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I’m a mother three times, and the births of my children were relatively easy. I say “relatively” because they were each (also) fraught in their ways. But the upshot was the same each time: healthy baby, healthy mother. I remain incredibly grateful for this.

The birth of one of them, however, was a little dicey. No, I didn’t require help with the pain on this particular go-round, but I also couldn’t get any help because none of the nurses would offer it. As I breathed through the contractions, a nurse would occasionally pop into the room and then out again. But none of them would stay long enough for me to ask my question: am I getting any closer to having this baby?

I think it was a very busy night in that maternity ward.

It doesn’t matter. As I said, the outcome was what we all hope for. And while this particular baby was blue for a few minutes and while he did have his umbilical cord wound twice around his neck, he was really altogether fine and, moreover, is fine today. Thanks be to God.

I recall only one interaction with a nurse, and this was when Nurse Harder came into the room. The sun was coming up and I was beginning to feel hopeful (because mornings almost always make me feel that way), and Nurse Harder came in at the start of her shift and didn’t leave the room immediately. Instead she introduced herself to me, my husband and my mother: “I’m Nurse Harder, as in ‘Push Harder’,” and I found her little joke incredibly encouraging.

She also checked my progress and told me that “this baby is almost ready to be born,” which is what every laboring mother wants to hear, and that she was just leaving the room to call the doctor. And then she said to me, “Please don’t push yet.”

I remember that instruction distinctly: “Don’t push.” This was really very encouraging and also not encouraging at all, because it meant that the pushing part (which means the baby part) was imminent– but my compliance with her instruction was absolutely impossible.

Because here’s the thing: when the body decides that it’s time to push the baby out, the body is going to push the baby out. When you’ve reached that point in the labor and delivery, the body shifts to auto-pilot. There is simply no stopping the pushing. None.

***

Why am I telling you this?

Well, because, you see: I am about to write another book. I’ve already begun the research. I have, in fact, been researching for quite some time. I am already in that phase of book-writing that looks like distraction but is actually me thinking about plot and characters and potential scenes in this book all the time. Or most of the time, anyway.

Yes, I may look like I’m washing the dishes or walking the dog, folding laundry or heaving a barbell, but if I’m by myself and not engaged in conversation with anyone, if I’m not reading or studying or working on something else that needs me, then you can be sure that I am thinking about Leon. I think about Leon and his problems, about his best friend Paul, about Leon’s wife (whose name I haven’t determined yet) or about their son (whose name I also don’t yet know). And I’m thinking about western Pennsylvania (again) and the Rust Belt, the space left in landscape and economy by a steel industry that skipped town. I’m thinking about love and jealousy and the deepest of friendships, of what hurts us and how we deal (all of us differently) with pain.

Also, quite naturally, I’m thinking of bears. Black bears, to be specific. Why? Because they’re the only kind of wild bear that lives in rural Pennsylvania. Obviously.

***

Perhaps you’re not with me, though. You’re (potentially?) not seeing the link. Why would the vivid memory of the birth of one of my children have anything at all to do with writing a book?

Because. Many (many) people (including me) have tied the two together. They say that writing a book can feel like a pregnancy, from its quiet beginning to its urgent end. Here’s how: a notion of a story sits dimly at the back of one’s mind and then begins to grow. If the story is worthy, if it’s something that is potentially good-for-the-telling, then it just won’t leave you alone. Gradually it gathers momentum, occupying greater and greater mental space, developing in size and complexity, until eventually it’s simply too big to sit there: it must be told. People say that the drive to write is similar to the process of labor: word by word, line by line, the force of the narrative compels the writer to write until finally–through fits of terrible concentration and pressure–the book is finished. The author has no choice but to write until it’s done. Until it is, one might say, born. 

That’s why I started this post by writing about childbirth: because I’m writing another book.

But I’ve written here about childbirth and writing (also) in order to say this: childbirth (for me) is no longer the right metaphor for this particular creative process. I mean, I definitely see how it relates. But I think I’ve found a better one.

What is it, you ask?

I answer: bears.

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***

I definitely could be wrong about this. The birth metaphor might be the thing most of the time. But I wonder if this new metaphor has less to do with any metaphor’s aptness and more to do with the story itself. Healing Maddie Brees, my first novel, was the story of a mother, after all.

This new book, despite being set in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt, is far more agrarian than Maddie‘s suburban world. Its people work in steel mills and factories, yes, but they hunt on the weekends. Their homes are on country roads. Their backyards are big enough to be mown with tractors, and cow-tipping is a thing.

And, like I said, there are bears.

***

Here’s how I see it.

While the wise and educated know to be mindful of bears, they know, too, that bears mind their own business. Typically, I mean. A healthy, normal bear– on catching wind of human presence, on hearing human noise– will skirt that presence instinctively. It will keep a wide berth between itself and the humans, and the humans will never even know it was there.

But there are exceptions. A hungry bear just post-hibernation, blinking in the bright light of spring, might sniff out food that the human campers did not intend to share. A wounded or ill bear might pick a fight with innocent hikers. And everyone knows what momma bears are famous for.

Like I said: exceptions.

I’ve been mulling over these possibilities in moments that look like distraction. What would it be like to be surprised by a bear?

***

Sitting by the campfire in the early morning, waiting for the coffee water to boil, you might not notice some rustling in the underbrush. Your eyes are swollen from last night’s campfire, and the smoke from this morning’s fire is already stinging your eyes. But that water needs to boil for the coffee. After the coffee, everything will be different. Then you can start cooking bacon.

So that rustling blends in with the sound of crickets and birds, with the conversation you’re having with your friends and, just now, the collapse of some wood in the flames. There is no more likely a bear in these woods than there is a new novel in your head. Both would be exciting and way too much trouble, and you are still waiting for your coffee.

Later, though, returned from a hike, you hear the rustling again. Your blood is pumping now, your eyes are clear. You stand and look towards the sound, into the woods where the sunlight falls in bands. You think you see a dark shadow move behind those ferns. You tell your friends, and they look too. You are the only one who sees it.

But on your canoe trip, no one can miss the bear moseying along the river’s edge. Everyone stops to watch it, paddles lying still across their laps. The bear is a big one: someone estimates it between three and four-hundred pounds. Can black bears get that big in western Pennsylvania? Someone says that it’s definitely less than three-hundred pounds. Someone else says it’s a baby, and then everyone starts to look for the mother. Meanwhile, the bear turns away from the river, disappearing into the green woods that close up behind it. You forget about the bear because now you and your friends are having a canoe race, which is much harder than it sounds.

Then you hear the rustling again at night, when you are all sitting around the campfire and the world around you is dark. Do you hear that, you ask your friends, and some of them think they do. You all stop to listen and hear nothing but crickets. Talking begins again, and laughter, but you are still thinking of the bear, three-hundred pounds or more or less. You are thinking that three hundred pounds of anything with claws and teeth sounds dangerous.

Later still, when you and your friends are tucked away in your tents, you hear the rustling noise again. But it’s louder this time and continuous, and this time it’s accompanied by whistling and snuffling noises and the occasional grunt. This is a large thing that has come very close. You raise your head and the dying campfire is throwing a shadow against your tent: the looming, shaggy shadow of a bear.

***

And that’s why a bear is a good metaphor for writing a book. See?

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***

Or maybe you don’t see, which is fine. I’ll explain.

In our earlier metaphor, one simply can’t quit. Once labor has commenced, it really must continue. And once it’s time to push, It’s Time. There is no putting it off or waiting it out. It has to happen. Now.

When you have a bear outside your tent, things are happening. Yes, the bear might (one hopes) get distracted and move on to other things, in which case you might go home and have great tales to tell. Or something truly terrible might happen. But at the Moment of the Looming and Shaggy Shadow, you can’t simply roll over and go back to sleep. No. You are suddenly on high alert, at the ready, and you will not look away until– one way or another– this issue of the bear is resolved.

Writing a book– at least in the phase I’m currently in– is like this. Thrilling, potent, completely absorbing. AND: it cannot be abandoned. How can I leave it now, pretend it hasn’t come this close, move on to– say– repainting the house trim WHEN THERE’S A BEAR OUTSIDE MY TENT?

I can’t.

I have to write this book now. Many, many pieces of it are falling into place. I love the setting (deeply) and the characters already. But I honestly don’t know what is going to happen to them. Most of them, anyway.

Writing this book is the only way to find out.

***

So here’s my news: I’m writing a new book. A novel. It’s about a man named Leon, about his wife and children and his best friend Paul. It’s about the Rust Belt in Pennsylvania  and the beauty and challenge of making a life there.

It has a bear in it.

And that’s all I can tell you for now.

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The post Writing A(nother) Book appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I have said that, and so have scores of others (although this one disagrees and makes some excellent points while she’s at it). The comparison works less for the degree of love and/or difficulty (parenting is fundamentally more in both regards) than it is the sense of personal investment, I think. To write something well is to labor over it in thought and deed for what is likely a Very Long Time. To make a story believable is to have drawn, again and again, from one’s personal understanding and experience. And although the result is not necessarily memoir, autobiography, or even that personal experience (I can, off the top of my head, point to perhaps three moments in Healing Maddie Brees that actually reside in my living memory), the finished book is naturally an extension of its author.

Not quite one’s heart walking around outside one’s body–as they say of children–but close.

And so, like parenting, having a novel out in the world requires a thick skin and the educated understanding that one’s book is not for everyone. Not everyone likes literary fiction, for example. Some read less for thought-provocation and more for entertainment, distraction, relief. Some people don’t like description, can’t work with metaphor, like their tales neatly told.

And this is Fine. The world needs all kinds of books. And all kinds of readers.

I don’t expect everyone who reads her to like Maddie. I don’t expect everyone I see to have read her. I never want to be the author that people duck and run from because they haven’t read or don’t like my book.

Most of the time I am not thinking about Maddie these days anyway. This is due, in part, to the satisfaction of having finished with the book: it’s done. The ideas that compelled me and overtook my brain are quieted now, perhaps like so much labor pain. And it’s due, in part, to work on a different project, a new book that will be finished soon and out in the world shortly thereafter and that necessarily occupies much of the mental space that used to belong to Maddie (details soon).

Still, it is lovely when people mention her to me, ask me how she’s faring in the world, express interest in or appreciation of the book. That is very kind. I love the novel and am exceedingly proud of her. And I still have great hope that more people will discover all she has to offer.

Recently Maddie has had some rather excellent attention: the novel was considered for the prestigious Eric Hoffer Award, a top literary prize for small, academic, and independent presses.

My publisher nominated the book; being new (still) to the world of publishing, I have little to no idea about prizes until my publishers teach me–which they do. So in early May I learned that not only had Healing Maddie Brees been nominated for the Hoffer Award, but that she was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, an award within the Hoffer prize that honors the most thought-provoking books.

Then came Friday’s news. The final awards were out, and my Maddie had done very well, indeed. The book was a finalist for both the Grand Prize and the Montaigne Medal, and she earned an honorable mention in the fiction category for the Grand Prize.

Oh. My.

Here’s what they had to say about the book:

This tale of physical and spiritual healing unfolds as a combination of current struggle and meaningful back story. The novel relates the tough process of recovery from cancer, misbelief in God, disbelief in God, alienation in marriage, and doubt. Perhaps the biggest battle faced by Maddie Brees is the need to be healed from a perverse self-centeredness. The superb writing conveys present and past with compelling images, beautiful words, and a lovely and relentless pace, even while skillfully confronting questions that belong in a theology class. The result is a story of wonderful characters who act so human in overcoming the pitfalls of life, love, and belief without the blatant miracle.

Friends.

I have duly formed a thick skin. I know that not everyone will like my book. And from time to frequent time, I am struck anew with insecurity: maybe the book isn’t as good as I hoped, as I thought. Maybe what I have for this book is that blanketing mother-love that sees beauties no one else can see. And would anything be wrong with that?

No. The creator loves what she creates. It is enough to do one’s best.

But when, from time to time, I discover someone who sees and understands Maddie, who appreciates the struggle and beauty I tried so hard and for so long to tuck into those pages, well.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s similar to–though not quite the same–as witnessing one’s grown child thriving out there in the world.

(That’s my girl!)

And I’m grateful.

The post Maddie and the Hoffer Award appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It’s tricky, though: when invited, I always tell my host that I recognize the liability. Having an author present for her book’s discussion can decidedly hamper dialogue and limit expression: how many attendees will be willing to say what they’re really thinking with the author sitting right there?

Of course, I am more than willing to hear criticism. Releasing a book into the world requires lots of things, and a thick skin is definitely among them.

***

One of the first book clubs I attended for this novel was also among the best. They were a large group of intelligent and educated women, most of whom were empty-nesters. We had a long and very rich conversation, and people were not at all unwilling to express annoyance with characters or frustration with ideas.

But I was taken aback by one critique: one woman said–and others agreed–that there wasn’t much in the book about Maddie as a mother. They wanted to hear more about that, they said.

***

That was the day she’d imagined she was knitting–though she had never actually learned how. But she had imagined that she could, and that as she sat, her knitting needles clicked in her hands, binding together the softest yarn into a ribbon and then a square, and then an oblong sheet that grew so long it fell to her feet. Still she knitted, calmly, efficiently, so that the blanket (for this is what it was) pooled onto the ground and then, by the force of her knitting, began to move away from her and toward her son where he sat in the sandbox or walked toward the swing. This great blanket of her affection followed him over the playground, flowing up the ladder behind him and then piling around him as he sat on the platform at the top. It followed him down the slide, too, and she could see in her mind’s eye the way that it surrounded his torso and flowed over his legs that, once again, he used to brace his body against gravity. Such was her love for this child, and such was the way that she willed it to cover him. 

***

The fact of Maddie’s motherhood is in fact central to the novel. She and her husband Frank have three sons, and her cancer diagnosis–occurring very early in the book–keenly shadows her thoughts, feelings, and fears as a mother.

As one might expect it would.

***

***

I’ve thought often about that remark at that book club. At the time, I didn’t defend the novel against it, although immediately my mind ran through multiple instances wherein Maddie’s love and fear for her children are in view.

It’s a trick of my attending book clubs not to be defensive, to let the book speak for herself (or remain silent, if necessary), to let the liability of welcoming the book’s author not be such a liability.

I am not an expert on many things, but I am an expert on this book. There is never need to let that authority cow the expression of others.

***

***

Yes, the truth is that Maddie-as-mother is a very important part of this novel, and over the course of the book it’s a concept I return to again and again. Maddie’s motherhood is, in fact, vital to the overarching themes of the work as a whole.

And of the few autobiographical elements of the book, Maddie’s motherhood experience is perhaps most closely linked with mine.

Being a mother has been and remains one of the most important experiences of my life, and I contend that, of the myriad experiences this life has to offer a person, motherhood is likely one of the most powerful.

One can see this, for instance, in how intensely personal it is, how every comment can so readily be received as a critique. The “Oh, I see your baby sucks his thumb!” becomes a commentary on the mother-as-enabler, as addiction-engenderer, as potential destroyer-of-her-child’s yet-to-emerge teeth.

Every comment, every tantrum, every failure to sleep through the night is fodder for assessment as to how well one loves her child.

And every mother feels inadequate, because every mother sees–if only in glimpses–how gloriously separate her child is, how unlike any other, how inconceivably precious are the toes, the fingers, the thoughts, the phrases, the efforts, the successes, the failures, the being of the one she mothers.

***

Mothers should know. A mother should know her child’s face, she thought. She knew that Garrett’s left ear was just the slightest bit bent at the top, that Jacob’s whorl of hair was just to the right of the center back of his head. And Eli had his father’s nose: straight and, even at this young age, elegantly shaped. It was like a little ski-jump, Maddie always thought: dramatically steep with just the slightest inverted angle at the end. He would be handsome when he grew up.

***

Kerri is mother to twins who are going on three. The other day on my walk, I stopped to chat with her where she sat on her deck in the afternoon sun. The twins were in their beds: naptime.

We talked about them at pre-school, and Kerri marveled aloud to me about Eli’s predilection for holding open the lid on the classroom garbage can so that his classmates can throw away their trash.

“How does he know to do that?” she wondered. And we were silent for a moment, taking this in. Here was an untaught behavior, a glimpse into a nature uniquely Eli. What might it signify? A pleasure in being helpful, a blooming compassion? A fascination with hinges, an interest in seeing things properly put away, a love for his teacher? An ambition to someday drive the garbage truck?

“What does it mean?”

I stood with my dog on the other side of her fence and pondered it with her, I with my years and years of parenting experience, with two out of three of them– by all accounts– full-grown. What could I say?

I told her what I thought, which is to say that I told her she was doing the right thing. I told her it is her privilege and perhaps her unique responsibility as a mother to pay attention to these things, to notice.

I have a collection beyond counting of the things I have noticed and know about my children–things that might no longer interest them, things they have moved on from, things that once defined them and really no longer do so.

But I have collected and I keep them; and this, to me, is part of what it means to be their mother.

***

***

The women at that book club had wanted more from me about Maddie as a mother and, as I’ve said, I’ve given that request a lot of thought. Had they missed what is there in the book about Maddie and motherhood? Certainly other themes and plot elements speak far more loudly in the book, I see that.

Is it that they are empty-nesters, and so are missing the difficult and excellent work that means having children at home?

***

I am not displeased with the way I wrote Maddie-as-mother. In fact, I feel quite the opposite. I didn’t say this to the women that night, but this is how I saw it when writing the book, and this is how I see it now:

Motherhood is one of the most powerful experiences this life has to offer. Raising it in ordinary conversation can evoke all kinds of reactions, from those who wish they were mothers to those who never want to be mothers to those who had a bad mother.

And raising it in a book is equally if not more powerful for the distilled nature of a novel. That Maddie was a mother is incredibly important to the book–but it is a bell I had to ring lightly because of the reverberations it evokes.

In short, writing too much about Maddie-as-mother actually might have been unkind. I couldn’t say too much about it, because motherhood is too dear to me. This book–and any good work of fiction, I’ll warrant–is not about the author. Any and all of the personal emotional investment the author puts into it is actually none of the reader’s business, and, if there, would necessarily tarnish the reader’s experience.

The experience is the story. The means is the writing. The book is the gift.

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?

—  A. Dillard, The Writing Life

***

These days, every day, I drive Emma to school. She is a junior in high school now, nearly as old as she’s going to get before she moves on from home.

Every day she gets out of the car, tells me she loves me, closes the door behind her, and never looks back.

But as I pull away, I always look for her blond head moving in the crowd, and I say yet another prayer over her lovely self, and I send the blanket after her, covering her, keeping her all through the day.

The post Maddie and Motherhood appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

His email arrived sometime in May, or maybe late April. An invitation. He’s a writer, a someday filmmaker, and he wanted to talk Art.

I’ve known Joel since he was born, I guess. His family and ours go to the same church; his age falls just between that of Everett and Emma. I’m sure they tumbled over one another in the church nursery. But he first truly registered with me when, at about four years old, he spoke to me on the church sidewalk with all the gravitas of a grown-up. He was adorable.

Since then, I’ve watched him grow up in the way that parents watch children not their own: out of the corner of my eye. But in recent years, he’s been around more, hanging out at my house with my children. Among teenagers I’ve known, he’s emerged as that scarce and winning type: deeply thoughtful, with the confidence to discuss those thoughts with adults not his parents. We’ve had some good conversations over the years.

Now an invitation in the inbox: words over coffee. Would I meet with him at a coffee shop and talk art-making? Talk writing, to be specific? His schedule was flexible. Would I meet him?

Yes, and I was looking forward to it.

The problem was time. When could we meet? I was working on a magazine article, a project requiring research within the limitations afforded by Everett’s upcoming graduation. My answer: Sure! I’d love to. But can it wait until after May?

There’s no hurry, he said, which was good. May flew by, as did the graduation festivities. Our home’s exterior, due to long-neglected damages, was undergoing a modest reconstruction, as was my magazine article. Meanwhile, a wedding loomed.

Can it wait until after the wedding? Mid-July at the latest. I’m sorry.

His answer: No problem.

So then the wedding and all the travel, and a return to a house interior– due to recently developed damages– undergoing a modest reconstruction. The living room furniture was in the dining room, construction dust was everywhere, and the suitcases had exploded on the bedroom floors. The magazine article, meanwhile, was in a sorry state of disrepair. And we were leaving town again in–what was it?–a few weeks.

Me, embarrassed and tired: After that?

Him, cheerful: That’s fine.

But things still did not look good. Remember all that time I spent on the magazine article and consequently not on the clean-up? And you know the faithful miracle of housework: It always waits for you. Mine grinned at me from dust-coated walls.

The article, meanwhile, Was Not Good.

And we were anticipating a wedding reception. Not a wedding, mind you, but a party to celebrate our newlyweds here among their North Carolina friends. There was a house to clean up and a yard to make right. There was Emma’s back-to-school preparations. I sprained my ankle walking the dog. I had no time for the article and absolutely no business meeting anyone for coffee.

Me: So sorry. So, so sorry.

Finally we met this week–but mostly because he was here at the house already, hanging out with Everett. Our conversation wasn’t in a coffee shop; there was no coffee involved. He sat on our living room sofa and I on a nearby chair, happy to not be on my feet (er, ankle) for awhile. He ate his Chick-fil-A French fries and, with all the gravitas of a grown-up, asked me:

When you’re starting a story, do you think about the concepts and ideas you want to communicate, or do you start with plot, or with character?

Here was something I hadn’t thought about in awhile. Not in a long while. Suddenly I was recalling Maddie in her earliest days–such a long time ago.

You start with ideas. No, with character. Well, but character must absolutely drive the plot. One can play with believability. Almost anything is believable–potentially, anyway, if you handle it right. But you can’t readily believe a person suddenly doing something out of character.

And what does one do with the ideas or images that come to mind–those random ones that seem completely insignificant to the larger work? Are they worth writing down, or do you wait until you’re sure of a thing and then take the time to develop it?

No, you don’t wait, because you never know. You never know when an idea or an image isn’t exactly the one you will–someday–be reaching for. Write it. Bring it to life and then, if need be, squirrel it away. You never know.

I had a useless character while writing my book who kept coming up. I didn’t know what to do with her. Truly, I had no idea why she mattered, but I kept writing her, and I kept writing her in. In the end, she was enormously significant to the story. I needed her throughout, but she came of her own volition. I can’t explain it to you, and I’ve heard other writers say the same thing.

We went on like this for the better part of an hour, each of us talking about that what comes in the exhilarating isolation of creativity. I summarized some concepts from my book for him. I told him about how, for years, any church communion service I was part of had my head teeming with ideas. I had little notebooks of grocery lists and errands that were punctuated with thoughts on the meaning of the Eucharist. It was a vital part of my book, I told him, and now that I’ve finished the project, these ideas don’t come to me anymore. I can receive communion in penitent and grateful prayer, just like everybody else.

He told me about a concept he’s working on. He showed me the paragraph description that was an opening scene, and in a few moments of reading, its quiet and fearsome tableau filled my living room. He talked about it, and behind his eyes, I watched the strange multi-fold labor of the creative: ideas made manifest in character, then teased out in images that invite others into the room.

He said: the most terrifying thing in the world is a blank page.

Yes, I said, remembering that fear and wishing that I were staring down a blank page again.

But I had to go. Time to get Emma from school, and then hit the grocery store, and then a meeting at church at 7. I was running late already, having lost track of the time because for ten-twenty-thirty minutes I was talking about writing, that thing Annie Dillard describes as “mere,” but that, for some of us, is akin to life.

We continued talking as we walked to our cars.

He won’t go to film school. Quentin Tarantino (among others) says don’t bother. Joel says Tarantino said to make a short film. And I thought about my training as a writer: two classes, one workshop–all of it twenty and more years ago.

I picked up Emma. We went to the grocery store. And the ensuing days have been full of preparations for the wedding reception– all of them must-do’s for that joy-filled reception.

The “words over coffee” had happened– without the coffee, but rich with reminders of what I love to do. I’m grateful to Joel for the conversation, wedged as it was into an unforgiving schedule. And I’m looking forward, more than ever, to confronting a blank page.

Soon.

“The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.” — Annie Dillard

“To this day I actually think that…rather than go to film school, just grab a camera and try to start making a movie.” — Quentin Tarantino

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly…. that page will teach you to write.” — Annie Dillard

The post Words Over Coffee appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

He is before all things

You can’t know–when waking at the gray cat’s paw to a dark sky–how the light will come through the trees at noon.

Other things come first: the sliced turkey laid just so on the bread, carrots and cherry tomatoes, the mandarin, the note on the napkin.

Coffee.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

The very bad traffic at the light.

In the car-line, Emma’s friend waved at me while I stared blindly out my sunglasses. Then he pulled his hoodie over his flume of hair and kept walking.

Meanwhile, news was of bombings in Aleppo and the child mortality rate in North Carolina, of strategies toward peace in Syria and the horrors of opioid addiction. Of forest fires in the South and a new presidency.

Of four-year-old Susie in the UK who called the emergency hotline and saved her mother’s life.

In Him all things hold together.

But last night you played board games and ate brownies and enjoyed the first fireplace fire of the season, and today you sipped coffee and talked with a new friend about books and guilt and the portrayal of guilt in books

and you realize a thing you are just beginning to know, which is that guilt is like grief, that guilt is, in fact, a kind of grief. And as grief, it won’t go away. It can be denied or pretended against. It can be shoved into a corner or hidden neatly with compassion and the magnanimous gesture

but It Will Out.

He is before all things

And you say to your new friend what you know is true: that there are no easy answers. That even though you believe absolutely in an Answer, that answer isn’t easy.

If it were easy, it couldn’t possibly be the answer.

But in Him all things hold together.

It’s on the way home that you see how the yellow leaves filter the sun like lace inflamed; how the scattering of leaves pointed like pins rolls like a flume in the wake of an SUV; how air and light and color are caught and impossibly suspended together around you; how the loosened maple leaf, drawn down by its stem, inscribes circles on the air.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 

Colossians 1: 19-20

(Amendment made with gratitude to Lynne, who understands so well.)

The post All Things Hold Together appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The difference between these two books? The one on the left is a review copy, replete with typos. The one on the right is the REAL DEAL. We’re getting close now!

It feels like only weeks ago I was sitting at my little table in the public library. Biography section on the left, self-help on the right, and me at my table in the middle because here was a bright space with a window. I sat there almost every Monday morning for a span of three or so hours, and I did this for the better part of three years.

Ahead of me were floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a patch of lawn and a little bench for sitting. And only a few steps beyond that was the woods full of trees, deciduous and otherwise.

The woods were a fine distraction, rain or shine. Most trees look beautiful in any weather. But there was no door giving me immediate access to them, so there was nothing for it but to sit at my table, laptop waiting, and admire.

More accessible was the alcove on this side of the plate glass, the one with the comfortable chairs and ottoman. The magazine subscription section flanks that alcove, and it beckoned with all manner of photograph and slick-paper distraction. But I never gave in to that.

I did repeatedly read the spines of the books around me. I read them blindly, I think (if there is such a thing), because I can now remember none of the titles. But there they were, week after week, staring back at me.

Maybe this is what it takes to finish writing a book? A little Inspiration, a little Discipline.

But by far the most important were the books–because they were all finished. Their authors had completed them. No matter how many days, weeks, and months of focused, silent sitting, the represented authors had eventually reached The End.

So here’s to Determination: If they did it, I could do it, too.

It’s been more than a year since one of those Mondays, a fact I find very difficult to believe. It’s been almost a year since I signed a contract with my publisher, nearly six months since I mailed in the last edits.

Within the last month, I sent in the list of errors I found in the review copy, and about a week ago I got my hands on a polished edition (above), clean of all those random errors–including the alarming sentence in the last paragraph on page 58, which read exactly as follows: “l.”

I have no explanation for this, and I am so glad it’s gone.

And four days ago, I polished up that vital paragraph at the end of the book, the one that reads “Acknowledgments.” It’s over now; it’s finished.

I did it.

This is still somewhat unbelievable to me. How long does it take, I wonder, to adjust from dream-work-hope to reality? Human beings, I’ve found, are complex creatures, and some of us transition more readily than others.

In my defense, the reality of having finished a book is not quite yet a reality. Healing Maddie Brees is in the hands of select reviewers and is, otherwise, not yet in circulation. I have a little over two months left before the book is *out there,* so to speak, before the conversation I’ve been wanting to have can be had because people have read her.

Still.

A week ago, I was offered a peek into what the conversation might be: last Saturday, Kirkus Reviews let me and my publisher know what they thought of the book, and on Thursday I was allowed to share it with the world.

I was and I remain overjoyed and so grateful. Grateful that they chose to review it (in this business, decision to review or not is entirely up to the reviewer). Grateful that they like it. Grateful that they find it beautiful. Grateful that the conversation I am wanting to have might, in fact, be a conversation this book will engender.

And so grateful that those silent hours, pent up at my table in the library, have produced this book.

Now Healing Maddie Brees has ten weeks and three days before she can “go outside.” On September 13, she will be released from bookstores and Amazon, finally available to be read. That’s seventy-three days.

I’ve learned a lot about publishing books in the past year. One year ago, I knew nothing but inspiration, discipline, and determination, the story in my head pitted against the blankness of my laptop’s screen.

I had no idea–beyond writing it–what effort, wisdom, experience and help is needed to really launch a book into the world. My editor and publisher have been nothing short of astounding in getting Healing Maddie Brees where she is now: toes at the threshold, almost ready to go.

I’m so grateful for this, too.

If you are interested, if you would like (and if you haven’t already), here is something you can do to help out:

• take a Pledge-to-Buy. See the tab on this website for how and why this works. I currently have 298 pledges. If and when I reach 500, we will choose ten pledgers (that’s a thing) to receive a free iBook of the novel.

The post Inspiration, Discipline, Determination–and a Whole Lot of Help appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The post How It Works appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue to evolve toward completion.

And, in truth, it might be gaining life. In fact, I know it is–but not in the way one hopes. It is gaining life in the way of all creative projects when they are neglected: it is growing wild. When I do (today? tomorrow?) return again to the project, it will be scarcely recognizable to me, grown woolly and fierce. I will have to wrestle it to the ground, read and re-read its pages. I will have to remind myself of its identity and my intentions. I will have to, all over again, tame it.

*sigh*

But that is for another post.

This post, this very one here, is all about the reason why I am letting my fourth child grow feral in the unsupervised wilds of my laptop. The reason is my other children, the two-legged ones, the three quasi-adults who inhabit the rooms of this house.

How is your book doing? It is neglected, sorry to say, because my other children are not. What have the last weeks–no, months–been if not tending to these Busy-nesses? These persons who must come and go with their own agendas, not necessarily needing me and then suddenly Needing Me Very Much?

In a way, I suppose, things have always been like this. Children–no matter their ages–don’t need us and then suddenly do. Think, for instance, of the skinned knee, the erupting quarrel, the sudden and bracing trip to the emergency room. But for the most part, when they are younger, the needs are quiet and unsurprising. He needs a nap. She needs a bath. Now they (clearly) need to be read to. Those daily things were predictable and completely under my control. I had things well in hand.

I don’t necessarily feel that this is any longer the case.

We have, as I have alluded to, more coming and going, for starters. I do a lot in the way of ferrying–trotting people to lessons and appointments, picking up Everett from school so that he can drive home again. I’m out more than I’m in, and for a homebody, for a writer, that has its limitations. At the same time, it’s a situation that has been mounting. It has been like this for awhile–and now, perhaps, more so. It’s normal, I know. It is the way of things.

And then there are the Events, the things that simply take More. Our latest and biggest was Will’s graduation from high school, joyous and wonderful and carrying also that quiet nostalgia. It meant, of course, preparations, which also meant stemming the activities of our home-school for a time. It mean out-of-town guests, and a Really Splendid Party, and getting ready for those things, and, since then, the recovery (vital) afterward.

Now, of course, things have slowed down, haven’t they? Will is graduated, Everett has finished his finals. Emma and I (mostly Emma) have a few things to wrap up, and then things will grow quieter, won’t they? Now, a friend encouraged me, this summer, she said, is the time for your book.

Predictability, ease of pace. The (perhaps) imposition of a schedule such that I have predictable time to myself each day, compulsory quiet, and a string of several hours together.

Right?

And then there was last Monday and the unanticipated 1.5 hours I spent in the DMV. He needed a parent (who knew?) to apply and receive his “after-nines.” Here was an errand I hadn’t anticipated. I had anticipated catching up on homeschool stuff that morning, sitting quietly with a history text and making notes, deciding what Emma needed yet to do. I had planned on doing laundry. On wrapping languishing packages. On making (and saving) room in my afternoon to work on that book of mine.

Instead, I did some very little planning in the DMV, perched on a chair with a desk attached like they have in high school, and coaching Will (again) in the art of the thank-you note. Yes, it was productive, and yes, it was time with Will. But it wasn’t (at all) what I had anticipated. And I never did get to the book that afternoon.

Which was fine.

Last night we held a sleepover, unexpected and last minute, the way my kids do things these days. They were quiet and respectful. They kept to themselves. When they left the house at 11 p.m. on an errand to buy some Cheerwine, Everett was thoughtful enough to text me. Everyone slept soundly, so far as I could tell, and this morning I made them muffins for breakfast.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by my later encounter with the family room: empty Sprite cans on the end table, empty glasses and chip bags on the floor. And, inexplicably wedged between the wall and sofa, the empty 2-liter bottle that had so recently been full of Cheerwine. The boys, oblivious (is it possible?), had begun to hold a band practice–and I made them stop immediately and take care of it all, which they did with no audible complaint.

Now those two dear sleeping-over boys have left. Like my children’s mother, theirs has necessary plans for the day. But at our house we are enjoying the unexpected visit of our youth group’s summer interns. A game of Settlers of Catan is in full swing on the dining room table, and I am letting Emma (who has a grammar test to take and some history to read) enjoy this fun with them.

I’m thinking there is yet time in the day for homeschool, and also (I think so) for the book. But these three children of mine have a mobility that, for all its wildness, my novel decidedly lacks. Feral or otherwise (and oh, I hope for mostly “otherwise”), they will take on lives of their own.

The book, when necessary (and thank you for asking), can wait.

The post At Our House appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I would imagine, too, that it’s almost universal: that sense of having a deadline, Something Due, and so everything else must wait, or take a back seat to it, anyway.

Of course, deadlines are helpful. Even necessary. I have talked about this before. I have always been grateful for deadlines– but that doesn’t mean I like them.

I find it especially difficult as a mother. Certainly I faced deadlines before I was a mother, and they were troubling (and helpful!) enough back then. But as a mother, the pressure of a deadline takes on side-effects that I don’t much care for. Because right now, my kitchen floor is filthy, and the Entire House wants a good vacuuming, and this morning I caught the dying mint plant only just before it kicked the proverbial bucket: it is now reviving nicely (freshly watered) on the deck. But a few hours’ more neglect and it would have been money (very) poorly spent.

This is not to say that I didn’t (necessarily) have floor-scrubbing, carpet-vacuuming, plant-watering duties before I was a mother. But it is to say that, around the edges of meeting a deadline, I have only enough (also) time to take care of my family– and Nothing Else.

It begins to wear on one, doesn’t it?: the Noticing of all that one must tend to, and the Not Being Able To Get To It. Yet.

But once again we are closing in. Tomorrow evening, in fact, at 11:59, I am Absolutely Committed to sending this New and Improved draft of my novel to my editor– and this will be the first time that anyone at all (other than me) has read the entire thing in full, and then I won’t be (Oh, I am So Glad) alone in this project anymore.

Until then, it is all hovering over the computer for me. Yes, I took Sunday off. But most of Friday and Saturday were spend reading, reading, reading the manuscript. And yesterday it was all about tending to my notes and making those additions, those vital little pieces that must be inserted here and there if the thing as a whole is going to make sense. Today it is more of the same: my head locked in this little story, my mind overtaken by these characters and plot– so that everything else (nearly everything else) must take a backseat.

Focused in this way on this small thing, the rest of the world grows unfamiliar. It weighs on my brain as annoyance, as tedious and distracting obligation. Last night, tired beyond what seemed reasonable, I had to make myself quit the book and go to bed– and read Something Different, just to clear my mind.

We as a family have faced this before: way back when I wrote my Master’s thesis; or when I was writing curriculum; or when, periodically, it was time to grade essays, write report card comments, grade and comment on a new raft of papers. Mom in the throws of some assignment-or-other, working hard against a deadline.

Yes, we are all too familiar with this.

Yesterday it was so bad that I didn’t even take time to exercise– something that is ohsogood for a hard-working brain. I asked Emma and her friend Jewel to walk the dog–which they gladly did, and let her off the leash, and didn’t notice until it was too late that she had rolled in something rotting (“it had maggots!,” they told me), and consequently bathed her in the backyard using Will and Everett’s Old Spice Denali body wash because we are out of dog shampoo. And then for the rest of the evening, the dog smelled like wet dog (yuck) and Denali body wash, which is really quite pleasant.

Emma also brought home to me a fistful of honeysuckle– and I wouldn’t have known but for that bouquet that it is blooming now all along the edges of the woods. It’s in a little vase on the kitchen counter, and it smells wonderful.

I remember my father introducing me to honeysuckle when I was maybe six, discovering where it grew in a hedge up the road from my grandparents’ house on Long Island. He taught my sisters and me how to choose the ripe blossom and pull it off the vine, how to break and then tug so gently at the pedicel and so pull the filaments through. At the base of the filament: treasure! The sweetest drip of honey that we sucked right off the plant.

Later I showed this to my children. It grows so near our house. William was probably two when I showed it to him for the first time; the same was likely true with the others. But they’ve always loved honeysuckle since then, and I distinctly remember one of them (Everett?) instructing me as to the parts of a plant (pistil and stamen, petal and style) when he was (maybe?) in the first grade and learning about the parts of a plant.

You can look them up in the dictionary, you know– these botanical terms. Merriam-Webster is more than happy to oblige the curious with an accompanying drawing, and I went there just now to look up the parts of a blossom because, don’t you know, I can’t
ever remember them.

Which made me think that someone (who?) does the drawings for Merriam-Webster. Someone has that job– a botanist, maybe. And she works against a deadline, perhaps, to get her drawings in on time.

But for me it was an escape: looking up the image, writing this blog post, standing a moment too long at my kitchen counter and inhaling– not wet dog– the smell of the honeysuckle there.

We will get past this deadline, as we have all the deadlines before it.

I walked the dog this morning. A brisk walk that my entire self– mind and body and soul– was so glad for. And in a shady patch down where the creek overflows its banks after rain, I saw a little tree– a dogwood, maybe?– that was all entwined in honeysuckle. The tendrils brooded over the top of the tree, hanging down like a lock of hair, all yellow and white with blossoms.

The post Familiar appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

There is simply Too Much Else to do.

My children have the day off today. Which means, of course, that one of them has a friend over, and another is at school for play practice, and the third must needs come with me to Target to do some birthday-present shopping. Besides, it’s a glorious day outside with blue skies and thin clouds, warm air and a high breeze that makes the trees laugh and the leaves fall. So maybe Emma and I will walk the dog, and maybe we’ll make granola in the kitchen that has windows and doors open.

And also, I have to write.

When I do, I will be putting some confidence in the truth of this little paragraph. I rediscovered it in yesterday’s late afternoon, when I pulled from my desk drawer some of the earliest writings I did for this novel. I had lost a vital passage from my electric files, you see, and so I was in pursuit of hard copy.

Happily, I had some.

And, as I’ve said, this, sent to me by my sister Emily in May of 2002. She discovered it in the Wilson Quarterly and she thought it might make some sense to me. It does. It is, in fact, what I’ve always loved about novels, and what made me want to teach people about them, and what made me think I might like to write one.

At any rate, it’s worth thinking about.

Here:

It is the curious identity of books in general that history and philosophy, invaluable though they are, cannot, by their very nature, contain novels; yet novels can contain history and philosophy. We need not quarrel about which genre is superior; all are essential to human striving. But somehow it is enchanting to think that the magic sack of make-believe, if one wills it so, can always be fuller and fatter than anything the historians and philosphers can supply. Make-believe, with its uselessness and triviality, with all its falseness, is nevertheless frequently praised for telling the truth via lies. Such an observation seems plainly not to the point. History seeks truth; philosophy seeks truth. They get at it far better than novels can. Novels are made for another purpose. They are made to allow us to live, for a little time, another life; a life different from the one we were ineluctably born into. Truth, if we can lay our hands on it, may or may not confer freedom. Make-believe always does.

-Cynthia Ozick, The Yale Review, October 2000

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