Midnight Light, A Unique and Spooky Journey! is a collection of poetry and photography that shows how creepy things can be beautiful through a different perspective. What inspired you to create this book?

BP: The first photo that you see in Midnight Light is what inspired me to create this project with Michael. A colonial era crypt in the side of a hill. It’s façade green with mold, it’s iron doors brown with rust. A cluster of trees on top, stretching high in the air. It was hauntingly beautiful. Such images combined with Michael’s poems, I thought it was possible to bring a reader to that place and time. That is what I wanted to accomplish.

MP: My future wife and I started having get togethers at our home in 2010-2011 and we began to have certain themes like tv events or cocktail jazz parties, etc.. Brian would attend and at one event we began talking about his passion for photography. He said that he would like to shoot some pictures at a local cemetery and asked if I would like to join the next morning. After that morning we began talking about adding my poetry to his pictures and creating a book. For me, the project’s goal developed into something greater than finishing the book; it became a means for Brian and I to evolve our friendship and use our friendship to create a work of art using our combined passions of photography and poetry.

I loved the image accompanying the poem ‘Resting Star/Nesting Star’. Do you have a favorite or stand out image from the book?

BP: Well besides the first photo of the crypt, which is my inspiration for Midnight Light, I would choose the angel from “As Dead”. I go and visit that cemetery fairly often, and I always get a new perspective of it every time I visit.

MP: One of my favorites is Underneath Icicles and its photo on page 32. I can remember as a kid during the winter playing in my backyard. Against my house the daytime melting snow water would drip from the gutters and create ice drip castles on the ground when the water would refreeze. I remember thinking that they were emerald cities within the ice. These cities were perfect, almost heavenly. I would sit there and imagine living inside under the drips. Later I wrote Underneath Icicles thinking of those ice drip castles and dancing with my lost love inside them. The image on page 32 reminds me of me as a child looking into the emerald city and watching myself and the girl it was written for dancing inside the paradise, complete with our smiling blue lips…

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

BP: I really enjoyed exploring and taking photos for Midnight Light. But the ones we had chosen always had the themes of Michael’s writing in mind: Love, Death and Redemption.

MP: Love, death and redemption are the main themes in this book.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

MP: We have a second volume of Midnight Light that hopefully we will begin to talk about bringing to life in 2022.

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