Amber J. Keyser's Blog, page 9

Amber Week

Amber during AMBER WEEK

After spending a scary and intense four days in the hospital with my son (emergency appendectomy), and following a week of deeply emotional book stuff (which I blogged about here), and in anticipation of summer vacation during which both my personal and work time are severely curtailed, I declared last week to be AMBER WEEK.

What, you ask, does Amber Week mean?

It means that each day I asked myself, “What do I want to do?”

The sad truth is that often for busy people, especially busy moms, we so rarely ask this question that when it is posed, coming up with an answer can be downright flummoxing. I always have a to-do list a mile long, and my kids always have needs. Why bother with the question when what I want is often the bottom of the pile priority-wise?

During Amber Week, I kept asking the question. Sometimes finding an answer came easy. Yes, I want to go to yoga with Liz! Yes, I want to go for a run in the forest! Yes, I want to have someone else clean my house for a change! Yes, I want to take a nap!

Sometimes the answer was harder to find. Would it feel better to go for a run or pull weeds in the garden? Do I want to knock off the things that have been on my list for four months or go pick strawberries? It was interesting to prioritize with my own satisfaction in mind rather than a deadline or pleasing someone else or dousing the fire burning most furiously.

Often–to my great satisfaction–I found that I wanted to work, which right now means editing essays for THE V-WORD.  How lucky is that? My work as a writer is what I want to do most of the time.

It got me thinking about the lesson of Amber Week.

There are always going to be to-do lists, deadlines, and needs to meet. Can I reframe those things in the light of my satisfaction?

I weed my garden not because weeding is so fun but because I want to have yummy vegetables. I drive my kids to soccer four days a week not because I like driving so much but because I want to see the joy on their faces as they bound off the pitch at the end of practice. I want to work on my books not because writing is easy but because the process exhilarates me.

It might not work for everything. (Hard to imagine a way cleaning up kid puke, for example, is satisfying other than that it is gone.) But the lesson of Amber Week is to focus on what feeds my body, my heart, and my spirit. If the task or commitment isn’t fun or doesn’t serve some larger purpose that matters to me, then it has no place in AMBER WEEK.

Or AMBER LIFE, for that matter.

 

 

My beating heart

Today words don’t come easy. I am awash in emotion, celebrating, reveling, and yes, weeping too.

My story has found a home at Carolrhoda Lab.

Andrew Karre took world rights to Amber Keyser’s YA novel, The Way Back From Broken, in a two-book deal. The novel follows two adolescents, one 15 and one 10, who are both older siblings of infants who died. When the two kids are taken into the Canadian wilderness by one of their mothers, the publisher said, they find disaster, “in addition to the fragile hope and terrible beauty that mark the way back from broken.” Agent Fiona Kenshole at Transatlantic Literary brokered the deal for Keyser. The second book in the deal is a currently untitled YA novel.

What this lovely announcement from Publishers Weekly doesn’t capture is what this story means to me. In a Dear Sugar piece, Cheryl Strayed talks about her book, the book she had to write, which pulsed in her chest like a second heart. Upon  writing the last word, she wept. “I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands.”

THE WAY BACK FROM BROKEN is that book for me. When I brought it forth, it cemented the tender repairs to my shattered self. When I laid it before my friend and agent, Fiona Kenshole, she knew it for what it was–an offering, a prayer, the completion of a promise. She guided it into the most trustworthy of hands.  Andrew Karre is an editor who knows blood on the page when he sees it.

I am grateful.

Speaking Up

Voice.

Voice is connection.

Voice is speaking our own truth.

Voice is the driver of our narratives.

After being raped, Maya Angelou didn’t speak for years. In an interview with Terry Gross, she told how she found her voice so she could love poetry.

The #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign blew up the internet because stories are the most profound way for us to connect across differences. We need to hear the voices of those who experience life outside of our own private bubbles.

My son overheard a friend making a comment, presumably in jest, about killing himself. He could have brushed off the throwaway comment, but instead he came to his parents. And we went to the boy’s parents. And the boy is still mad.

The recent attack in California and its anti-woman underpinnings have prompted many women to speak out about the sexism they face every day.

Voice.

The imperative is to find it and use it.

Use it big and use it small.

Never go mute.

I wish…

Yesterday, a writer friend and I were leaving a restaurant and our very young male server said, “Thanks, Girls.”

We paused at the door, looking at each other. “Did he just call us girls?”

We laughed and walked out. The easy thing. But I wish I’d turned around and gently, very gently, reminded him about respect. It would have been a small thing. A small response for a small ignorance.

But I would have used my voice.

And he might have faced the world differently from then on.