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.