On the tidal flats, July 2019

The reason I went to Provincetown for the first time, in the summer of 2006, was to take a class from Pam Houston. I owe her for the rest of my life for that alone. Over that winter she read the novel I was working on, my first novel. In 2007, I went back to take her class again. That summer, she introduced me to the breakwater, which I had somehow missed during my first summer. As we walked on the giant boulders, I began shedding things. Later that same year, I joined the writing group she led, and over the years, we’ve become the best of friends.

Here’s how she fictionalized that real time on the breakwater in Contents May Have Shifted.

Last year, on that same long walk across the breakwater, Willow left behind first her sweatshirt, then her shoes and eventually even her giant purse, which contained six hundred dollars cash and her brand-new Vaio computer, which is the exact effect P-town is designed to have on anybody who is willing to let it.

But really, the story starts years before that, back when I was a reader without the first thought of writing.

The kids were little, and in those days, after they went to sleep, I stayed upstairs and read in bed.  Early in January of 1992, late one night, when Cal arrived home from a business trip, he came into the bedroom holding a scrap of paper. “You have to get this book,” he said, handing me the paper. “I heard her on NPR.”

On the paper, of course, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston.

I adore Pam’s sentences. Look at these two from Contents May Have Shifted:

Henry is the only man I’ve ever known in my life that I knew how to love well, and as luck would have it, we were never lovers (6).

See how she repeats love in the noun form of lovers. And notice the rhythm of the sentence. Now, take a look at this one.

We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one (8).

Notice the multiple could-have-been-single sentences contained in one sentence and how the compression creates such a lovely rhythm.

Some of you know that Tidal Flats is actually the fourth novel I’ve written–all of them about marriage. Here’s what Pam has to say about that, from her essay collection, A Little More About Me.

There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not.

Currently, Pam is on tour for her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, which was published in January.

Here are some of the lines from Deep Creek that I love most.

It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.

This passage means so much to me because I had a moment like this–when I finally lifted my head as my last child left for college. Here’s another one.

You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns. It’s the only place I always miss, no matter how fabulous my temporary circumstance. When the road turns to gravel and bends with the river into Antelope Park, every single part of me takes a deep breath.

All I need to do is substitute Provincetown for the ranch, the ocean for the river, and the Pilgrim Monument for Antelope Park…

Here’s one more. Pay attention to the symmetry and the juxtapositions and the rhythm.

Sometime in the last twenty-five years, the ranch changed from being the thing I always had to figure out how to pay for, to the place I have spent my life.

Her sentences, I’m telling you. And I’m still on the first essay. Actually, I’m only on page 10. I won’t spoil the end of this essay, but I will tell you I underlined the last two paragraphs.

I don’t know where in the world I’d be without Pam. She has shaped me as a writer and as a human being. Her writing and wisdom have set the bar high, high, high. I’m grateful for her and her writing and for her support of mine.

Rebecca in 2013

Rebecca Makkai has many claims to fame. First of all, her sense of humor. Outstanding. Second, she’s had 4 short stories anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. FOUR. In  2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Third, The Great Believers. If you haven’t read it, put it at the top of your list. It was my favorite book of 2018. For months after I finished it, I missed Yale and Fiona. Here’s one of the reasons I love Fiona:

“That a French cafe would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.”

And there’s this. The Great Believers was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a Finalist for the National Book Award, the Winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Winner of the LA Times Book Prize, the Winner of the Stonewall Award, and a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2018.

I met Rebecca at Ragdale back in 2012, and I always enjoy running into her at AWP. This fall she will be teaching at the Writing by Writers Tomales Bay workshop. As of last night, there were still a couple of spots left in her class!

For more about Rebecca: the next writer in the series: november 1, 2013.

For more from Rebecca: How We Spend Our Days: Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca is a bright light in the world, and I’m happy to know her. I’m grateful for her words and for her support of mine.

In Tidal Flats, Cass’s father loved his leather-bound edition of Rumi’s poems, Rumi who was born in Afghanistan. Instead of bedtime stories, he read to Cass from Rumi. And Cass would lie in her closet underneath her dresses and think about elephants tearing the darkness to shreds. The Essential Rumi has been on my shelf since I met Coleman Barks back in 2005, but I read it cover to cover, more than once, as I was working on this novel.

Cass works at Howell House, the home to three unusual women referred to as the Fates. One of them, May, loves The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Cass reads to her from this book that I did not like when I read it in high school. But I fell in love with it when I read it years later after moving to Columbus, recognizing the red brick buildings of both our worlds.

Although Cass had a lonely childhood, early on it was full of a pleasant darkness that gave way to imagination. As an adult, her best friend, Vee, gives her The Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton in an attempt to help her become comfortable with being alone during Ethan’s long absences.

There’s something about Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. It has inspired me with other books I’ve written too. Here, in Tidal Flats, it has a small part near the end of the novel when a stranger mentions it to Cass.

I’m grateful to every book I’ve ever read. And at this moment in time, to these in particular.

August 2012

I love seeing the world through Paul’s eyes.

How emotions are not simple but can be opposing, like these in The Burning House that add depth and complexity to the descriptions.

Joan lay on the couch with an arm thrown over her face, a posture both carefree and desperate at once. (114)

If time could be sweetness, this was it. Sunday night, the sweetest night of the week. And lonesome too, slightly blue. All that work about to begin again, grinding and dull, on the other side of sleep. (49)

Here are some of my favorite passages from The Narrow Door, where I’ve underlined something on almost every page:

[S]pilling is our most inevitable condition. How much work goes into reining ourselves in at every moment when all we want to do is spill, spill? (110)

How many tasks does one not get done in a single day? That’s how most of us live our lives, but that’s not our problem right now. Denise’s family and I are holding ourselves still in the room of light. (200)

To think you can love someone so well that he’d forget the dead, forget his pain. To think of love as a laser beam of attention. (203)

Paul’s blog is cool. If you don’t know it, take a minute. Pick a card–any card. This morning I turned over the card “Present” from January 1st.

At a certain point this week I was running my thumb over photos on my phone. Terrible year, I’d been thinking, terrible. Terrible! And yet there were vivid trees, lightstruck shots of the sea, and faces (friends, strangers, me) that looked, well, awake, present–and dare I say, happy?  Happy in our dailiness. So this is why we make representations. This is why we put a frame around things. How else could we see otherwise?

See what I mean?

His new memoir, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, will be out in March. From Graywolf,

To read how Paul spent one of his days in July 2012: How We Spend Our Days: Paul Lisicky

I love seeing the world through Paul’s eyes. I’m especially grateful for how he sees Tidal Flats.

Robin Black, May 2010

I loved Robin Black’s story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, but I fell hard for her debut novel, Life Drawing.

Really, how could I not adore the story of a marriage between a painter and a writer written with lots of interiority and lots of honesty. The characters are as flawed as we are, and there are no easy answers anywhere.

The opening paragraph paints a picture that stuck with me not only the length of the book, but is still with me even now, years after I finished the novel.

In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I would wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home.

You’ll find more about Robin’s wonderful story collection here: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. And more here about Life Drawing. To read how Robin spent one of her days back in 2010, click here: How We Spend Our Days: Robin Black.

Because we both wrote first novels about a marriage and because I adored hers, I’m especially proud that she loved mine. I’m grateful for Robin’s stories–long and short–and for her support of mine.

I would print out whatever novel was ready to go and carefully lay it in the manuscript box with a letter on top, then drive to the FedEx office, where this tall guy with red hair and glasses would notice if I was sending to New York and would say he would take extra care of this package. I always said I would let him know when the good news came. Maybe I need to drive over and see if by some chance he’s still there. I hate I can’t remember his name.

Then there’s Dale, the FedEx guy who brought the returned manuscripts back to my door. So many returned that I got to know Dale’s twin granddaughters, Layla and Dakota. “Next time, I’m sure of it,” he would say. I was so close so many times. Agents would request partials and then fulls, and then the manuscript would come back with such a lovely, encouraging handwritten note. And back to work I would go.

Now Dale has a different route, one easier on his knees. I need to call Dale and let him know too.

These short conversations were the connective tissue to the world of publishing, real people I knew holding my words and letting me know the work I was doing was not just in my head and that it was valued and that they were rooting for me.

Many thanks, guys.

Joshua Mohr is a wonderful writer and a wonderful human being. His smile will make all your troubles fall away. The dedication to his memoir Sirens, my favorite book of his, reads as follows:

For those of us who want to do better.

Josh had three strokes before he turned 40. And then they found a hole in his heart. Sirens is about this and his addiction and recovery and relapse and recovery. It was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2017. The following is from an interview with the LA Times:

I’m thirty-nine now, writing this as a father, someone sober six years, writing this wondering if a look backward can make sense of who I am, what I am.

I think that’s why I loved Sirens so much. With all my projects I’m trying to make sense of who I am, often looking backwards.

But another really cool thing about Sirens is its musical structure of three notes–the addition stories, the person fearing for his life, and the person looking back trying to make sense of it all. The juxtaposition of these three notes creates something bigger than you can imagine.

You’ll find more about Josh in my introduction of him last May. And more from Josh in his essay on how he spends his days.

I’m grateful for presence in the world and his wonderful writing, and his support of mine.

When I started writing in January of 1997, I had no idea what I was doing. It would be a number of stories and three novels later before I started writing Tidal Flats in January of 2013. So there’s the story of all the people who helped make Tidal Flats a real book, but that’s only part of the story of how I kept myself going all these years as a writer without the most accepted, and most hoped for, form of validation–publishing a book.

A big part of the answer is YOU. All of you who read a post and left a comment or emailed. You have kept writing novel after novel without publication from feeling as if I were writing in a void. Particularly when I hit that low point back in December of 2014 and began the one true thing a day, so many of you came out to support me. I’m happy to be able to officially thank you in the Acknowledgments section of Tidal Flats.

While we are working away on something that may take years and years before it appears in the world, the single most important ingredient to keep going is to feel as if we are being seen and heard. And the way to do this is through community.

It might be a writing group, an MFA program, a group on Facebook, a writing conference that you return to over and over, a writing program where you volunteer, a residency where you work during the day but have dinner together at night.

I am so solitary and private and need so much time to myself, and yet, looking back, this is how I kept myself going–other people.

Without understanding that was what I needed, I sought communities and found them. And I have been so lucky. In 2007, I joined a writing group. Since 2008, we have had a community here at Catching Days. In 2010 I joined the community at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2012 I became a part of the community at Ragdale. And starting in 2013, I became a part of Writing by Writers.

Many thanks to all of you for being out there and responding to my writing, for bolstering my confidence as a writer, and for making me feel part of a community.

Cheers.

First sentence of the Prologue: “The summer just past had marked a full year since Beth had learned what happened to her son Ben.”

On June 1, 1996, when The Deep End of the Ocean was published, my kids were 2, 7, 9, and 15. I had not practiced law in 7 years–they were a full-time job. Reading was my lifeline.

But the all-consuming part of mothering appeared to be coming to an end. During 1995, I had 3 free moments. 1996 brought me 7 more. I know the exact number because the moments were so astonishing that I wrote them down. I still have the tiny slip of paper.

During each of those 10 moments, I picked up a pen and a piece of paper or I sat at our first computer and tried to write. Writing was not a need or even a desire, but if I had a free moment, I dipped in.

But in January of 1997, when I started writing, I couldn’t stop. I began to make time for it. And it was in April of the same year that I finally read The Deep End of the Ocean. It was Jacquelyn Mitchard’s debut novel. She had five children and had written this book that I could not put down, that took me to another place, that I have kept on my shelf for all these years.

In the novel, Beth and Pat have 3 children–a baby, 3-year-old Ben and 7-year-old Vincent. Chapter 1 begins with a moment between a husband and a wife that feels true.

“I only like the baby,” Beth told her husband, as they stacked plastic bags and diaper bags, and duffel bags and camera bags, and Beth’s big old Bacfold reflector–all in a pile in the hall.

She was surprised when Pat looked at her with disgust; she knew he didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to make trouble on the verge of clearing the whole tribe out for a weekend.

It was my love of books like The Deep End of the Ocean that made me want to write in the first place. During my 2012 residency at Ragdale, I had the pleasure of meeting Jacquelyn Mitchard. Earlier this year, she generously agreed to read my first novel and send a quote. Huge thanks to Jacquelyn Mitchard for her writing and for her support of mine.