted the rooms.

Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was just published. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds. 

Author’s Talk

Bruce Spang

Writing about a moment in your life when you took a risk although you thought, I must be crazy to do this, is not easy. Old anxieties and fears bubble up. The denial, the doubt, the shame—they all flood over you. But along with them is the profound relief that, indeed, despite everything, I did make a choice, and that choice changed my life. Memory has a fickleness. Any moment in one’s life can be entered through any number of doors. Finding the right one is critical since, if it is right, the reader will be there with you and can experience what you did. The wrong one can end in confusion. In this piece, I decided to jump right into a moment, and, as I did, to leave out much of what was happening, so that the reader discovers my dilemma in bits like fitting pieces in a puzzle. The resolve comes quickly. I hope it works for others who might discover the agony of coming out as gay late in life.