I’m writing from the fishbowl.

Thanks to Jack Butler, I’m on the outside looking in.

You see, I’m a firefish; I just didn’t know it until I started talking to Jack.

I was always a little weird, the only quarterback on the bus (in the country?) reading a book. I toed that line all through high school and into college. I hid my weirdness, my doubts, pretty well.

It wasn’t until I made it to Ouachita Baptist University that I found my tribe. Little did I know, my chieftains would turn out to be two middle-aged men.

It all started with Dr. Johnny Wink. If you’re a regular reader of this column, you already know that story. But there’s more. There’s the bit about Jack.

Johnny sent Jack my way right when I needed him most. I was getting “serious” about writing. Serious enough, I started mailing my stories off to an address Johnny shared with me, an address in California that led me to Pulitzer-Prize-nominated-author, Jack Butler.

Jack performed story surgery. There was red ink everywhere. Words were cut. Whole lines — entire paragraphs — deleted. I read the notes left in the margins as if they were the Gospel.

I read Jack’s debut novel, Jujitsu for Christ, too.

I asked questions. Jack shied away from answers. We talked about dreams and vampires, mindfulness and meditation.

To this day, I have never met Jack Butler; I’ve never shaken his hand, but I owe him my life, this strange little existence I’ve crafted out of my words.

This realization hit me hard a few weeks back. Philip Martin had just sent me a song where he’d taken Jack’s poem “Firefish” and put the lyrics to music.

I was on the boat with my wife when I first heard it. I played the audio file over the loudspeakers as the water swallowed the sun. When Philip sang the line,

“You can quote the Gospel,

you can spin the track,

but once the firefish jumps,

he never crawls back...”

I lost it.

Real tears ran lakewards down my cheeks. My wife didn’t understand. I’d told her about Jack, but what I felt in that moment went deeper than any words I could summon. And that’s saying something. I love words. But words aren’t what got me to jump all those years ago.

It was Jack.

Just knowing that I wasn’t alone, that someone had wrestled with the same questions, had thought the same thoughts — gave me the courage to plunge headfirst into the mystery of life.

And I’ve never looked back.

Buy Eli Cranor's books - #Commissions Earned