I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

I belong to a group of writers called The Dark Room Collective.

Lately, I am intensely nostalgic because one of our members recently passed.

Danielle LaGroche George was decidedly one of the most brilliant people I've known.

Her poem, a Dominican poem, was featured on the slowdown last year.

She possessed a transatlantic imagination that was fiercely committed to a purposeful literature.

She was kind beyond possibility.

Danielle and I went long jags without seeing each other, but recently had connected

at least once a year, either in her hometown of Boston or at writers' conferences.

Her passing took me to unbox some early photographs of the Dark Room Collective, and thus back to all the memories

when we first saw futures as writers. I contemplate the journey of the lives of the

Dark Room Collective, and am moved by the steadfastness of each person's vision and commitment to their art.

I thought, too, about the bonds created away from our deaths and books and poems.

I particularly recall all those moments we communed, our parties, our nights at

restaurants, our dancing, our cutting a rug. Kevin and Charlottesville at Fred's and

Rita's, then later at a club downtown, Sharon in Maine, Natasha at Breadloaf,

Tisa and John Kay in Philadelphia, Tracy Kay in Bennington, Bethany in Tampa, Elizabeth in South

Beach doing the Neney, twirling beneath the rafters at Nick's barn party.

But the nature of my youth was one in which my passion for art lived out in my passion for life.

At times, there was a recklessness about it, like Greg, Koresh, and me spilling out of a Soho bar at first light,

having debated literature and writers with the seriousness that felt like life mattered,

truly mattered.

...