Room Enough for All

Every morning, I receive an email from Poetry Daily. On Mondays, I also receive an email from American Life in Poetry, and on Fridays, an email appears with the subject heading The Poi Tree and Other Creative Stuff. The Poetry Daily and American Life in Poetry emails each contain one previously published poem. The Poi Tree email provides a collection of mostly unpublished poems, bits of memoir, short stories, and the occasional photograph or illustration. What further distinguishes Poi Tree from the others is that it publishes all the work it receives. No curating. No editing. 

I don’t always get excited by the work I read from Poetry Daily and American Life in Poetry, but occasionally a poem stands out because it resonates in a personal way or stuns me with its construction or offers a fresh bit of phrasing. I tuck these in a special folder to read again and possibly share with poet friends. I nearly always find something in the Poi Tree emails that strikes a chord—a description of Hawaii flora or a particular beach or a local food that triggers memories of growing up on Oahu. Writing about Hawaii is not a requirement for inclusion in the Poi Tree collections, but the common thread uniting its writers is a friendship with the publisher, Kyle Metcalf, one of Honolulu’s iconic residents and devoted surfers. Nearly every contributor grew up in Hawaii or spent considerable time there.

Besides transporting me home on waves of warm nostalgia, those Friday emails remind me weekly that creative expression needs a vehicle. We aspiring artists can invest a lot of energy in ranking the means by which we share our creations. The ambitious painter dreams of a show at a Chelsea gallery instead of Honolulu’s Art on the Zoo Fence. The accomplished violinist aims for Lincoln Center not Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The poet aspires to publication in the New Yorker rather than in his community college’s annual literary journal. I won’t argue that this hierarchy is wrong or useless, but the need to share creations exceeds the tiny space reserved for the elite who’ve scaled the academies’ walls.

I’m grateful to Kyle for creating an online community of writers and artists and promoting their work each Friday without being a gatekeeper. I’m grateful to the towns and cities that encourage street performers and public art displays and to the libraries and bookstores, cafes and galleries that open their doors to anyone with a story to tell or a poem to recite or a piece of visual art to hang on the walls. I’m even grateful to Facebook (yes, even Facebook!), because it provides a platform for my poet friends—poets like Verandah Porche, Gary Margolis, and Laura Foley—to share their most recently published as well as unpublished work. Thanks to these accessible venues for the arts, we all benefit.

A long time ago, a struggling graduate student in one of the science disciplines asked me which poetry journals paid the best, as he thought that selling his poems would help him survive financially. I had to break the news to him that he would probably have to pay to submit his poetry and that he might consider another revenue stream. I hope that young poet continued to write poetry and that he sought and found ways to share his poems even if they didn’t improve his bank statement or bring him fame. Most of all, I hope he has heard the thundering silence that follows a fine poem well read and counted himself well-compensated even if his audience wasn’t packed into the Tishman Auditorium at The New School, but was instead perched on wobbly folding chairs in a tiny Vermont library, their faces beaming with gratitude.

Hawai'i Calls Finds a Home

This weekend I signed a book contract with Rootstock Publishing, a small, independent press in Montpelier, Vermont. I had heard good things about them from one of their authors and liked their model of a writer-publisher partnership which is different from the norm. I submitted the first 30 pages of Hawai‘i Calls. It’s been 6 months since publisher Stephen McArthur first called to express interest after reading those pages, and we’ve since enjoyed long, amiable conversations that convinced me he is someone I’d enjoy working with.

Stephen made sure this would be a good fit for us both. Rootstock curates its list carefully, and he wanted to establish a shared understanding of what our roles would be before he passed the full manuscript on for an editor to read. Thanks to the editorial review that followed, he extended an enthusiastic invitation that I was delighted to accept.   

Six months was a long stretch, but nothing like the time it took to complete the novel. I began work on it in the early winter of 2012, when I picked up a scrapbook of my grandmother’s social gossip columns for Sodus, New York’s The Record and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. I recognized the wealth of descriptive information in them, especially about Hawai‘i during its 1930s heyday as playground to the rich and famous. I was struggling with another novel at the time, frustrated by my inability to find its narrative arc. I realized that in the basic outline of my grandmother’s life, I had a potentially engaging story, so I set aside the first novel and began the new project.

Of course, the story I thought I would write with a central character based on my grandmother evolved into something profoundly different. The novel’s short synopsis—small town journalist with two sons and an alcoholic husband moves her family from upstate New York to Hawai‘i in 1936—echoes my father’s family narrative, but the similarity ends there. Very quickly, characters and plot events emerged that bore little resemblance to my family’s story, and while I drew from my grandmother’s columns and my father’s memories to provide a vivid sense of the time and place, the final story and its people were born in the writing process. That process required nearly a decade of writing, attending workshops, and exchanging work with other writers. The more I worked on the book, the more I learned about the craft of writing fiction, and the more I understood how much I had yet to learn and master. 

After reading a draft of the novel, dear friend and poet Cynthia Huntington gently and wisely counseled me that Hawai‘i Calls would never be perfect, no matter how hard or how long I worked on it. If anything, she warned, too much rethinking and revision can damage rather than improve a piece. At some point, I had to declare the work done, hand it off to a publisher’s editor, and move on to the next project. Rootstock’s assessment that Hawai‘i Calls  is compelling and worthy of publication provided the needed additional assurance that it was time for me to let it go. 

No matter how the novel is received—loved, hated, or ignored—I am grateful my life circumstances allowed me the luxury of creating it and for all that I learned in the process. I can’t imagine a better way to spend a decade.

The Lost Novels

This past summer I revisited The Red Wheelbarrow, a novel I worked on for a long time. Those who’ve attended workshops with me might remember it as Glass Balls. 

With a quieter life schedule thanks to the pandemic, I had time to dive back into that stalled project and see if I could find a way through what, nine years ago, seemed insurmountable problems with its structure. It’s been fun to revisit my old work and discover I like it better today than I did in 2011. I know other writers who’ve done what I did—drop a novel because they were sick of trying to make it work or because it never satisfied their standards. I wonder how many millions (billions?) of attempted novels are out there, never to find an audience.

Some of the novels my friends set aside still have a hold on me. I feel particularly wistful about three novels, works-in-progress, that I love. I respect their creators’ decisions to set them aside, but I’m sad I may not see their promise realized. The authors were fellow members of writing groups, and all completed a full first draft. I got to read their work in pieces, some of it from the very first scene. Over periods of months, even in some cases for years, I watched them evolve. The characters and settings remain vivid despite the passage of years.

I was relatively new to New Hampshire when I met Jeff Hastings’s central character, an ornery old guy who emptied septic tanks, collected and froze roadkill, and performed an act of pure love as poignant as any I’ve seen rendered in fiction. I would read the book again simply to spend time with this character, but Jeff delivers a rarity—a riveting plot, full of surprises, within a literary novel. His version of New Hampshire’s hardscrabble terrain is sharp and authentic. This is not the precious New England landscape of calendars and postcards. 

The world Jennifer Goss Duby created in her police procedural overlaps with Jeff’s. As it happens, the real life inspirations for their fictional towns are only a few miles apart. Jennifer, like Jeff, nails small town New England—its landscape and occupants. Her mystery had me hooked from the start as did the romantic thread. I needed to know who murdered that young man years earlier and if the central characters would be brave enough to act on their attraction. Specific details linger—the magic eight ball in an unlikely setting, the little dog named Caliope, the characters’ idiosyncratic homes. I can still see the novel’s hero crouched on the hillside behind a boulder as suspense builds to the final confrontation.

Jessica Eakin’s imagined location was less specific. I pictured Vermont as I read it, but it could have been any town in America in the 1960s when new interstates bisected farms and the country was transitioning to different cultural norms. Jessica, a poet as well as novelist, writes prose that sings, yet is spare and precise. I recall a particular paragraph in which she describes the interior of a barn wall with the kind of elegant and light touch that inspires me to aim higher in my own writing. A summer afternoon she captured still radiates heat in my memory, and the narrative voice remains as memorable as Scout’s in To Kill a Mockingbird.

I think of these books as the lost novels. Real and yet not. They exist in limbo. They are not the only novels that never find their audience. Publishers decline gorgeous novels all the time. Even published novels, highly acclaimed ones, go unread, but they at least exist in a tangible way. We can find them in bookstores, on Amazon, in libraries and used bookshops. We can share them with others. Their creators have released them to the world, giving them life beyond the writer’s control. 

Several years ago, a friend introduced me to one of my all-time favorite novels, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. Gerard Basil Edwards wrote the book late in his life and died in obscurity five years before it was published in 1981. This masterpiece nearly disappeared into that Neverland of lost books. Thankfully, Edwards trusted a friend to share it with the world and eventually a publisher recognized its brilliance. Once published, it was critically acclaimed as one of the great novels of the 20th century and included by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. It’s the Cinderella tale writers dream of—though I think it’s safe to say we’d all rather it happen in our lifetime—but also a reminder of what a near miracle it can be for any book to find its audience.

Any creative effort, brilliant or flawed, springs from an impulse to express something—a feeling, an insight, a resonant moment—and that creative act requires courage, especially in the decision to share it with others. For my high school senior quote, I borrowed John Whiting’s line, “you can’t shut out the human voice—especially when it’s expressing itself in an act of faith,” from his play, Marching Song. I had only a vague grasp of its meaning back then, but it’s stayed with me. I wonder if my sadness for the lost novels is a part of a broader sadness for all the unheard human voices. 

I have no authority to say whether Jeff’s, Jennifer’s, and Jessica’s novels would be published and applauded if offered to the market. And, of course, only they can decide if and when their book is ready to be shared. Still. I would love to have these three books on my shelf where I could revisit them and be reminded of the diverse ways love and goodness can manifest, smile again at the banter in a police station, feel the heartbreak that impersonal forces can inflict on individuals and families. Whatever the novels’ fate, I’m grateful for the human voices that created them.

Tuesdays with Joni

On April 29, 2019, my friend Joni B. Cole and I made a pact. Beginning that Tuesday, we would meet weekly for 6 weeks to report progress on our individual writing projects. For me that meant completing a final, submissible draft of my novel Hawai‘i Calls. Her goal was to sustain momentum on a collection of personal essays.

“Always have a start and end date and ideally meet for six weeks only” is Joni’s advice to anyone forming a writing group or partnership. Experience has taught her that writing groups have natural expiration dates, beyond which they start to lose their value. So we agreed June 10, 2019 would be our end date.

We didn’t have to establish rules or protocols for our feedback process. Thanks to Joni’s books, Toxic Feedback and Good Naked: Reflections on How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, and her many workshops I’ve attended over the past fifteen years, we were on the same page about the process. For the most part, we stuck to the rules. Our feedback focused first on what worked in a draft—anything from the overall emotional impact to the nitty gritty specifics such as an effective use of verbs or the way a particular detail (say, nunchucks or a cheap metal bracelet) captured an idea, person, moment, or place.

Constructive criticism followed the positive. We pointed out what wasn’t working for us as a reader—what confused us, took us out of the scene, might better serve another part of the essay, or was a missed opportunity for a compelling impact. Feedback did not include line or copy edits and we did not write comments on the page. In fact, we rarely saw one another’s work on the page. We read our pieces aloud during our meet-ups. While speculation on revisions was permitted, we did not tell one another how we “should” fix a problem area. We shared ideas, brainstormed together, and then the author sorted out what she thought would work best.

All this happened against a backdrop of mutual cheerleading. The days when I decided my work was stale and trite, Joni reminded me to set it aside until I could look with fresh eyes and maybe find a kernel of something worth developing. We gently nudged one another to set reachable weekly goals to keep us on task, and also offered abundant empathy when life blew up our good intentions.

In what may be the most valuable piece of this partnership, we shared our insights and feelings about the process itself. Writing can be a lonely pursuit and the mind prone to self-sabotaging monologues. Conversation with a sincere, seasoned, and compassionate writing partner can help ward off the demons and fire up the brain cells for creative work. 

Today, it is March 6, 2021, two months shy of two years since Joni and I met at King Arthur’s Café in Norwich, Vermont, for the first of our weekly meetings. June 10, 2019 came and went without us noticing. We have managed over all this time to meet weekly either in person, by phone (thank you, pandemic), or through emails like the one Joni sent in August of 2019. “Even with our topsy turvy Tuesday meeting schedule, I now see Tuesdays as my motivation and my inspiration. A sanctuary day in a way, to protect my own writing. It's weird, just planning on meeting, even when we don't, helps.”

Though we broke our first rule about group expiration dates, I think the writing gods will forgive us. Joni’s original work-in-progress is now a masterful manuscript of complex, probing essays, all immediately recognizable as hers thanks to her distinctive narrative wit and brave authenticity. I hope to see Hawaii Calls published someday and I’ve resumed work on an earlier novel I abandoned when a narrative structure eluded me. Thanks to our partnership, we achieved our individual goals and are moving forward.

I’ve so many other writer friends to thank as well for their support and shared wisdom. They’ve commiserated, encouraged, and given hours of time and talent to close readings of my work. Thank yous to Lillian, Paula, Laura, Jeff, Hatsy, Doreen, Deb, Bev, Ina, Giavanna, Meg B, Meg N, Linda Lee, Colleen, Jessica, Gretchen, Jennifer, and Cynthia. Thank yous as well to fellow participants in workshops and classes, at the Vermont Studio Center and at the Green Mountain Writers’ Conferences. 

If I don’t see my novel(s) published, I will be disappointed, but these writing associations and friendships have been more than a means to that end. Their value doesn’t rest on whether or not I someday hold a hard copy of my book. It’s a cliché, but I believe it to be true that the journey matters at least as much and, in this case, more than the destination.

If you are new to writing, I encourage you to find a writer or a group of writers with whom you can share your work safely. To that end, I recommend Joni’s book, Good Naked: Reflections on How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, to help nurture your own writing practice and show you ways to be a positive support for other writers.

Why begin a blog at age 67?

Years ago I read a report claiming women experienced their greatest happiness after turning sixty. I didn’t buy it. Nothing about aging appealed to my forty-something self. Now that I am well past sixty, I get it. I’m more at ease with myself, less exasperated by my mistakes and inadequacies, clearer about what does and doesn’t matter. I recognize this new perspective as a kind of happiness and one for which I’m grateful.

I certainly don’t want to dial back the clock. For the four decades that followed my eighteenth birthday, life was a marathon of checking off the boxes. Get an education, start a career, gain a partner, create a family, acquire a home, fill the home with stuff (the right stuff), contribute to the social good. All that checking of the boxes seemed necessary to prove I was an adult, a capable adult who always got the school forms turned in on time and the kids signed up for the right soccer and ski programs. If I could only host dinner parties with the right china and silver in a home with an esthetic and vibe that put guests at ease, never mind serve a perfect gourmet meal and entertain with a subtle grace that left each guest feeling admired and valued, I might earn my bona fides. My loving friends and family will tell you, I fall short of those self-defined expectations. (I do own a Gourmet cookbook. It terrifies me.) 

Suddenly, in what feels a snap of the fingers, that time of aspiration and striving is over and the shedding has begun. My life phase now requires sorting and labeling the basement boxes full of photos and videos, discarding the bags of size 6 and 8 clothing that will never fit again (I’m still holding onto the size 10s just in case), donating boxes and boxes of books (though not yet the Gourmet cookbook), shredding documents, labeling family heirlooms, documenting the family history. All those years, all that effort to acquire, and now empty shelves in the basement give me joy and entertaining means dining out.

It’s not all a backward glance. I am also writing more. This past year, thanks in part to the pandemic, I have conversed regularly with another writer/friend about the writing process. Reflection and self-assessment are proving a key part of my current life phase. Our discussions inevitably reveal gaps in my writing knowledge, but I’m discovering I know more about writing than I thought I did—certainly more than when I wrote my first poems 40 years ago. 

Fresh out of grad school and teaching speech-communication classes, I shared office space—a cubicle formed by bookcases—with the English faculty at Windward Community College in Kaneohe, Hawaii. When my officemates formed a poetry writing group, they invited me to join, and I began my first serious attempt at writing. My first publication of a poem followed as did the discovery that writing is my bliss (and my bane), but that is a topic for another post.

In the decades since, I’ve focused on writing poetry and fiction. (There was that year I spent writing for a U.S. Senator, a kind of writing that falls into its own category, but that’s definitely a story for another post.) I’ve taught nonfiction writing, specifically essay-writing for high schoolers, but personal essays and blogs have never been my mediums. Writing a blog isn’t even a box I aimed to check, but here I am at 67, thinking it could be fun. 

Despite my age and my decades of effort, I am and always will be an aspiring writer, practicing a craft I love. I may be shedding other expectations in my life, but I still have boxes to check and lessons to learn when it comes to writing. I hope this forum will be a means to articulate and share what I know as well as what I hope to learn, and that it will also serve other writers, especially those who have not yet found a community of writers.