I recently completed page 140 of The Next Page Book Project, which put a pep in my step. The Next Page Book Project is a wonderfully original concept created by Samantha Pearlman, a school-based therapist and photographer from Saint-Louis, Missouri. In her own words, “The concept of this project is to have a book written by 150+ people. The story will be passed one page at a time to the next writer. The proceeds of this book project are going to be donated to mental health charities.”
During the first half of this year 2022, I shifted my focus away from writing to take care of more pressing matters including my health, which thankfully improved. Now I feel like I am waking up from a long physical and metaphorical slumber that lasted much longer than six months. I can no longer recognize the United States of America, the country I moved to in the mid-eighties, and where I still live. Some days, I even wake up wondering if I should obtain a different passport to keep on living here! I’m also older and no longer look like the photo I chose for my Twitter account and this website. That photo was taken about two years ago, but I have since embraced my gray hair which makes me look my age. I’m fifty-eight years old already!
It’s time for me to write my own passport for a different type of entry into my inner and outer worlds. I’ll be writing an autobiographical novel next. It will be in French, and I’ll probably also do the translation in American English once the book is completed. It will be the book I wish I could have read when I was a teenager desperately searching for the meaning of life.
Dominique Margolis 