“I used to think that my life wasn’t interesting enough to write about.”

A simple statement, but one that resonated with me and caused me to have an immediate fondness for this stranger at the front of the room. John Gallaher wore glasses and modest clothing, he brought a timer wherever he went, and he enjoyed seasoning his dialogue with profanity. For a first impression, I thought he had done a fairly decent job. Getting into the heart of why he had come here, Gallaher began to read from his selection of poetry. A lover of “little things” as I am, his descriptions were so satisfyingly full of feeling even if they were indeed just small snippets of moments in memory. For instance, he shared one of his favorite moments as being when he was simply sitting on his couch one day. As a truck passed from one side of his television screen to the other, a garbage truck outside did the same across his adjacent windows, in perfect unison. “It was a nice moment” he said.

For one of his recent books Gallaher revealed that his work process was basically to wake up, turn on a specific music album, and to write about whatever he was thinking about that day. He also mentioned how he feels that everything he is thinking about whilst making his art in some way belongs in it. (I enjoy that concept a lot.) At the end someone posed a question about why his poems tend to end abruptly, and he replied that “we are always in the middle of things.” He doesn’t care to end his poems definitively because he doesn’t like goodbyes.