Shadow and Light: In Remembrance of John Nova Lomax

Like so many of us, I deeply admired John Nova Lomax’s writing. I’d read his work for years in the Houston Press, then Texas Monthly. And I had the chance to finally share bylines with him in the masthead of this publication, Texas Outlaw Writers.

But I got to know John personally after I read his devastating personal essay about his mother that was published in Houstonia Magazine in 2013.

That’s because I recognized in that essay that John and I were both writers who shared a deep and overwhelming mother wound. I have tried many times to write about my mother, both her truth and trauma and my experience of her, but words fail me. I had never seen anyone express a similar experience so poignantly, so truthfully, with compassion, vulnerability, and bravery as John did in that article.

It was that essay that prompted me to reach out to him, and we became friends.

It’s funny when writers become celebrities, like John undoubtedly was in the city he loved that loved him back: Houston. Writers are often writers because they prefer, either by choice or necessity, to be observers of life to varying degrees. Often not quite completely fitting in anywhere, they slink off a bit into the shadows to watch from the sidelines, becoming ethnographers to cultures they don’t always fully belong to, trying to understand them and thereby understand themselves. John was in many ways such a writer, though his charming personality and dashing good looks often made you feel that he not only belonged wherever he chose but could command the room and all of its attention with his star power and storytelling.

But as so many of the emerging epitaphs of John reveal, he was in fact that type of writer after all. A man who had mastered the art of storytelling, he wove a tall tale himself, with the tools of social media like Facebook and Substack. He’d slunk off into a corner that he couldn’t quite pull himself out of. And in that corner, John hid from so many of the people who loved him, close and far, all the while continuing to write stories and make posts that, like a magician, had us looking over there, instead of fixing our gaze on him.

There is something to be said for our lives today, hidden behind stories, those we tell ourselves and those we post. There is always so much more to us, hidden behind the veil. John hid, like we all do, but this most public writer was far too adept at hiding too much for too long.

I suppose that is one of the reasons his story about his mother moved me to write to him in the first place. It was one of the few stories he wrote that pulled back the curtain behind which he hid and revealed the man, even the little boy, his masterful storytelling shielded. And, as a woman and storyteller who is far too often adept at hiding as well, it spoke to me.

I have a few favorite memories of my friendship with John, but the best one is also tied up in loss and grief. When Prince died, I was living in Austin, a city John loved to hate. The city, in its indefatigable whiteness, failed to acknowledge the magnitude of Prince’s death, but Houston, of course, did. John and his wife, Kelly, invited me to dance the night away with them at Fitzgerald’s (another beloved Houston institution whose loss we all still grieve).

We grieved and rejoiced on that shaky top-level floor in the body of work that Prince left behind. Just as so many of us will rejoice in the body of work John left for us and grieve at what was left unsaid, unwritten, and undone.

During his last years, John was struggling with so much, including undoing what had been done. He and I had had a falling out a few years after our Princely convening. He’d characterize what happened as a misinterpretation; I characterized it as a misrepresentation. We didn’t speak for a few years. I think a lot of things were going on with John during those years that neither I nor many others knew. Then last year, in 2022, I received a message from fellow Texas Outlaw Writer, Myra Jolivet, who also happens to be one of my mentors in life (I’ve known her since I was 18 years old–I’m currently 52.) It turned out that John had seen me comment on one of her Facebook posts and realized she and I were friends. He reached out to Myra and asked her to contact me. “He told me his regret in the falling out,” she wrote. “He misses you something awful.”

My pride had me pondering a reconciliation, when I got word John was hospitalized. I drove from Austin to Houston and showed up in the ICU. John didn’t look quite like John anymore, but his voice was the same, though plaintive. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, as I stood inside the thin hospital curtain that shielded him from the outside world and peered down at him in his bed, “but I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“I’m glad to see you at all, John.”

“I always thought we could be great friends,” he said.

“I drove here to let you know that we are.”

I was honored that John wanted to see me the other week, after he’d landed in the hospital again, this time with an even worse prognosis, though higher spirits than I last saw him. I spent time with him, and he regaled me and other visitors with “old Houston” stories and gave me suggestions about a few places I needed to explore now that I’d returned to our beloved Houston.

As so many of the tributes to him have shown, we loved him for both his shadow and his shining, shining Light.

The night before he died another friend called me, in grief over the impending loss of Houston’s well-loved scribe. Part of his grief had to do with his friendship with John which had only taken place online and over the phone. It seems that John saw something in common with him and had some things to both wrestle with and get off his chest. “Yvonne, he called me every day for the last four months. Every single day. He was struggling with things and looking to make amends,” he said.

We discussed how John perhaps shared with him the things he tried so hard to keep in the shadows with others. It is, after all, easier to tell your secrets to someone who doesn’t fully know you. But John never needed to hide behind the shadows. As so many of the tributes to him have shown, we loved him for both his shadow and his shining, shining Light.

“I’ve never even met the man in person,” our friend said, “no one even knows that we were friends.” I encouraged him to go to the hospital in the morning, so that they could finally lay eyes on each other. But morning would be too late. By then, our shining star, our borrowed Nova, was gone.

Below is a poem I wrote after our visit on May 10, 2023.

Borrowed Nova

Where you goin’ so fast?
It seems you just got here
There’s a bucket full of crawfish
And the pitcher’s full of beer

Where you headin’ so soon?
There’s still some light here left
And with that traffic on 1-10
Stickin’ around’s your best bet

And the cicadas just started hummin’
And the grackles have gathered round
They are making these killer melodies
To your words, which they’ve just found

And the people, so many people
Have made space next to the bayou
Where they pushed the abandoned couches
To sit and listen to all the stories

You

Still have yet to tell
That you still have yet to write
Don’t leave yet, borrowed Nova,
It’s not time to say goodnight.

And the cicadas just started hummin’
And the grackles have gathered round
They are singing these killer melodies
To your words, which they’ve just found