From the Other Side of Maybe

a poetic memoir by P.M. Draper

A Journey of Family, Loss, and the Lifelong Vow to Never Forget

Do you really know the backstory of your family history?

In, From the Other Side of Maybe, P.M. Draper crafts a poetic memoir. For her granddaughters. In six chapters, she outlines her life story couched in her poetry. In so doing, she weaves a tale that carries the reader through unimaginable happenings and heartbreak. Each chapter begins with a letter to her granddaughters, hinting at what they’ll soon read.

Growing up with an impaired mother. An absentee father for ten years, before tragedy brings him back. An exercise in survival.

P.M. Draper does just that: survive, despite losing her brothers and sister to untimely circumstances. She puts together her saga in such a way that not only tells what happened but illustrates the strength and beauty of the human spirit.

Early Praise

In her arresting and haunting hybrid memoir, From the Other Side of Maybe, P.M. Draper explores the lifelong reverberations of family dysfunction and tragedy. Through an expertly woven tapestry of poetry, letters and traditional narrative, Draper shines a bright light on what it means to endure unthinkable trauma and loss—and move to unearth ways to build a life filled with meaning and beauty. A richly layered and powerful work of literature, brimming with humor and love, From The Other Side of Maybe stays with the reader as an inspiring reminder of the human spirit’s stunning capacity for resilience.

—SKIPWITH COALE, writer/poet

This heartwarming collection comprises unposted letters addressed to a latter generation, filled with family history, words of advice and a lovely collection of poetry relating the author’s experiences, transitions and growing up into her full realization of life. Stories and verse within are appended with such tragedy, hardship, switchbacks, and loss along her course that one might wonder how she arrived at all in such a place to proclaim to her beloved granddaughters: You are my unbound joy, my prayer for every tomorrow. / We are family—you make me believe in second chances./ I write from the other side of Maybe.

—SEAN SEXTON, author of  May Darkness Restore and Portals

P.M.Draper will wrench your heart out of you, but she’ll do it in such a way that you don’t realize it at first. So, you will keep reading: what is the feeling growing in me? Where is the center of the heartbreak in this story? Draper unwinds slowly, subtly, with all the drama and pacing of a mystery novel. You simply must read on as I did—until the very last page for its filled with the understanding of the healing—even the energy and love—that can come from heartbreak.

—BONNIE MACDOUGALL, PhD., Columbia University, author of Those Who Live and Curtain Call

About the Author

P.M. Draper is the literary pseudonym Patricia ‘Pat’ Draper uses for her writing life. She has lived on the Treasure Coast of Florida since 1978. A semi-retired nurse-practitioner, she joined a local writing group in 2018. Her previous books of poetry include The Tao of Hibiscus (Rebel Magic Books, 2019) and her chapbook After Pyre (The Poetry Box, 2022). Her poem “A Time Like This” won second place in the Covid competition sponsored by the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She is the current Poet Laureate of Indian River County. In addition to writing, she enjoys cooking and triathlon training with her husband Tom. And they both enjoy lounging with Oreo, Boston Terrier extraordinaire.

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by Linda Strever

Through a myriad of experiences with cars, these poems explore the events, relationships and evolution of a woman’s life.

About the Author

Linda Strever grew up in Connecticut and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in English Education at Central Connecticut State University. In her mid-thirties she moved to Brooklyn, New York, earning an MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was awarded the Louis Goodman Creative Writing Scholarship.

Her poetry collection, Against My Dreams, was published in 2013. The collection was a finalist for both the Intro Series Poetry Prize and the Levis Poetry Prize from Four-Way Books, the New Issues Press Award in Poetry, and the Ohio State University Press Award in Poetry.

Her novel, Don’t Look Away, published in 2015, was a finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts.

Winner of the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX Journal, her work has been a finalist for the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize, the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award, the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, as well as in the Provincetown OuterMost Poetry Contest, the William Van Wert Fiction Competition, and the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Competition.

Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published widely in journals and magazines, and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

She has worked as a proofreader, editor, graphic artist, teacher, trainer, and mediator and lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest.

[www.LindaStrever.com • www.Facebook.com/LindaStrever]

What They’re Saying…

My Life in Cars by Linda Strever is at once a history and a poetic memoir, punctuated with poignant nostalgia, comedic vignettes and soul-searching heartbreak. Each vehicle transports the reader along back roads and highways of the struggles and triumphs throughout the poet’s life; a road filled with unexpected twists and turns that eventually lead to wisdom and perspective. Entertaining and enlightening, Strever takes us for a trip of a lifetime. As she puts it, “we grow to fill the landscape we find ourselves in.” Sit in the back and watch her eloquently full landscapes slide by. It’s a deeply satisfying road trip.

~ Patrick Dixon, author of Arc of Visibility

While Strever’s collection offers vivid portraits of cars as its title suggests, at the heart of these poems are the experiences, by turns harrowing, tender, and mundane, that forge a rebellious young person into a contemplative adult. Her writing is crisp with physical detail, through which we catch glints of understated emotionality. “Never did much rambling in the car/ despite its name. It was pale blue with gray interior, like my days.” Strever doesn’t sentimentalize tragedy, but gives it to us kindly, like a good friend who knows that life will always alloy great pain with joy. “The list of my dead keeps growing. They ride beside me/ in the ghost-white car, the one I’ll drive toward my old age,/ equipped with six airbags to cushion the blows.” Reading these poems is a pleasure that will leave you feeling wiser for having been invited to share in hard-won lessons of a life not your own.

~ Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and the Rust

Each make and model in Linda Strever’s My Life in Cars narrates an unanticipated stop on one woman’s ultimate American road trip, spanning forty-plus years from coast to coast.  Poignant and bold, these poems move me to reconsider how the cars we drive transport our stories, recasting our daily lived experiences into the dreams and tragedies that inhabit every Memory’s Lane.

~ Sandra Yannone, author of Maiden Voyage

Who would have thought a single symbol could generate an entire life out of ten poems? What motif for a maturing American woman could be more telling than the car, the ‘auto’? Linda Strever reflects on focal points of her life, anchoring the emotional, the devastating, in the mechanical to make them not only real but possible to describe. Strever, as always, is mistress of poetic narrative. There is not one word too many, yet no ambiguity. In “1996 Honda Civic” she writes, “I traveled with my love, with women friends, / alone—into the Cascade Mountains, to the edge of the Hoh/ Rainforest, along the banks of the Columbia River, to bluffs/ overlooking the Pacific—yet most of the geography was internal.” The collection moves from youth through loss to a level of acceptance with deep sensuality and sexuality. Not only do I know more about Linda after riding with her in Ramblers and Impalas, I understand more about my own road.

~ Joanne M. Clarkson, author of The Fates

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