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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

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.

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 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

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 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

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

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

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