“Ernest Hilbert’s elegiac sonnet about a drowned relative provides a startling metaphor for this meditation on suicide. Initially, I considered a very literal interpretation of this sonnet, including putting an actor in a local river. When I decided that this was impractical, I started to consider what Hilbert does not tell us in his poem: how exactly William James drowned. Did he end up in the river as a result of horseplay, and could not swim? Was he drunk and fell off a pier? Did he drown himself? This line of questioning made me see the poem as providing an apt metaphor for suicide. Brian Orleman plays Wm. James Still, and Ernest reads his poem in voiceover.” – Judith Redding