A week ago Saturday, my family and I spent the day traveling to local museums. My son has a requirement to visit a certain number in the year and we decided to make the best of it. Most of them are little more than old houses that have been converted to tell the story of local history.

One that we went to about an hour a way was one such place and we arrived just as the curator was leaving and were told we would need to come back after lunch, but that there was going to be a valentine’s party we could attend. My boys thought that a grand idea, so we went to have our own picnic lunch and promised to return.

Finding a table outside the library we ate and then played on their lawn for a bit, then returned to the museum. It wasn’t much. Some Civil War uniforms, a chest of toys long forgotten, a dress or two, relics of the railroad. The party wasn’t much either; store bought cupcakes, juice and a chance to make a valentine for a resident of one of the local nursing homes.

The one thing that fascinated my boys was a voice machine. On the front was the name Edison. You slid a wax tube on a spindle and lowered something similar to the arm of a record player onto the spinning tube and place metal ear tubes to your ears—and heard the voice of a doctor as he dictated his thoughts.

My boys kept changing the wax tubes and listening through the scratch to this distant voice of one we did not know. It wasn’t even that the thoughts were all that interesting to them, but it fascinated them to hear what the man had to say.

I like to think someday, someone maybe a child will find our thoughts and find them that interesting. Maybe that is why we do it—why we scribble or type, rhyme and fret trying to capture our world a bit. To leave a bit of us behind, or our hopes for a future different from our own and hope as well that someone will be as fascinated as my boys.

Why do you write? What compels you to scratch out your own verse? What hope do you have for your writing?

I think these questions are important and the answers just as important for each of us to read as well, because there are times we don’t want to go on with it, that we lose a bit of those dreams and hearing each others can help us rekindle that.

So have a seat, I’ll draw us up some drinks—by the way, my name is Brian—tell me, why do you write?

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A quick reminder as well, you have until the end of the month to get your poems in for the anthology. You can find details here.