Nichole Bernier's Blog, page 10

On Rejection and the Beautiful Blueberry

I was not in the best of moods the other morning. It was gray and sleeting, and I'm guilty of letting weather sway my moods. The to-do list seemed overwhelming, and the calendar said there were to be no babysitting hours to be had for four days. As I leaned over the two-year-old to change his diaper, in my worn black cabled sweater, he reached up and grabbed a knit bobble. "Booberries," he said. "Iss pretty."

 Anyone who spends time with children knows the little bits of gold that come out of their mouths. They can also spew mercury and bile like Linda Blair, and show you just what they think of your stinking rules with every cubic inch of air in their lungs. But sometimes there's an utterance that makes you smile, something they say that makes you see things in a way you never have before, and for one shining moment you realize it's not true that there's nothing new under the sun, not as long as there are two-year-olds who can see blueberries in yarn.

Happiness can be brought on by the smallest, most unexpected things. I've had my entire evening turned around by a stranger in a restaurant, usually an older woman, who after suffering at the table beside us for an hour says something out of the blue like, Your children are so lovely. It doesn't matter how the kids treated me that morning or will again once we get home. She saw that I was trying, and that they were trying, and the result was something worth the tip of a hat. It's possible to be blindsided by a random bit of kindness, and it is important to be thankful for it.

 This has been on my mind since I wrote the Acknowledgements for my novel not long ago. Most people have probably never done an official Acknowledgements page, but it's a fascinating exercise, creating a neat small file of gratitude. How often do we ever sit down and make an accounting of the people who made a thing possible, who supported us and shaped us and were involved in the whole confluence of events that resulted in achieving a goal?

And yet I'm aware of one person I wanted to thank in my Acknowledgements, but didn't. To thank her would have been strange since we'd never met, never even spoken.

When I finished the first draft of my novel I was enormously pregnant with my fourth child, and filled with an urgency to progress in every way. It was my first time trying to write or publish fiction, and my point of reference for the timeline was as a magazine freelancer: a) finish, b) publish, c) paycheck. I was not accustomed to improving something slowly at no extra fee or guarantee. So in my rush to cross "Get Agent" off my to-do list before the baby came, I sent off a handful of queries immediately.

The baby came, and so did the agents' responses—some passes but also partials and fulls, all leading to rejections in the end.

It's easy to lick your wounds when you have a beautiful new infant. I put aside my manuscript and became absorbed with the unclear division of days and nights, much as I had after each of the previous three births, consumed with feedings and laundry and exhaustion and love. Months passed. What are you going to do with the novel, my husband would ask gently, because it wasn't like me to leave something unfinished. But I couldn't find a point of reentry, or a reason.

One day a letter came from the last of the agents I'd queried who'd asked for a full manuscript. I'd given up long ago, because she was a well-known agent who represented several authors I admired, and you often never heard back from important people. But when I pulled the letter from the envelope, it was three pages long. Three pages of thoughtful reflection on what she felt I had envisioned in undertaking my novel and nearly achieved, but not quite.

I read each paragraph with words like insightful and compelling, and kept waiting for the "but" that would really hurt. The turn-down came, but it came like this: "This was a near miss for me." I could feel the reluctance in her words, and it was almost as meaningful as an acceptance. I was a rookie in the business of publishing fiction, but I already knew from peers that a pass like this was not really a rejection at all. It was a blessing. Agents are too busy to take the time to write long letters of rejection just to be nice. She was not my mother, my friend, or my writing instructor. She didn't have to take the time to encourage me, or let me down gently. The only way this stranger would say it was a near miss and taken three pages to say so was if it were true.

I dove into revisions with an energy I hadn't felt since my second trimester. Someone had seen the likeness of nature in my writing, had seen hints of blueberry in the bobble, and taken the time to say so. This was a near miss for me, I would think in the downtimes. And it was enough to recharge my faith that someday, for someone, it would not be.

The Juggling Act

I was once asked this question in an advice column for writers on their way toward agents and book contracts. 

"How do people just write, then pause, make dinner and whatnot, and then go back to writing?"

Maybe it was the whatnot, but it made me laugh. It might have been a joke, but it suggested that the act of writing was too fragile and tenuous a thing to be interrupted for mundane tasks like making dinner. Indeed, would a surgeon pause in the middle of an operation to pick up drycleaning? Would the rescuers of the Chilean miners have halted their rock-burrowing shuttle to pick up kids from preschool?

But I played it straight, and focused my answer on surviving interruptions and finding your way back to your train of thought. Practical things like how important it is to wind down toward the end of a session instead of leaping into a new scene, or to take notes on where you would have gone if you'd had the time.

But in the time since I wrote it, I've realized the question was more about The Writing Life. About how some people might have lives organized around the writing, while others squeeze it in best we can around the edges. Day jobs. Raising children. Maybe, for people more well-rounded than I am, other hobbies. Lives in which the writing has to pause to make dinner a whole lot.

It's a valid question, because most of my ideas — and most of the time I have an urge to write — don't happen to be when I'm sitting at the computer (late at night, and when I hire babysitters). So I have to get creative. Send myself texts from the waiting room at the pediatrician, take notes on whatever paper I dig out of the diaper bag. This can be risky business. I've written myself notes on the backs of permission slips or teacher-conference forms (How well can a husband and wife really know each other?), only to have the paper shyly returned. "You might want this," one said, eyes averted.

I don't know how many writers are able to spend their days in creative seclusion, writing up a froth while forsaking social responsibilities and basic hygiene. I imagine that's what it's like to be at a writing colony, hour after hour of uninterrupted focus, day after day. Once a year or so, usually for a Christmas present, I get a weekend away when my husband stays home with the kids. If I were to honestly describe how this feels, how very much I value that time of no-parameters-no-safety-net- no-one-calling-my-name, it might come across with a passion that would make you a little uncomfortable.

Writing without borders. A land without clocks. For most of us, it isn't like that. The reality of the daily grind is a longing to write when you can't, and interruptions when you do. It all adds up to a very long time getting the draft finished, getting the queries out, the revisions back to your editor. Some ideas will get lost while we make dinner, the spilled milk of the writing life. The fact is, we simply can't do it all. There are choices. And whether you have a job or have to go grocery shopping or go feed the chickens, sometimes writing has to take its ticket and stand in the deli line. You can be jealous of your friend who's won residence in a writer's colony, and writes in a cottage with warm roast beef sandwiches delivered for lunch in a yellow tin bucket. But for most of us, that's not where we are.

When I get too envious of the tin bucket, I remind myself how lucky I am to pursue what I love, that I get to have a big raucous family and a book coming out. A book that took longer than it might have if I didn't have the raucous family, but a book nonetheless.

And something else: At the end of the day, I feel lucky to know what I love to do. I have a friend who used to be in marketing, and after her kids hit elementary school she wanted to find some new kind of work. Chefs cook, she said. Carpenters build, writers write. What do I do?

Call it the color of your parachute, or call it the thing that floats your boat. But that knowing what you do, in my book, is worth the interruptions that sometimes keep you from doing it.

Out Of My Comfort Zone

The other day I stood at the camera angle of this hallway, which was even creepier and darker than it looks (the iPhone has a decent flash). To say the walls were crumbling would be an understatement; where the drywall wasn’t buckled or missing, it was eerily melted away. No light came from the rooms off the hallway because most had no windows, and those that did were crossed with heavy iron bars. This was not a place where people had been kept happily.

The door glowed curiously at the far end of the hall, and I went toward it like the person in a horror movie, that person who makes you scream at the screen, No! Don’t go there! But I’d been in 10 buildings like this already that morning and I was curious about the light source which, judging by the shape of the building, was not outdoors. Plus, something strange was hanging from the door.

I had worked hard to get access to this eerie historic place, part of the research for my second novel. Even after I got a permit, I could only visit with chaperones from the Park Service. But once we arrived, we traveled in a loose pack and I was free to wander, guided by gentle suggestions —“the second floor staircase isn’t really advisable from the looks of the crumbling ceiling, but it’s up to you” — and by my own common sense.

Back to the creepy building. I reached the end of the hall and gingerly pushed open the door.The room was bathed in natural light. That strange thing hanging from the door was in fact a long, wide sliver of wood from the door itself, as if cut by a potato peeler, then warped and bleached from years of rain. How that even happens, I have no idea.

The light flowed in from the opposite wall of windows—broken, like all the windows here—which opened onto a sort of covered porch in a courtyard. But it was hard to tell what it was, because the porch above had thoroughly collapsed in a heap of splintered disintegrating wood. The remaining roof boards bloomed thick with ivy and grass. From a window above, a waterfall of vines flowed outward from some source inside the building.

Once upon a time, people lived here, I thought. Real people, either victims of contagious disease, or heroin addicts under restraints. They lived in airless rooms behind thick doors with rusting bolts, many of them against their will, alone with their demons. They had no civil rights. They were held because they were perceived as a menace to public health, and likely because they had few resources, or few people to speak on their behalf.

As I stood at this window there was a sound from upstairs, like someone kicking a stone across the floor.

But I was alone in the building. None of the park service personnel had come in; they were having an impromptu meeting outside about reforestation of native trees.

“Hello?” I called. “Who’s there?” Because that’s what the script says you should say in these situations.

There was no answer of course, because raccoons or falling bits of wall or 100-year-old ghosts of inmates cannot answer. I turned and walked all casual-like through the door hung with potato-peel wood, then broke into a casual-like trot to get the hell out of there.

I hate the contrived shock-terror of horror movies. I hate haunted houses; I didn’t even like the spooky castle at Disney World. But I love going out of my comfort zone in real life, stepping out of the kitchen where I make lunches every morning and zip them into neat padded superhero bags. As a mother of five children under 11, I’m not lacking for excitement. There are broken dishes, cuts that require stitches, kittens that have to go to the emergency vet. But that’s excitement of a different kind.

The thing I don’t encounter often is the truly unusual, the fantastically eerie adrenaline rush outside the realm of ordinary time that I used to get as a travel writer. The zipline ecotour through a Canadian mountain, where the harness clip snags on a line high over a frothy river. The muy fuente horse from a stable in Spain that gallops pell-mell through the olive orchard instead of strolling. The tour of an antebellum home in Alabama, where I heard an persistent buzz in my ear as if some unseen person were whispering to me. Many of the best, most memorable and challenging things happen beyond the margins of our comfort zone. And much of the best fodder for writing.

I walked as fast as I could without embarrassing myself out of the building and into the relative safety of the forest, where poison ivy blanketed the ground and hung in loose vines from the trees. About 50 yards ahead, the parks personnel still stood clustered in conversation. Behind them was another institutional building already well into a century of neglect, its door riddled with recent bullets from some official’s illicit target practice.

There’s a story there, I thought. There’s a story everywhere I turn in this place, which was so hard to reach through the tangle of child-care arrangements, but so worth the effort. And as I thought it, my shoe nudged a rusted machete lying in ivy.

Wedded to Wallace: The Stegner Marriage

Mary Stuart Page Stegner died last month. Her obituary ran in a few newspapers, but it came to my attention as a blip in my Twitter stream, tucked appropriately between posts lamenting the destruction of nature in the BP oil spill.

The fact that she was still alive gave me pause as much as her age. At 99, she’d outlived by 17 years her husband Wallace Stegner, who died after a car accident in 1993 on his way to give a lecture in Santa Fe. Their 60-year marriage was a “personal literary partnership of singular facility,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in The Geography of Hope, A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, a partnership in which he did the writing and she enforced the writerly environs. He brought her breakfast in bed; she fed him new interests and fended off distractions. The end of that partnership was like something out of Stegner’s own novel Crossing to Safety. Marriage and longevity. Loss, and carrying on.

Stegner is best known for his environmental writing, which has influenced generations of conservationists, and for his novel Angle of Repose (which won the Pulitzer in 1972), as well as his creative writing program at Stanford University. But my point of entry to his work was Crossing to Safety, published in 1987. I first read it in my early 20s and have returned to it several times, moved by its incisive portrayal of two couples over decades, two interconnected marriages and friendships that unfold with tenderness and tragedy. Because of this, Stegner is to me first and foremost a chronicler of marriage, and a mourner of the lost mother.

Just before his 80th birthday, he wrote a heartbreaking essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” of his own mother who’d died young:

“My name was the last word you spoke, your faith in me and love for me were your last thoughts. I could bear them no better than I could bear your death, and I went blindly out into the November darkness and walked for hours with my mind clenched like a fist… Your kind of love, once given, is never lost. You are alive and luminous in my head….You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.”

I read that essay only last year, in a collection of Stegner’s works given to me by my husband on my birthday. But twenty years ago, what struck me about Crossing to Safety was Stegner’s proposition that character remains constant through life: We might become more pliable or more brittle over the years, but essentially, we are who we are—for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, and so on. There in the novel was the perky wife with just a whiff of control freak, doomed in the end by her own stubbornness; there was the solid, sensible other wife, locked by fate in her fortitude. In my 20s, world as my oyster and luck changing daily, I was wide-eyed at the suggestion that we were shackled to our unchanging natures.

Years later, when I read All The Little Live Things (1967), I felt a jolt of recognition. Here was the clear predecessor of the two characters—the earnest manipulator, as well as her foil, the training-wheels version of the solid, bemused partner. My surprise was naïve, but exhilarating: writers revisit their terrain! writers try out themes and prototypes that won’t stop yanking their chain, and return to them until they get them right! I wanted to talk about it to anyone who’d listen. My boyfriends in those days mastered expressions of polite interest.

One isn’t supposed to make assumptions about a writer’s own life based on his characters, but I did wonder. Mary Stegner, it seemed, was of the solid-bemused end of the spectrum. With characteristic wry humor, here’s what Stegner said of her in James Hepworth’s 1998 book Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner:

“She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls. Also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse’s ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive.”

Rest in peace, Mary Stegner. May the two of you again amuse and restrain and agitate one another, lasting presences always, every wound healed.

The Training Wheels Novel

[Originally published in Beyond the Margins, April 2010]

I was mid-way through reading an interview with Amy Bloom in The Guardian when I ran into a line that stopped me short. I had to read it twice.

“She was in her mid-30s when she started to write, her 20s having been spent raising three children and working fulltime. She would write late at night and first produced a mystery novel, which, after it was accepted for publication, she bought back because she didn’t think it was good enough.”

Let me repeat that in case you didn’t catch it the first time, either. She bought it back. From the publisher. Because she didn’t think it was good enough.

I dug a little deeper into this anecdote, and might have even tried to interview Amy Bloom myself if I were not raising children and writing and, let’s be honest, if this were a paying gig that justified the further reporting time.

Instead, I googled for an earlier interview that might mention this bought-back book. I found one in 2000, in the literary magazine identitytheory.com. The book she’d yanked back had been a mystery novel, titled Them There Eyes.

She had this to say about it: “It was my warm-up … It wasn’t anything of which I had to be deeply ashamed. But it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. Once I saw that, then I wanted it not in print.”

This fascinates me. 

So many writers talk about the proverbial novel in the drawer, but like many clichés, it’s there for a reason. It seems everyone has a novel in the drawer.

When I first started writing fiction and heard writers talk about the one that got (put) away, I couldn’t imagine it: all that creative energy, the characters trained to say just the right thing, the heartache and carpal tunnel syndrome, moldering somewhere in a computer file and chalked up to experience. Those years of late nights and middle of the nights and early mornings, all just training wheels for the big ride to come some other day.

Those are the phrases I hear to describe these first novels: Warm-up exercises. Limbering stretches. Training wheels.

Just the other day, I was talking to my husband about this from the slough of revisions of my own first novel, which my agent plans to sell soon. I was comparing it to the bike my daughter rides, pink and white with Dora the Explorer on the side. In a prolonged metaphor that amused only me, I told him I’d tinkered with this manuscript for so long that I’d pushed it to the starting line through the sheer force of my stubbornness. Whether or not it was the soundest vehicle, my Dora bike was now lining up for the Tour de France, its tall plastic flag flapping in the wind and little metal bell going brring-brring-brring all the way.

Is there something wrong with publishing your first novel? Should I have stood up after finishing it, cracked my knuckles a few times, then sat down to write something darker and more exotic, something that would reach higher heights and deeper depths because it was #2? I hadn’t done it consciously, but with my first novel I’d followed the old adage that you should write what you know. For me, that was the terrain of motherhood and marriage, honesty and facades, security in an uncertain post-September 11th world. I’ve heard Amy MacKinnon talk about her own training-wheels novel of motherhood; she sent hers down to the drawer, and began work on what would become her hauntingly beautiful work about an undertaker, called Tethered.

All writers want to come out of the gate with their strongest work. So I suppose the real question is, how do you know when you’re doing your best work, and since that’s an ever-changing benchmark, can you embrace yourself as a work in progress? I once read about a well-known author, someone quite old and established, who said he never went back and read his old work because the desire to change it was too strong.

We are all so critical of ourselves, we writers. Though it seems to me the greater danger would be to keep pulling back, always measuring your work against some elusive voice you dream someday to express, which may not in fact be your own.

At times when I’m spinning my wheels, I wonder to what extent it’s possible ever to be completely satisfied with your work. To hand it over with a confident Fini!, and maintain that certainty all the way to publication and beyond.

And I wonder too if Amy Bloom ever reads her old work and hears a little brring-brring-brring herself, and can love it anyway

Out Of My Comfort Zone

[Originally published in Beyond the Margins, October 2011]

The other day I stood at the camera angle of this hallway, which was even creepier and darker than it looks (the iPhone has a decent flash). To say the walls were crumbling would be an understatement; where the drywall wasn't buckled or missing, it was eerily melted away. No light came from the rooms off the hallway because most had no windows, and those that did were crossed with heavy iron bars. This was not a place where people had been kept happily.

The door glowed curiously at the far end of the hall, and I went toward it like the person in a horror movie, that person who makes you scream at the screen, No! Don't go there! But I'd been in 10 buildings like this already that morning and I was curious about the light source which, judging by the shape of the building, was not outdoors. Plus, something strange was hanging from the door.

I had worked hard to get access to this eerie historic place, part of the research for my second novel. Even after I got a permit, I could only visit with chaperones from the Park Service. But once we arrived, we traveled in a loose pack and I was free to wander, guided by gentle suggestions —"the second floor staircase isn't really advisable from the looks of the crumbling ceiling, but it's up to you" — and by my own common sense.

Back to the creepy building. I reached the end of the hall and gingerly pushed open the door.The room was bathed in natural light. That strange thing hanging from the door was in fact a long, wide sliver of wood from the door itself, as if cut by a potato peeler, then warped and bleached from years of rain. How that even happens, I have no idea.

The light flowed in from the opposite wall of windows—broken, like all the windows here—which opened onto a sort of covered porch in a courtyard. But it was hard to tell what it was, because the porch above had thoroughly collapsed in a heap of splintered disintegrating wood. The remaining roof boards bloomed thick with ivy and grass. From a window above, a waterfall of vines flowed outward from some source inside the building.

Once upon a time, people lived here, I thought. Real people, either victims of contagious disease, or heroin addicts under restraints. They lived in airless rooms behind thick doors with rusting bolts, many of them against their will, alone with their demons. They had no civil rights. They were held because they were perceived as a menace to public health, and likely because they had few resources, or few people to speak on their behalf.

As I stood at this window there was a sound from upstairs, like someone kicking a stone across the floor.

But I was alone in the building. None of the park service personnel had come in; they were having an impromptu meeting outside about reforestation of native trees.

"Hello?" I called. "Who's there?" Because that's what the script says you should say in these situations.

There was no answer of course, because raccoons or falling bits of wall or 100-year-old ghosts of inmates cannot answer. I turned and walked all casual-like through the door hung with potato-peel wood, then broke into a casual-like trot to get the hell out of there.

I hate the contrived shock-terror of horror movies. I hate haunted houses; I didn't even like the spooky castle at Disney World. But I love going out of my comfort zone in real life, stepping out of the kitchen where I make lunches every morning and zip them into neat padded superhero bags. As a mother of five children under 11, I'm not lacking for excitement. There are broken dishes, cuts that require stitches, kittens that have to go to the emergency vet. But that's excitement of a different kind.

The thing I don't encounter often is the truly unusual, the fantastically eerie adrenaline rush outside the realm of ordinary time that I used to get as a travel writer. The zipline ecotour through a Canadian mountain, where the harness clip snags on a line high over a frothy river. The muy fuente horse from a stable in Spain that gallops pell-mell through the olive orchard instead of strolling. The tour of an antebellum home in Alabama, where I heard an persistent buzz in my ear as if some unseen person were whispering to me. Many of the best, most memorable and challenging things happen beyond the margins of our comfort zone. And much of the best fodder for writing.

I walked as fast as I could without embarrassing myself out of the building and into the relative safety of the forest, where poison ivy blanketed the ground and hung in loose vines from the trees. About 50 yards ahead, the parks personnel still stood clustered in conversation. Behind them was another institutional building already well into a century of neglect, its door riddled with recent bullets from some official's illicit target practice.

There's a story there, I thought. There's a story everywhere I turn in this place, which was so hard to reach through the tangle of child-care arrangements, but so worth the effort. And as I thought it, my shoe nudged a rusted machete lying in ivy.

Wedded to Wallace: The Stegner Marriage

[Originally published in Beyond the Margins, June 2010]

Mary Stuart Page Stegner died last month. Her obituary ran in a few newspapers, but it came to my attention as a blip in my Twitter stream, tucked appropriately between posts lamenting the destruction of nature in the BP oil spill.

The fact that she was still alive gave me pause as much as her age. At 99, she'd outlived by 17 years her husband Wallace Stegner, who died after a car accident in 1993 on his way to give a lecture in Santa Fe. Their 60-year marriage was a "personal literary partnership of singular facility," wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in The Geography of Hope, A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, a partnership in which he did the writing and she enforced the writerly environs. He brought her breakfast in bed; she fed him new interests and fended off distractions. The end of that partnership was like something out of Stegner's own novel Crossing to Safety. Marriage and longevity. Loss, and carrying on.

Stegner is best known for his environmental writing, which has influenced generations of conservationists, and for his novel Angle of Repose (which won the Pulitzer in 1972), as well as his creative writing program at Stanford University. But my point of entry to his work was Crossing to Safety, published in 1987. I first read it in my early 20s and have returned to it several times, moved by its incisive portrayal of two couples over decades, two interconnected marriages and friendships that unfold with tenderness and tragedy. Because of this, Stegner is to me first and foremost a chronicler of marriage, and a mourner of the lost mother.

Just before his 80th birthday, he wrote a heartbreaking essay, "Letter, Much Too Late," of his own mother who'd died young:

"My name was the last word you spoke, your faith in me and love for me were your last thoughts. I could bear them no better than I could bear your death, and I went blindly out into the November darkness and walked for hours with my mind clenched like a fist… Your kind of love, once given, is never lost. You are alive and luminous in my head….You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound."

I read that essay only last year, in a collection of Stegner's works given to me by my husband on my birthday. But twenty years ago, what struck me about Crossing to Safety was Stegner's proposition that character remains constant through life: We might become more pliable or more brittle over the years, but essentially, we are who we are—for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, and so on. There in the novel was the perky wife with just a whiff of control freak, doomed in the end by her own stubbornness; there was the solid, sensible other wife, locked by fate in her fortitude. In my 20s, world as my oyster and luck changing daily, I was wide-eyed at the suggestion that we were shackled to our unchanging natures.

Years later, when I read All The Little Live Things (1967), I felt a jolt of recognition. Here was the clear predecessor of the two characters—the earnest manipulator, as well as her foil, the training-wheels version of the solid, bemused partner. My surprise was naïve, but exhilarating: writers revisit their terrain! writers try out themes and prototypes that won't stop yanking their chain, and return to them until they get them right! I wanted to talk about it to anyone who'd listen. My boyfriends in those days mastered expressions of polite interest.

One isn't supposed to make assumptions about a writer's own life based on his characters, but I did wonder. Mary Stegner, it seemed, was of the solid-bemused end of the spectrum. With characteristic wry humor, here's what Stegner said of her in James Hepworth's 1998 book Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner:

"She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls. Also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive."

Rest in peace, Mary Stegner. May the two of you again amuse and restrain and agitate one another, lasting presences always, every wound healed.

The Training Wheels Novel

[Originally published in Beyond the Margins, April 2010]

I was mid-way through reading an interview with Amy Bloom in The Guardian when I ran into a line that stopped me short. I had to read it twice.

"She was in her mid-30s when she started to write, her 20s having been spent raising three children and working fulltime. She would write late at night and first produced a mystery novel, which, after it was accepted for publication, she bought back because she didn't think it was good enough."

Let me repeat that in case you didn't catch it the first time, either. She bought it back. From the publisher. Because she didn't think it was good enough.

I dug a little deeper into this anecdote, and might have even tried to interview Amy Bloom myself if I were not raising children and writing and, let's be honest, if this were a paying gig that justified the further reporting time.

Instead, I googled for an earlier interview that might mention this bought-back book. I found one in 2000, in the literary magazine identitytheory.com. The book she'd yanked back had been a mystery novel, titled Them There Eyes.

She had this to say about it: "It was my warm-up … It wasn't anything of which I had to be deeply ashamed. But it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Once I saw that, then I wanted it not in print."

This fascinates me. 

So many writers talk about the proverbial novel in the drawer, but like many clichés, it's there for a reason. It seems everyone has a novel in the drawer.

When I first started writing fiction and heard writers talk about the one that got (put) away, I couldn't imagine it: all that creative energy, the characters trained to say just the right thing, the heartache and carpal tunnel syndrome, moldering somewhere in a computer file and chalked up to experience. Those years of late nights and middle of the nights and early mornings, all just training wheels for the big ride to come some other day.

Those are the phrases I hear to describe these first novels: Warm-up exercises. Limbering stretches. Training wheels.

Just the other day, I was talking to my husband about this from the slough of revisions of my own first novel, which my agent plans to sell soon. I was comparing it to the bike my daughter rides, pink and white with Dora the Explorer on the side. In a prolonged metaphor that amused only me, I told him I'd tinkered with this manuscript for so long that I'd pushed it to the starting line through the sheer force of my stubbornness. Whether or not it was the soundest vehicle, my Dora bike was now lining up for the Tour de France, its tall plastic flag flapping in the wind and little metal bell going brring-brring-brring all the way.

Is there something wrong with publishing your first novel? Should I have stood up after finishing it, cracked my knuckles a few times, then sat down to write something darker and more exotic, something that would reach higher heights and deeper depths because it was #2? I hadn't done it consciously, but with my first novel I'd followed the old adage that you should write what you know. For me, that was the terrain of motherhood and marriage, honesty and facades, security in an uncertain post-September 11th world. I've heard Amy MacKinnon talk about her own training-wheels novel of motherhood; she sent hers down to the drawer, and began work on what would become her hauntingly beautiful work about an undertaker, called Tethered.

All writers want to come out of the gate with their strongest work. So I suppose the real question is, how do you know when you're doing your best work, and since that's an ever-changing benchmark, can you embrace yourself as a work in progress? I once read about a well-known author, someone quite old and established, who said he never went back and read his old work because the desire to change it was too strong.

We are all so critical of ourselves, we writers. Though it seems to me the greater danger would be to keep pulling back, always measuring your work against some elusive voice you dream someday to express, which may not in fact be your own.

At times when I'm spinning my wheels, I wonder to what extent it's possible ever to be completely satisfied with your work. To hand it over with a confident Fini!, and maintain that certainty all the way to publication and beyond.

And I wonder too if Amy Bloom ever reads her old work and hears a little brring-brring-brring herself, and can love it anyway