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.

I know, I know. I should have told you sooner– and I have posted about it on all the social media things. But life is ever busy, and I’m not terribly good at all the social media things, as my publisher will tell you, and as I have mentioned here before….

Still, I love birthdays. At our house, we celebrate birthdays for the better part of a week, and sometimes people manage to squeeze very nearly a month out of it. Which is completely worthwhile. There’s not a soul living in my house that doesn’t deserve a full month of celebration.

Nonetheless, Maddie’s $0.99 deal only lasts for a week, and that week ends today. So here’s a thought: close that deal for yourself or a friend today, and spend the rest of Maddie’s birthday month reading her.

Reading. It’s a different way to party, and a great one!

The post Birthday! A Different Way to Party appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Every student in this country has started back to school by now. The other day, a boy in my daughter’s math class announced that, two full weeks in, they had completed exactly 5.5% of the school year.

This was not excellent news to Emma. She wasn’t sure that 5.5% was worth registering.

Nearly three weeks ago now, I visited her school with her at student orientation. With five minutes to pass between classes–threading our way in and out of buildings, up and down stairs–we sat in each of her classrooms for ten. Her teachers met us at their doors, encouraged us to take copies of the neatly stacked hand-outs. And in what must have felt to them like a hot second, they explained the scope and sequence of their courses, their methods of teaching and evaluation, and briefly listed (if we would be so kind) those extras we could provide that might be handy over the course of the upcoming year: whiteboard markers, boxes of tissues, hand sanitizer.

None of them knew that I have been a teacher, but like every parent in that room, I’m sure, I was interested in how my child would do in that class. I wondered if the methods employed would work for her unique mind, her way of perceiving the world. And, as a teacher, I had that other perspective: knowing what it feels like to greet student and parent alike for the first time. Knowing that I would be navigating relationships with both, listening carefully to both. Seeking to know each student insofar as he would allow it, as was appropriate. Seeking to like each one. Knowing that my standards were high and earnestly believing that my students could and would get there, that it was my job to give them everything they needed to reach those goals.

Emma’s 5.5% has been well worth her time already. I hear it in the way she talks about her classes: the experiments, the discussions. On the way to school this morning, she was telling me about parent functions in math; last night before bed she was discussing Malcolm Gladwell and rhetorical analysis. She likes each of her classes; she likes her teachers very much.

***

Once, years ago, I saw a comment about teachers on Facebook that saddened me. It was made by a mother of grown children, each of whom had been educated through college and perhaps beyond. She was complaining about teachers asking for pay raises. Why did they need to ask for more, she wondered aloud on social media. They only work nine months a year. They get the entire summer off.

I didn’t reply, but if I had, I might have said something about the work a teacher does around the edges of her day, those hours when she’s not required to be in her classroom. I spent hours and hours at planning and grading when I was a teacher. After an eight-hour day at school, I easily and often put in two to four additional hours of work at home, especially in my earliest years of teaching.

Listening to my daughter’s teachers talk about the upcoming school year, I had a difficult time assessing the value of their expertise. This one has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a Master’s in teaching. She will conduct her students in performing experiments that will help them draw conclusions about acids and bases, and she will–at the same time–ensure that none of them blows himself up, or his neighbor, or school property.

When you are a teacher– I wanted to say to this Facebook remark– you don’t work with your colleagues. You almost never see them. You work instead with people who are vastly younger than yourself in age and experience, vulnerable people, people who are not in charge of their own lives and so sometimes (often?) are victims of poverty or anger, who are trying to understand the world while you are trying to teach them the beauties of a sonnet.

Please put a price tag on that and then pay the teacher accordingly. Or give her the summer off. Or both.

***

Every year I was teaching, my husband would compose a list of “class rules” and write it on a white board in my classroom. This is fall, 2007. Sorry for the flash. Again, 2007.

Of course I realize, too, that some people are terrible teachers, that they entered their profession in error or that, over the course of years, they have become calloused or embittered to the point that it might be best for them to stop teaching altogether. But that doesn’t happen because teaching is easy. That’s never why.

***

A teacher is a person with two loves: her subject and her students. They vie for dominance within her, and she is at her best when their marriage erupts in the classroom: when her delight in a sonnet equals her delight in her students discovering the same.

This doesn’t happen every day. It can’t.

And the most difficult part of a teacher’s job is when he is altogether unable to enjoy the thing he loves in deference to loving his students. They present with needs, difficulties, challenges, issues (or essays) that he must give his full attention while his love of sonnets molders behind the classroom door.

And that is part of the job.

***

My very favorite teacher helped me learn to write. I can’t say he taught me: like the best teachers, he understood that the best learning was a process of discovery. But he provided the insights and the examples, and he made me write. And then he only gave me praise when I wrote well.

He was an excellent teacher, and in what I consider to be among the best of the essay-ish things I have ever written, I recounted his excellence and my blundering foolishness in the face of it, and my regret.

He was a teacher, but he was also a writer– and it was his love of good writing that equipped him to teach me. No doubt it was also his hours spent evaluating my writing and that of others that prevented his getting more writing done. I wish I could thank him for that.

But there is this: he has released a book. Or rather, a book of his writing has been released (ugh, passive voice–he would have hated that), compiled and edited in the years since his death by his colleague and another of my favorite teachers, Dr. Gloria Stansberry.

Fragments is a collection of Bill Donnelly’s short stories–some fiction, some not–that showcase his love of language. He taught me to love the dictionary, and this book demonstrates that he loved it too–for all the wonder and surprise a rightly chosen word can deliver.

He was a brave writer, unafraid to experiment with writing–and this is what he encouraged us to do, so many years ago now, in his Advanced Writing class.

I think he knew what I have learned: that writing is always a risk; that you never show up to the task alone, despite how solitary you are; and that perseverance just might produce quality. So it’s always best to try.

He said, “Fragments are not the enemy. I like fragmentary sentences, vivid imagery, humor, weird repetition and variation, sound effects, contentious dialogue, electrifying facts, surprise.”

I did not know him well, but I can vouch that the above is true. It describes not just the way he wrote; it was the way he taught.

The book is titled Fragments because, I think, of his avowed love for them. But the book is fragmentary too: pieces of a life.

And that’s the thing I like best about the book: I can hear his voice as I read. No matter which story, it is Bill Donnelly’s voice reading it aloud. He is perched on a desk at the front of the room, his long legs bent in front of him. He is sucking his cheeks, he is pausing, he is enunciating the words exactly so. And I am riveted, listening, hearing not just the words but their sounds, not just their sounds but their rhythms–and finding my own voice because he shared his so generously. I am sitting there listening, and I am learning how to write.

I received my copy of the book a few months ago, but I’m writing about it today to celebrate. The book itself is a few months old, and today my novel celebrates one year since its release. I guess one could call it my book’s birthday.

So this is another gesture of gratitude to Dr. Donnelly, who above all others, helped me find my voice as a writer– or who, at the very least, most emboldened me to try. It is the page, after all, that teaches us to write. But Dr. Donnelly provided me immeasurable help.

Once more, Dr. Donnelly: thank you.

William Francis Donnelly, III    1935-2015

Fragments is available here. 

The post Of Teachers and Why We Love Them, My Favorite One, and Two Birthdays 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.

That might be what a writer wants.

But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find herself repulsed by the blank screen, even terrified. Given the space and time, she fails to write and instead examines her hair for split ends, the interwebs for distraction, or, with blindly searching fingers, the table’s undersides for abandoned gum.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

No, the writer wants silence and space not for their yawning emptiness but for what might possibly, conceivably come of them–if silence and space result in something.

It’s the Something that the writer wants: that perfect word, that shining sentence. The paragraph that miraculously hits the mark.  And then scores more paragraphs, coming with ease or terrible labor, that somehow bring to light that thing that was in her head–the thing that was the reason she looked for silence and space in the first place.

But then, what of it?

Once–more than once–satisfied with a string of paragraphs, I sent them off to a dear friend. Here, I was saying. You know the story, or you know it well enough because I’ve told it to you. Read this, I was saying. This, I was saying, is good.

And she responded, in good faith, with something sensible along these lines: I see what you’re saying and I think it’s good, but I don’t really know how it fits, you know, within the structure of the whole, so I can’t really tell, in a way, how good it is.

It was true– and it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t be expected to appreciate it. She couldn’t even understand it, really, perched isolated like that in the body of an email.

A writer doesn’t really want to write email, I think. Not really. This writer doesn’t, anyway.

So what, in the end, does a writer want?

I’ll tell you.

A writer wants what I had on Friday evening, sitting comfortably in a living room I had never seen before in a town I’d never visited. I was sitting with readers, all members of a book club, and their names and faces were brand new to me–but their love of books was not.

I can tell you that a writer wants readers like those souls sitting there, who had read my book and were considering it, who had opinions and ideas of things in the book that they liked or didn’t, were sold on or maybe were not sold on at all.

A writer wants readers like Melanie, who suddenly spoke up about some paragraphs of the book she especially liked. She said she read them and she read them again. She folded down the corner and marked them, and then she read them aloud to her husband. She told us all why she loved this part, how this part especially rang true for her. How she knows that sometimes faith and life are like this: not things you can plot out so specifically, but that somehow occur, are born, come to light nonetheless.

Melanie said she especially liked that part–and I said I liked it too. I said I loved it, in fact. That, in fact, it was one of my favorites, and I remembered silently that I sent that very part to a friend once who, through no fault of her own, couldn’t possibly appreciate it at the time.

A writer wants moments like this–when the sitting in silence and isolation result in paragraphs that result in a book that connects one like this with Melanie. I didn’t know her until Friday, but I will always know her now and will know, on the chance occasion I re-read that more-favorite-than-some-to-me passages in the book, that Melanie loves it too.

Thank you, Melanie, for loving that part of my book.

Every writer, I think, wants a Melanie.

Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was–the day or the month–when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.                                                                                                     Healing Maddie Brees, p. 50

The post What Every Writer Wants 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.)

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It’s difficult to say that this is a wonderful play, or even, perhaps, a good one. You don’t witness a drama about false accusations, terrible lies, and gross injustice and feel good about it afterward.

Cast of The Crucible, photo by Jon Gardiner

Which isn’t to say that the play doesn’t resolve. It certainly resolves–but perhaps not in the way you might wish it would. It doesn’t resolve with the wicked getting their just desserts. And whether or not you believe in wickedness, it’s a thought that occurs to you when you’re watching this drama unfold. Miller understood the human condition: that gnawing need we have to find reasons for things, the desire for security and esteem, the terrible but nearly irresistible tendency to look for fault in those we envy or, with undue cause, hate.

It is an excellent play, creating and sustaining tension wrought by characters acutely themselves: as in real life, they play their part the only way they can, hemmed in by belief and experience and desire. The maddening part comes when no one will listen to sense, when the light of reason and bald fact glance away instead of making impact. Along with the rest of the audience, we sat pinned to our seats, impotently armed with the truth, and watched a small society devolve into chaos.

actress Allison Altman, photo by Jon Gardiner 

***

When I entered high school, I found myself in the honors English program. I didn’t really know what that meant, but it was soon enough defined for me by lots of writing and reading text after sorry text. To a title, they were depressing: books and plays and short stories about nuclear disaster, dystopia, heroes failing miserably just before they hit their mark. I made bold to ask my 10th grade teacher why, exactly, this was inflicted on us. Why all the unhappiness, I wanted to know.

Her answer was a wise one about tragedy showing us the dignity of humankind, of life. Most comedies, she pointed out, ultimately ridiculed the human condition. But a tragedy asks us to look our failings in the face, to reckon with them, to provoke questions about ourselves, our societies, even our world.

We read both Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Death of a Salesman in 11th grade. Excellent, worthy texts.

***

One month and a few weeks since my book’s release, I’m finding myself in an interesting place. More people than I can count have asked the same question: why couldn’t the story have ended like this?  They propose the same small turn of the plot, and it’s an exceedingly comforting one–one that, in all the time I wrestled the story into place, I never for a moment considered. The story goes the way it goes. It could never go a different way. Were it to have gone the way they propose, then Maddie would be a different person.

Which is true–with certain decisions, certain moments–for all of us.

***

Actors Ariel Shafir, Sarita Ocon, photo by Jon Gardiner

Miller’s John Proctor has a decision to make at the end of The Crucible. His entire life is staked on it. And in making the choice Proctor does, Miller turns the play out to his audience: he asks a question of all of us.

The questions that tragedy asks are the unhappy ones. On a good day, they make us shift in our seats; on a bad one–with the most excellent of stories, perhaps–they set us thinking hard. They release us to a cold October night with churning minds. They humble us. They set us back on our heels, in our place as people with finite time and limited agency, who had best make the most of both.

***

A recent reader of my novel asked the same question so many have asked: “Why couldn’t….?” She already understood the answer and as good as gave it with the question. But she also expressed what I was feeling in the 9th grade, in 10th: the discomfort of our frailty as humans, as finite lives. She wanted the happiest possible outcome.

Don’t we all?

She wrote, “I would have let Beth March live, too. And Bambi’s mom.”

I also would have liked that.

The job is to ask questions–and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

-Arthur Miller

The post The Absence of Precise Answers appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I carried more water-weight than Lake Erie at the end of my first pregnancy, and I remember wielding that considerable girth down a sidewalk in mid August, and I recall that a well-meaning passer-by asked, “When are you due?”

I said–only honest, “Today.” The beautiful boy didn’t make his appearance for another week. Which was fine. It has worked out fine.

A due date is an educated guess, a shot in the dark, a single box selected from the calendar grid. Meanwhile, labors and deliveries most often hang on the mystery of hormones… or something. I’ve heard it said that not even doctors fully understand what exactly triggers it.

Make plans.

Tomorrow is a due date for me, too, albeit a more certain one. It was selected by my publisher last (2015) July, right after I signed my contract. It was chosen for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time, but my editor said it would allow time for editing and also for about six months of marketing.

And it gave me Time–something I didn’t realize at all that I would be needing.

At the time, last July, signing the contract to publish the novel I had been working on since time out of mind, I was eager to get it Out There. I thought all it needed would be a glance or two by a generous eye. I had already crafted and re-crafted it, and I’m an edit-as-I-go kind of writer: I can’t let an error wait for later, and I test the rhythm of my sentences even as I’m churning them out. I return compulsively to paragraphs to correct redundancies. I write with dictionary and thesaurus in hand, so to speak.

Surely this book wouldn’t need more than a year before it was Out There.

But it wasn’t long, working with my editor, before I realized that this book of mine Needed Help. It wasn’t just a good idea–it was Absolutely Necessary that the story be kept in the quiet shelter of some shared files for a while. We decided that the edits needed to be finished in January, and suddenly the time that had seemed too long couldn’t be long enough. I sat for hours with laptop and drafts, trying to work through and smooth out and figure out the presenting problems of this book. In all the time I spent writing this novel, the last hours of editing were decidedly the hardest.

And then they were done.

After which the waiting really began, because covers had to be designed and promotions had to be sought, and I sincerely thanked my publishers more times than I could count for all the expertise they had on all of these things that I couldn’t possibly begin to guess at.

And then there was the book.

But even then it wasn’t time to get it Out There, because the real promotion had only just begun. So there were trips to Chicago and Orlando, and all kinds of meeting people who might possibly (we hoped) decide to give Maddie a read. And every time, with every conversation, with every title page insribed, I thought about that book carried away from me in the hands of a stranger, and I knew without saying so that just a little piece of me had walked away with it.

Maybe that’s when it began to feel–back there in the months of May and June–that it was actually a very good thing that the book wouldn’t be Out There for a while, that I would be more than happy to wait until September–until mid-September, actually–for people to start reading this book in earnest.

There have been some Incredibly Helpful moments along the way. At the end of June, Kirkus Reviews amazed us all with a glorious (and glowing) review. There has been nothing like that moment–in all of this process–sitting high above Orlando in my hotel room and reading those words: “Most powerfully, Stevenson links the spiritual to the physical…letting love for the mortal body open space for love of the divine.”

And there was the conversation, just over a week ago now, with a literature-professor friend who asked the very questions I had hoped the book would provoke and then some. We talked for an hour but it felt like minutes, because the ideas and methods and elements he explored in the novel were the things that had fascinated and held me, that had compelled me to lose sleep and sit silent for hours, to give up–senselessly, it sometimes seemed–an otherwise vibrant life to fill page after empty page.

And then there was Amazon, enormous warehouse and distributor that it is, who decided (because what else is one to do with books-in-stock?) to ship Maddie–without warning more than a month before she was set to go.

Suddenly there I was, due date circled in red, a bull’s-eye in mid-September, delivering this baby about six weeks premature.

Except that I wasn’t delivering it. Amazon was. “It’s as if,” I said to my husband, “I went to the hospital for labor and delivery, only to be told that my baby was already down the hall.”

So much for due dates.

That was a tricky week. So many people happy to get their book in a surprise and early delivery, and I felt like I had lost something–my footing, perhaps, the proverbial rug pulled out from under and I’m sprawled somewhere down the hall. It wasn’t a huge deal; it was decidedly a first-world problem, but there was something about the unanticipated exposure that I wasn’t at all prepared for.

I think that anyone who makes art might understand what I mean. If you make art, then it’s likely you’re passionate about it. It’s probable you believe in it with all–or nearly all–that you are. It’s an expensive thing, in its way, to make art. It costs. My editor said it about this book, and in truth, her words help me to understand how I feel about it: “It’s one of the most beautiful, brave books I’ve ever read,” she says.

Well, I hope it’s beautiful, and I do think it might be. But I’m pretty sure it’s brave–because it terrifies me.

When it comes to making art, there’s a white-knuckled, deep-breath sort of moment before the curtain rises, before the doors open, or before the book is chosen from the shelf.

And I missed it. Like all three of my human babies, this baby didn’t come on her due date.

Which is fine. It has worked out fine.

Because a glorious gift of this early release–a gift bestowed unwittingly by Amazon–has been the joy of the early readers. I’m sure I haven’t heard from everyone who has read it, but time and again I am learning that that people love her, that they “get” her, that this is a book that will stay with them.

I am delighted.

What more does a parent, an artist, a writer want than to know than that her child will thrive in the world? Will be, moreover, a blessing to others? What more, indeed? Never mind the timing of her birth.

It makes one want to celebrate. Which I will do. On September 13th. On Maddie‘s (second) Birth Day.

The post Birth Day 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.

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