My parents loved Sinatra. I recall many Saturday evenings in the mid-1980’s sitting in the backseat of my father’s Buick Regal as we drove slowly around what was called ‘the big circle’ listening to the radio program “Saturdays with Sinatra.” Both my parents sang along as I cringed, a teenager trapped in her parent’s back seat, wishing everything—this night, this drive, time in general—would move much faster.

If only I was as cool as this guy.

I blink and suddenly I’m 32 and my mother is dying of ovarian cancer. A guitar player stops by her hospital room and offers to play a song. My mother requests Frank. The young woman with long brown hair nods and launches into one of my parent’s favorites, “My Way.” I want to smack this woman. Why couldn’t she have played something happier, like Summer Wind, or New York, New York? Instead, I step out into the hallway and cry.

Life really is just a series of beginnings and endings is it not? A little more than a year ago I introduced myself on this blog as the new managing editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. When I posted on Facebook that I’d taken on this new role, I received so much support from folks. People who know me well know that creative writing is my soul work. To work for a magazine that treasures creative writing and (bonus!) diverse voices was fantastic. Over the course of the past year, I learned a great deal about running a literary magazine, I helped coordinate the publication’s first print anthology, went to Minneapolis to run our booth at the AWP conference, managed a blog and an e-newsletter, interviewed some incredible authors, and met many incredibly kind and talented people associated with the magazine along the way.

But now, as Mr. Sinatra croons, the end is near. I’m leaving Solstice to take a full-time job at WGBH in Boston. I’m both excited and nervous, which experience has taught me is the norm for starting a new job. One of my biggest fears is that between parenting, working 40 hours per week, and that stuff toward the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs like eating, sleeping and watching The Voice, I will not have the time or energy for my creative writing. But then I remind myself that I’ve managed to work full time and write before, so there’s hope.

For now, I bid you all adieu, although I do hope to pop in occasionally on the blog when I’ve got something to say. If you are a writer, keep writing! If you’re a reader, read my stuff!(pretty please).  And the wonderful work in Solstice, of course.

Thanks for the memories. (That’s Bob Hope, I’m pretty sure, not Sinatra).

xo
Amy