Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the word community as well as how important it is for a writer to be part of a literary community. I wanted to break down the word community and further explore its depths. I mean really get in there. I didn’t want to just touch its underbelly, but also slice it open and see what’s inside. Not in a way that would permanently kill the word, but rather just temporarily kill it, like how my biology teacher just temporarily killed the frogs we dissected in high school. After school, she reanimated them and sent them back into the wild. I never actually saw the reanimation, but my teacher assured me it took place, which was quite a relief, as I was very concerned about the frogs.

So, anyway, I wanted to do the same with the word ‘community.’

Let’s start with the root of the word: comm. Not much there, really. But now let’s remove one of the m’s. We now have ‘com,’ which, as you know, is a suffix for the World Wide Web, one of the largest communities in the nation. Right out of the gate, the word ‘community’ embraces hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of people. Indeed, the Internet has helped me stay in touch with writers I met during my time in the MFA program and at writers conferences, with the help of Twitter, Ancestry.com, and Facebook.

You really have to hand it to the person who coined the word ‘community.’ It’s as if the person pored over the entire alphabet to find the perfect letters to represent the feeling the word evokes. I could almost imagine him sitting there, in a candlelit room, sweat running down his face in tiny streams, his hands quivering, a gun pointed directly at his head. Simply amazing.

Now let’s take the second part of the word. It’s a little trickier, but once you see it, you’ll be like, “How did I not see it?” I’m, of course talking about the letters u and n. The first letter is a homophone for the word ‘you,’ right? But—and here’s where you’ll really slap yourself in the forehead—when you add the n to it, you get ‘un,’ which is French for ‘one’. So you have ‘you’ and ‘one.’ In other words, ‘you’ are ‘one’ of many in a community.

Now, how is that forehead feeling? Yeah, thought so.

When I first started dissecting the word ‘community,’ I did a lot of research and discovered the origins of the word. Apparently, it comes from the Middle English word comunete, which, in turn, comes from the Anglo-French communité. It was that last point that stunned me. Anglo-French. Could it be a coincidence that, last year, I visited Paris right before I went to Positano, Italy, where I attended the Sirenland Writers Conference—a conference that was, among other things, a literary community? Possibly, but that’s quite the coincidence. I started feeling paranoid, as if the person who coined the word knew me; indeed, as if he were manipulating my every move like how a Muppateer manipulates a Muppet. Had he been reanimated after death as those frogs in my biology class had been only to steer my life in certain directions? Stranger things have happened.

The third part of the word—i—is pretty obvious. All you have to do, really, is capitalize the letter and there you go. I am part of the community. Go ahead, you say it. Louder. Louder. I can’t hear you. Louder. Louder.

Never mind. You must be too far away. I’ll just have to trust that you said it.

So you’re probably wondering about that last part of the word. You’re probably saying, “Gene, what does ‘ty’ mean?” Well, think about it: there is more than just one community in the world, right? And what do we do when we have more than one of something? That’s right: drop the ‘y’ and add ies. Now you have ‘ties’: we are all tied to our community. We all have ties. I know, I know: duh.

Look, the point is, a writer should find the literary community in his or her own town and be a part of it. The literary community where I’m currently at—Orlando—is really starting to grow thanks, in part, to this publication: Burrow Press, which, when you break down those words, you get the anagram “Orbs We Purrs.”

That’s right: Orbs We Purrs.

Of course, the meaning of that is another story. Another story for another time.