WRITING WITH OTHERS

I thought I wouldn't be able to write in workshop last night, waiting as I am to hear from a major publisher who is considering my new book manuscript. The editor has told me she wants it, but the marketing department is where the real decision is made. This is a little bit like being pregnant.  When you are consumed with hope and fear for your long writing project, it's not easy to begin again to put pen to paper.  When you're eight and a half months pregnant, you really don't want to think about whether after this one you will  ever want another baby.

This is a crazy time to try to sell a book, of course, with Borders declaring bankruptcy and nobody really knowing what is going to happen to book publishing.  I keep thinking about medieval monks – how they must have sat around their great monastery desks drinking mead or whatever they drank, saying things like, All our beautiful scrolls!  No one is going to read any more! Some fool has invented a thing called the '"printing press'"and now anybody can write!  It's the end of literature!

But we gathered in our circle and everyone grew quiet. I gave the first prompt, we all put our pens to our pages, and in spite of myself the magic happened.  My book, the editor and her marketing department all disappeared and I found myself putting words on my page about what happened to me this week -- receiving hearing aids.  I decided to get them because when everyone in my workshop is laughing, I can't understand the joke through the ambient noise.  Admitting that you need hearing aids is a kind of loss, and writing about that took me to my brother, Sam and his teeth, how it hurt me that he had made the choice to have them all removed before he was sixty years old, because he couldn't afford dental care.  Then I thought about all the women my age in the world who can't afford to hear, how privileged I am. I thought about health care of all kinds as a human right. I wrote about myself, and I wrote about women in public housing along the Connecticut River near where I live, and women in refugee camps and barrios.  How they can hear the laughter, but they can't understand the joke.

I didn't write something that became a poem or a story or a personal essay, but I did get to what was more important last night than whether or not my book is accepted by the marketing department.