The stories we tell ourselves and one another help complete our lives. My stories, like most, try to find a balance between time and timelessness. Many take place in the nineteen fifties and sixties or at 'times' dictated by atmosphere or environment: the nocturnal limbo of subway tunnel, funeral parlor, carnival fairground or end-of-the-world bar. Out of these worlds emerge the strangers who will become my characters, most of them displaced, at least for that particular moment at which the story finds them.

Without intentionally doing so, at least at the outset, I extend the landscape to include several characters, perhaps my own attempt at providing a 'family' for these outsiders. In the end, characters will walk out of their own stories and appear in others’, sometimes simply passing through and other times, staying a little longer, sitting down and having a cup of tea to keep out of the cold.

Poetry, on the other hand, is the art of breath and pulse and memory, and the scent of honeysuckle that drifts through the window, or the stench of death - literal or metaphorical - that makes you want to close that window. Poems capture a moment in time and render that moment timeless. My own poems are never plotted; the formal ones may be ‘mapped out’ according to meter and rhyme, but all poems begin with an impulse and end, at least for me, with a discovery. My poetry and stories are joined in their mutual attempt to unveil a moment in its starkest truth.

Helen Morrissey Rizzuto