The Afterlife of Deleted Text or Thank You, Ben Holzworth

When I talked about Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest at the Fort Collins Book Fest earlier this year, I mentioned that the book began its life as a collection of twenty-two poems about Mount Everest, of which only one, a poem in two voices, made it into the final picture book. I showed my middle grade audience some slides with a couple of the other poems, whose content became transformed into two spreads of back matter. And I showed them a couple more that didn't even make it that far.

“Will you do anything with those unused poems?” Amy Holzworth, Children’s Services Librarian at Council Tree Library, asked me. I said, “I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think there’s another book in there.”

Well, one thing led to another in that conversation, and before we wrapped for the day, I’d printed out a copy of one of those left-out pieces, an acrostic poem titled “The Story of a Fossil.” It’s about ammonites, those coil-shelled, many-tentacled creatures that went extinct 66 million years ago.

Art ©Ben Holzworth, 2024

Why ammonites disappeared in that long-ago extinction event, we don’t yet fully know, when their distant relatives like nautilus and squid managed to survive. Their fossils, considered to be sacred in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, can be found washed down in glacier-fed rivers in the Himalayas. They’re becoming rarer on account of climate change and gravel mining. They’re visually complex fossils with unique patterns, their delicate artistry created by pressure, time, and water.

It turns out that Amy’s son, Ben Holzworth, is an artist, in his own words a paleo artist, an “artist of beasts and photographer of bugs.” He ended up illustrating the signed copy of the ammonite poem I gave his mother. So here it is, my deleted text in something of an afterlife. Because the whole point of writing anything is to see if it’s worth sharing, whether in a book or in some other way. Today’s work can even be shared in the future, through, as they like to say in publishing contracts, “media yet to be invented.”

Seems fitting. Those ammonite fossils, after all, left their imprints for the long haul on cliffs and rocks and mountains.

Thank you, Ben Holzworth.