Timing
the First Novel
by
I have three early memories. The
first: my sister ganging up with her friend, Mary Lou Springer -- the two of
them pelting me with snowballs just after my mother had suited me up for the
cold. The second: turning over a log in my family's backyard in Joliet,
Illinois, where the state prison is located, and finding worms, tons of moving
worms. The third: walking to the elementary school I hated and making up poems,
coming up with my own lyrics, hoping Robert Rylant, my kindergarten tormentor,
wouldn't catch me with words and make that a reason to pitch sticks at me. If
early experience equals destiny, I was to become a victim of a cold war, a
supplier of worms to fishermen, or a writer.
I have pursued my craft despite the Robert
Rylants out on the planet Earth -- the living, breathing manifestations of
discouragement. I am the kind of person who shuts herself in and stares at
the blue screen. But publication came slowly. When I turned
thirty-five or so friends got antsy. I was asked about growing up. When
would I get a real career? When would I start dealing in real worms?
It was as if my writing career were a rusting beat-in car that was endlessly
parked in front of their house.
My first novel,
In
My Sister's Country, has just been published by BlueHen/Penguin Putnam.
I don't know if this equals vindication, but it's sweet, worth the effort, and
in an odd way the timing makes it's own sense. Maybe this has something to do
with being a later-life person, but maybe most writers start to take off as they
gray and get a little wormy.
In that peculiar way that fate deals it, I became
a single-mom this year -- the same year that I sold my first novel. Now I'm
suddenly faced with keeping the bread flying onto the table, I do all the snow
shoveling in my household -- and I have to make sure to read to my child twice a
day -- we're both a little word-crazy and that's okay. I scramble for time.
On my better days, I go on the faith that there's
a clock at work here, a screwy clock-a timepiece that defies the American ethos,
the fiction of when we are to fall in line, get promoted, find true love and
certainly a sustainable marriage, buy that first house -- go to Europe (I've
never been but I have my ambitions), hit our strides, and start saving for that
all-inspiring mirage of retirement.
But what sensible writer wants to
retire?
As I hold my book in hand, I tell
myself that if I keep my end up, things will turn out. Didn't Buddha say:
Nothing's easy, certainly not the writer's life? Or maybe it was: Timing is
everything -- you just have to get into it.
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an excerpt from In My Sister's Country at PenguinPutnam.com]
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