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

TV Shows that Inspired the Song of the Midnight Rider

Lex E Santí, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC There are shows that pass through your life like a rest stop on the highway — you pull in, get what you need, pull out, and forget the exit number by the next mile marker. And then there are shows that stay with you — not because they're prestige television or because someone told you they were important, but because they did something to you. They changed the way you see. The way you drive, metaphorically speaking. The way you sit with

Lex Santí

Mar 316 min read

The Night Reality Slipped

True confessions from a young child facing their worst fear Lex E. Santí, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC It was 1987, and I woke up in the dark to something crawling over me. Dazed I rubbed my eyes and pulled back the sleeping bag. I heard screeching. I don't remember having awoken to screeching like this in the last 40 years. This type of screeching landed in my chest before it reached my ears. I was a teenager and something was moving in the living room of Jesse Winter's house th

Lex Santí

Mar 256 min read

Now on Substack... and TikTok

A Key to Something -- On starting a newsletter, staying with the blog, and what I'm thinking about these days A Key Therapy PLLC, LCSW I've been writing here for years — poems, essays, dispatches from the practice, the occasional film recommendation — and that continues. This is still home base. But I've been circling the idea of a newsletter for a while now, and I finally did it. It's called A Key to Something . The name is a play on aquí — the Spanish word for here, which

Lex Santí

Mar 202 min read

The Song of the Midnight Rider Is Now Available

After years of writing, revising, and carrying the story in my head, I’m excited to share that my debut novel, The Song of the Midnight Rider, is now available. At its core, the book is a literary noir road novel —a story about loyalty, found family, and the restless pull of the American road. The novel follows Jordan Samson , a young man moving through a fractured landscape of ambition, violence, and uneasy alliances. Along the way he encounters hustlers, drifters, and unlik

Lex Santí

Mar 55 min read

Poetry from the Plum Ruby Review

Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, PLLC - A Key Therapy Three Poems from 2004 Plum Ruby Review, Summer Issue In the summer of 2004, I published three poems in Plum Ruby Review . I was living in Washington, DC, on the edge of entering an MFA program, politically charged, aesthetically restless, and deeply interested in how language could stretch—visually, ethically, bodily. These poems come from a time when I was less concerned with coherence and more interested in pressure : how an imag

Lex Santí

Jan 132 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.