Delivering Hannah
I don’t understand how anyone, myself included, can create a dynamic story. Stories have a life all their own—their own wisdom, their own flaws, their own power. Today is launch day for Hannah, Delivered, and to celebrate I want to kneel down before the mystery that is story.
As you can imagine, I’ve been riding an emotional rollercoaster as I prepare to put a decade’s worth of effort into the public eye. One reader weeps, she’s so moved by the novel, and I’m elated. Another reader is furious about a mistake in the book, and I feel miserable. And so it goes, up and down, until I’m driving my family berserk.
When I’m having labor pains like this, my partner Emily sometimes asks me, “What would Hannah do?” The question makes me laugh, but it’s right on. Really she’s saying, “Consult something other than your mercurial feelings. What does the story say?”
Going Virtual, Staying Real
In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this (at least the first draft) by hand, in a spiral notebook with a fountain pen. My laptop makes a great lap desk. I like the new paper against the back of my hand and the ink easing from my pen tip. Writing can be a calming, sensory delight.
These days I’m spending more of my day than ever before on the computer—on the internet, even, where privacy doesn’t exist and stimulation is the rule.
Author / Authority
What gives YOU the authority to write? Not a nice question, but it’s certainly one writers ask ourselves. I’m asking it afresh as Hannah, Delivered heads to the book stores next month. Was I deluded to think this novel belongs in the world? Surely I’ll be found out to be a fraud!
I’ve yet to work with a writer who doesn’t question his or her right to tell a story, or to devote tremendous time revising it, or to launch it into the world. A colleague of mine wrote a gorgeous memoir which her agent had difficulty selling. At long last she got bids from two different publishing houses. Later she told me how relieved she was. “If I’d only gotten one offer, I’d have thought they made a mistake.” I found my colleague’s comment deeply disturbing, but indicative of the strange mental games writers play with ourselves to convince ourselves we really do have authority. One pat on the back’s not enough, but two? You’re in!
Penny Friend
Annie, my neighbor one block over, bends down to the curved rut running the length of the alley and scrapes a penny out of the sand. She brushes its scratched surface against her blue-jeans, then presses it into my palm. “You’re the lucky one today,” she says.
I slip the rough penny into my pants’ pocket, laughing at our odd ritual. It’s not strange that Annie bothers to pick up a penny; she is Buddhist and a poet, a woman who treasures details and is as frugal with resources as she is with words. Even one cent, tarnished and of little value, gains significance by our attention.
The Story about the Story Revisited
I’m in the marketing trenches now, preparing to launch Hannah, which means, strangely, that I’m reading books like Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars and I now actually know what The Long Tail is. The majority of writers reading this will probably think, “Marketing?! I’m not there yet. I’m still in the private stages of writing.” You’re absolutely right to protect your tender, beloved process. I’m with Rilke when he told the young poet: “You ask whether your verses are good… You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now…I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether…
Faith and Fairies
“I believe in fairies,” Gwyn tells me.
“Me, too,” I respond.
In our house we tell stories incessantly, and they’re all true. They began with Special Baby, Gwyn’s imaginary friend when she was two years old. Special Baby could do everything Gwyn couldn’t, like go to the library when it was closed and eat extra servings ofdessert. Then came Lilly the Lilac Fairy who lives in the gnarled lilac tree over Gwyn’s sandbox and who is too shy to show herself to grown-ups.
A Writer’s Polar Vortex
Here is one of the secret ironies of being a published author: As you move toward launching a book, your writing life is decimated. Those quiet, searching hours of half-starts and rambling experiments, those blessed days of research and play and discovery, those driving weeks of inspiration—as well as months of paralyzing self-doubt that this mess of words you’re accumulating will ever amount to anything—are replaced with two-hour conversations with your copyeditor about the proper formatting of ellipses and coaching sessions on how to use Pinterest to market your new book and the seemingly exciting but actually grueling work of setting up readings. I could whine about all this, but instead I want to make a point: It’s hard to stay balanced—it’s hard to keep writing—when you’re also publishing. Launching a book is its own creative endeavor, as I’ve explored in earlier posts, but it is not writing. I can’t…
Church: The Third Parent
I regularly dream about the church where I grew up: A soaring Protestant-plain structure built in the early 1800’s with a handful of parishioners clustered in the first few pews. I doubt more than twenty people have attended a Sunday service in the last three decades. The congregation was vibrant when I was eight but then got hit by a parade of inept and at times unethical pastors. By the time I was in high school, the church probably should have shut its doors. That congregation loved me and raised me in the faith. They were my first community—adults who winked at me during the service and attended my piano concerts and taught me about the Bible, youth who dared one another to explore the endless basement or climb up onto the roof, a family broader and stranger than my immediate family but just as reliable. I see the same…
Pigeon Holes: How Labels Hurt Writers and Writing
This Christmas my mother gave me a fantastic, hilarious collection of poems called God Got a Dog. In one, God goes to beauty school, falls in love with nails, and opens a manicure parlor. The poems are deceptively simple. Theologically, they’re out in left field, playing with our notions of holiness and embodiment and images of divinity. They are smart, adult explorations of how God works in the world. I adore them. The publishers list God Got a Dog as a children’s book. Why? There’s no way even a precocious five-year-old would enjoy these poems. But they were written by Cynthia Rylant, a Newbery Award winning author, and illustrated by Marla Frazee, a beloved children’s book illustrator. Rylant and Frazee have loyal followings among those who read kids’ books, so I imagine their publicist wanting to reach that loyal following. And so my mother had to go to the picture…
Leaning Into God
In the days after a fire destroyed a six-bay garage at the ARC Retreat Center as well as three cars, two years’ supply of firewood, and all my belongings, I was numb; I wandered around wearing other people’s clothes trying to remember who I was and what I believed. Had God abandoned me? The ring of towering Norwegian pines surrounding the garage had been scorched; I put my hands in their blackened, seeping wounds. For the first time I understood the significance of Jesus’ wounds after the crucifixion. God is with us; God hurts with us, and God is far bigger than our hurt. When I think back on the crises and tragedies of my life—that fire, the death of my nephew, my father’s two kidney transplants, and Emily’s two bouts with cancer—I’m struck by how formative and transformative they are. The times when I’m most broken by grief are…