Writing | Lex E. Santi | Writing, Poetry & Creativity by Lex Enrico Santí

Writing

Connection is where meaning begins.

Writing is how I listen.
How I make sense.
How I stay connected.

88 pieces · nearly twenty-five years · essays, reviews, dispatches & the road to The Song of the Midnight Rider

The Newsletter · on Substack

A Key to Something

Short dispatches in your inbox — the full essays live here, in the archive below.

Query Letters, Rejection, and the Midnight Rider

A Field Guide to Agents, Queries, and Other Creative Punishments Lex E. Santi, LCSW, MFA At one point in its life, Song of the Midnight...

Lex Santí

The Space Between Clinician and Human

Developing boundaries as a therapist needs to happen before it is too late. Lex E Santí, LCSW, Clinical Director, A Key Therapy It was Halloween. Six, maybe seven years ago. I was driving home on Perry City Road, about three miles from my house, coming off a shift at Family and Children's of Ithaca. It might have been my first year working there, before A Key Therapy, this private practice, before the novel, before most of what has since become my life. I was learning somethi

Lex Santí

May 126 min read

Thunder Road and the Song of the Midnight Rider

The lineage that my novel comes from, The Song of the Midnight Rider, goes directly to the original road movie, Thunder Road from 1958. A movie so powerful and fierce that it took Robert Mitchum producing it himself to make it work.

Lex Santí

May 73 min read

I Keep Coming Back

On Pallas, the people, and why this place keeps calling me home by Lex E. Santí, LCSW, MFA On May 3rd, from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, I’m doing something vulnerable: my first real public reading of The Song of the Midnight Rider at Pallas Fitness. My debut novel. The one I’ve been working on, in one form or another, for twenty years. I’m doing it here—not a bookstore, not a library, not a stage with a podium and strangers in folding chairs—because this gym has shaped the last

Lex Santí

Apr 275 min read

My Apple Playlists, My iPod and the music behind The Song of the Midnight Rider

Lex E. Santí, My old iPod is sitting on my desk again, or at least it will be when the charger arrives. I ordered it on eBay without thinking too hard about why, the way you sometimes reach for something instinctively, like calling an old number you’re not sure still works. I know the playlists are still on it. A while back, I hacked the battery and upgraded it. I even tried to buy a mod for a Bluetooth plugin and then gave up. I'm looking forward to having it in my life aga

Lex Santí

Apr 136 min read

Where Do the Mosquitoes Go?

On fingerprints, snapping turtles, and the grace of small mercies Lex E. Santí · A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC I was late. It was raining. The drive to Odessa is a little windy going from Tburg, and I had somewhere to be — the kind of official somewhere that does not forgive tardiness: fingerprints and a background check, the formal machinery of a New Jersey license, another state in the slow accumulation of permissions that will let me do the work I’ve been doing for years. You k

Lex Santí

Apr 64 min read

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From the Road

Some essays begin as photographs.

Phnom Penh, 2011 — from the self-funded documentary on human trafficking. The camera came first; the writing followed.

Lex E. Santí

Lex E. Santí is a novelist, poet, and essayist — the son of Cuban refugees, raised in Ithaca, New York, and shaped by years abroad: Peace Corps service in Romania, seasons in Spain and Seoul, a documentary in Cambodia. He founded Our Stories Literary Journal, which he edited for sixteen years, and holds an MFA in fiction from George Mason University. His debut novel, The Song of the Midnight Rider, arrived in 2026, after four collections of poetry and the story collection Homer’s Last Line. He lives in Trumansburg, New York, where he writes — and practices as a psychotherapist.