When you identify so strongly as someone who cares about youth, then lose your little brother to suicide, that just heightens and highlights that responsibility. 
But also, in a way, it became a weight for a few years, and I didn’t know if I could continue to bear it after losing the young person that I’d been caring for and mentoring for their entire life. Five years later, I’m more comfortable with that heightened responsibility, which led to the film.

Rilla glanced out the window. The smoke was so dense that the teachers’ parking lot was no longer visible. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened: The brush fires couldn’t be seen. Nor could the snapping and cracking be heard.

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetr