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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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September 1, 2023: Sari Botton

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Sari Botton was born in 1965 and is Gen-X. I was born in 1957 and am a baby boomer. In her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself… she writes about family dinners and mean girls and apartment therapy and living in NYC, and while the details of her life differ dramatically from mine, the takeaway is the same. She “came of age at the intersection of two conflicting attitudes: ‘should’ and ‘whatever.'” I did too. And she writes that “she was sidetracked away from” herself and only began to discover and own who she really was in her forties. Yeah, me too.

No one had coerced me into the life I was living. Far from it. I chose almost every detail–had desperately longed for, even campaigned for, many of then, including the genius idea of marrying almost criminally young… As I was embarking on adulthood, I somehow couldn’t see beyond the confining parameters of my little world, or find the courage to consider other possibilities beyond it.

So much of what Sari writes resonates with me. Like this section, from the foreward: “I remembered how little I know about the lives of my grandmothers…I remembered how much I relish reading books by women abut their lives. I remembered that my voice matters. I’m using it now, to take up space, to say, ‘I was here.'”

In the introduction to the memoir, Sari writes that she became a writer because she “felt like a weirdo.” And in fact, the subtitle of this, her first book as author, is Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. And a lot of this memoir does read like confessions, but the confessions of someone who is saying it to claim it, in order to put herself back together.

In “Leaving the Land of Make-Believe,” Sari writes about her parents’ divorce in the 70’s. “I felt split in two, one version of me only able to fit in with my friends on Long Island, the other specifically engineered to fit in in Westchester.”

In “Mean Girls,” she recounts falling out with girls in junior high in the 80’s and not having any friends, which led to her being wary of friendships with girls and women, which she’s still trying to get over in her fifties so she doesn’t have to deal with it in assisted living…

In “Confessions of a Closet Vocalist,” she writes about skipping gym class to sneak home and sing. “Connecting the dots between the creative weirdo I was as a kid and who I honestly am as an adult has been my great project of mid-life.”

In addition to this memoir, Sari is the mastermind behind Oldster Magazine, published over on Substack. Its tagline is “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.” If you’re fascinated by aging, as I am, then you’ll love reading Oldster. One of its many features is a questionnaire that Sari created–a fixed set of questions that contributors respond to from the vantage point of different ages. Here are a few of the questions: Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? What has aging given you? Taken away from you? How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how SARI BOTTON spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

xA

July 1, 2022: Kirie Pedersen

Every day, I marvel that I get to live almost without sounds of civilization here adjoining the Olympic National Park, where I was born and still live on the same property. Instead, I sleep to the sound of waves on the cliff (May through October when I sleep in a tent right on the cliff), and eagles, seals, great blue herons, and myriad other birds in the wildlife sanctuary I left/created around my cabin built mostly of repurposed materials.

For those of you who don’t know her from the delightful comments she leaves after reading essays in this series, meet Kirie Pedersen. She’s published essays, non-fiction, and fiction in more than fifty literary and general interest magazines. More than fifty. I became aware of her writing because she read a story of mine back in 2013, came looking for me, found Catching Days, and left a comment. The excerpt above is from a letter she wrote me in 2019, when we were talking about our days.

I’m obsessed with where Kirie lives and where she writes. In a wonderful 2017 interview over at The Magnolia Review, Kirie describes her writing spot.

I work in a 10×12 foot hut I call Eagle Cottage because bald eagles nest nearby, and they cackle as I write. Eagle Cottage was repurposed from a 1924 schoolhouse that was being demolished… [It] is lined with journals, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and books on writing craft. Close beside me are jars of colored pencils and fountain pens.

In that interview, you’ll find more lovely details about her process and her materials, and her Artist Chicken!

Kirie has lived a fascinating life. Earlier this year, I read a piece by her, entitled “Finding Pulali,” which was published in Sunspot Literary Journal. This piece is about where and how she grew up. Before I read it, I didn’t know what Pulali was.

Pulali Point sits pretty much in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula and is itself a small peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Hood Canal, and Jackson Cove. The geological formation itself dates from the Eocene Era and is about forty million years old.

I could spend this entire introduction talking about this one piece that is alive with form. Here’s the beginning.

For a graduate workshop, I entitled this “Essay in Twelve Genres.” Feedback: The word genre is phony, unnecessary, and insufficiently ironic, a pretension by someone fancying herself intellectual. I was, they suggested, using genre to seal myself up and be safe.
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I too was concerned by the word, but it is the idea that disturbs me. When I try to write about Pulali, I grope for a form that captures my birthplace, my home. I attempt essay, dream, play, story. Word made manifest. Word made flesh.

Kirie had a hard time when each of her parents died in a two-year period while she was living across the country, far away from this world, on the opposite coast in Manhattan. In “In a Dark Time,” she wrote about the despair and depression she suffered and how she brought herself back from it. This essay was snapped up by The Magnolia Review, prompting the interview mentioned above. “In a Dark Time” received the Ink Award, for being the piece that unified the entire issue. It also received a Pushcart nomination. The excerpt below shows the mind/body connection in a number of ways.

My previous despair returned full-force, and perhaps due to the depleted immune response grief can cause, a tooth abscessed, and I developed debilitating back pain. I’d tried my list of non-drug cures that final year of my mother’s life, but my practice was desultory. Now, flattened by physical and emotional pain, I became determined to survive.

If you’re looking for a peak into Kirie’s fiction, check out “Liberating Life,” a flash piece from Glossalalia, with an ending that just keeps echoing out… Here’s an excerpt from the middle.

In Buddhism, Paul said, there was a ceremony called Liberating Life. The monks gathered animals scheduled for slaughter, and they freed them. When the Mormons purchased a live turkey for Thanksgiving, the turkey wandered around the yard. Melissa asked Paul if they could purchase the turkey and talk the Mormons into buying one already killed.
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The Mormons agreed, and the turkey moved to the Buddhist side of the fence.

This essay, “Getting a Life–Coming of Age with Killers,” which was published in Under the Sun and which received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays 2018, is a personal look at growing up in the same place in which Ted Bundy was murdering women. It’s also a solid piece of journalism about what was actually happening, as well as the realities of the death penalty. Here’s the first sentence, which starts with the personal.

“Ted got Brenda,” my sister said.

And here’s one more excerpt from the beginning so you can get a sense of how the journalistic voice mixes with the personal.

In my early twenties, every three or four weeks a peer in her late teens or early twenties disappeared. Brenda, a year behind me at Mt. Ranier High School, was number six. The women vanished from streets I’d walked that same day, from beaches where my friends and I sat to tan, from beds just blocks from my own, and from the campuses of the universities my sisters, friends, and I attended.

Kirie’s essay “Saving Paradise,” published in the beautiful Still Point Artists Quarterly in 2017, will be of special interest to those who love places that are disappearing.

The last thing on earth I wanted was to walk to the front of that room, but if I didn’t say something, I would forever lose my chance. “I propose preservation of Meadowdale as a wilderness,” I murmured into the microphone, voice thin and shaking. “A walking-only park where children can learn about the environment.”

Kirie earned an M.A. in fiction writing from Western Washington University, where Annie Dillard (!) was her thesis chair. Kirie also loves the writing of Ellen Gilchrist, another favorite of mine. She’s taught writing for gifted and talented inner-city students, elders, and others. Washington State commissioned and published her Writing Handbook for Teachers and Tutors (published in Spanish and English) and Teaching Creative Writing Using Native American Songs and Myths. Please check out her website–I love how she introduces each new publication with a few words about the piece and about the journal where it’s published. P.S. Click on the little white lines in the upper right to subscribe to her publication updates!

Come back on JULY 1st to read how KIRIE PEDERSEN spends her days.

Since my grandmother took me to Europe for one of those Cartan twenty-one countries in twenty-three days tours back in the sixties, I’ve loved to travel. In recent years, I will often arrive home from a trip, unpack, repack, and leave the next day for somewhere else. I get some of my best writing done in airports and on airplanes. I love the movement, the getting to and from, the new places, the old places again, the roar of the engine right before the plane barrels down the runway and that moment when the front wheels come off the ground.

Many of you know that Cal and I live in Columbus, Georgia, and also that I love Provincetown. I discovered it when I took a class at the Fine Arts Work Center back in 2006. Over the years, each time I went back, I loved it more. But it was the summer of 2012 when I fell for it like crazy. And in 2016, I bought a house here. Since January of 2013, I’ve been in Provincetown every month except for one.

Until this year.

On March 2nd, 2020, the day before I left Provincetown for book tour events in Atlanta and Birmingham, people were just beginning to talk about stocking up in advance of Covid-19. I went to the store too, thinking even if I couldn’t fly, I could drive the nineteen hours. I was thinking going to the grocery store before I left would be the thing that would make it possible for me to come back.

Cal and I have been sheltering in Columbus since March 15th. For us, going to a restaurant on March 12th felt perfectly fine, but when we sat down at a table on March 14th, it did not. And that was that. No grocery stores, no one in the house, no children, no friends, just wiping the groceries left on the front porch, letting mail and packages sit for three days, and having the wine dropped in the back of the car where we’d left the exact change.

When I drove away from the house yesterday morning at 8:45 am, I had not been by myself in a car for over three months. Deciding to come to Provincetown was not a decision I made lightly or by myself. In addition to so many more important things, Covid-19 has also deprived us of our independence. What we do affects others in our pod. Cal is the other in my pod. We talked about driving the nineteen hours, but that would involve not only the driving risks but our creaky bones in sitting positions for hours and hours and at least one hotel, and gas stations and bathrooms galore.

On June 14th, Cal and I ate outside at a restaurant. As Massachusetts reopened, the metrics were continuing to trend down. Delta was capping seating on all flights at sixty percent and leaving middle seats open. The ferry was going to run again. Earlier in June, I wasn’t ready to even consider flying; now I was. But Cal still wasn’t. We worked our way through it, and he said even if he wasn’t ready, knowing how much it meant to me to be in Provincetown, he was okay with my trying it.

When I drove into the Atlanta airport, the parking meter issued a ticket without my having to touch anything except the ticket, which I reasoned had been in the box long enough. Still, I put it up and sanitized. Finding a parking place was not a problem.

I wore long sleeves and a baseball cap. Everything I had with me was zipped away from any flying germs, so I almost forgot to empty the water out of my bottle. I avoided Clear and went to pre-check where I did not have to get within six feet of the checker to be allowed into the line. The six-feet floor markers were unnecessary. Only one person was ahead of me, and she was done by the time I got to the front of the line.

The TSA agent was masked and gloved. He asked for my driver’s license and for me to lower my mask. Then came the tricky part. He tried to give me my driver’s license back. My first thought was there was no way I was taking it back. But of course I did, and then I didn’t know what to do with it so I stepped to the side, hesitated for just a moment wondering what sanitizer would do to a license that had so much information on it the agent didn’t even need my boarding pass, and then poured a pool of sanitizer into my hands and rubbed the license and my hands around in it.

Next obstacle. Again, not people. The gray bins. I was supposed to move them from underneath to the top and put my suitcases inside. I used my shirttail. And when I got to the other side and got my bags back, I sanitized.

At the escalator, there were signs to keep your distance, which people were doing. Waiting for the trains, the same signs. Then I remembered I didn’t have to get on a train, I could walk. In fact, I usually walked for the exercise instead of taking the train.

Going up the escalator at the terminal, I couldn’t remember the number of my gate, and it didn’t show up on my phone. That’s another thing you’ll be doing all day. In addition to using hand sanitizer, you’ll be putting your passcode into your phone what feels like a thousand times because facial recognition won’t recognize your masked self. At the top of the escalator, I found the flight boards, and that was a weird moment. Of the ten boards that list the flights and the gates, only three and a half had anything on them. The rest were empty, just like all the blue seats at the Trump rally in Tucson.

The main area of terminal A was full of people (not normal full but still) and for a few minutes, I felt like I was in a video game trying to make my way to the gate without getting within six feet of anyone. I ducked out of the flow a time or two because I could feel people close behind me. Most wore masks. Maybe ten percent did not. And then another ten percent who had them around their chins.

After successfully driving the hour and a half from Columbus without a bathroom stop, now I needed to find one. My gate was at the far end of the terminal, and I thought a bathroom nearer the gate would be less populated. But it was being cleaned. I turned around to find another, and then I turned back. I had plenty of time. Why not wait for a clean bathroom? After five minutes, it was open, and I was not only the first but the only one in there.

At the gate, it was easy to stand away from people. The agent boarded the plane so that I was never closer than six feet to anyone. I didn’t have to wait on the jetway or at any time during the boarding process. The closest I got to anyone was the flight attendant as I boarded the plane, and I whizzed right by her.

The flight was full at the sixty-percent cap, and that felt safe. I had the window seat next to an exit (more space) and ended up with no one else on my row. There were people behind me and in front of me. With a wipe, I cleaned around me and above me. I didn’t recline. I declined the pre-bagged snack and water. They kept the lights low. No one spoke. I didn’t even read. I just sat there. Try as I might, I couldn’t make it fun. After we landed, I thought I would just wait until everyone got off, but people were keeping their distance and when it was my turn, I went.

In Boston, the water taxi is not yet back in business, so I took a Lyft to the ferry. Very few drivers so that was a fifteen-minute wait. I handled my own bags and was in the car less than ten minutes. I sanitized.

I had a two-hour wait, and I’d only eaten a few nuts driving to the airport. So I headed across the street to a restaurant with a large outdoor area. After giving my name and contact info to the host for tracking, I pulled the menu up on my phone and ordered guacamole and chips. And a margarita on the rocks. Closer to fun, but it still felt risky.

Only one ferry was running to Provincetown, and it was the first day for that. I was on the last run of the day. They are temporarily capping their passenger limit too, but it was unnecessary. There were only about twenty of us. I sat outside on an upper deck. As we were about to dock in Provincetown, the captain reminded us to wear our masks and to set a good example. I think he meant as visitors though, not as people.

When I opened the door to my house at 7:45 pm, I stood there for a minute and took it all in, felt the peace of being in the one place that feels right to me beyond anything I have the words to express, and then I took everything I was wearing off, including my hat, stuffed it in the washer, and got in the shower.

I had walked the last leg, and when I saw my house, it was almost too much. I think I’d been feeling as if I really might never be here again. And it still doesn’t feel quite real. Not only did I not love the traveling, I didn’t even enjoy it. Which, I have to say, surprised me. Out in the world, where I hadn’t been in a while, I was masked and vigilant for eleven straight hours. Most people and entities along the way did what they could to lower risks. And I took the risks in as smart a way as I knew how. That’s the thing. If you’re contemplating getting out there, be as smart as you know how, and you’ll need a little luck too. I hope luck was with me yesterday. There are not many reasons I would do it again, but I will to get back home.

And then to get back here again.

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Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
–David Bowie

This is sixty.

60 is more freedom than I’ve ever had. Really. It’s awesome.

60 is not just feeling the same but feeling better than I have in years.

60 is thinner skin–actually not metaphorically.

60 is loving my new MacBook Pro with touchbar a little too much.

60 is not yet having used age as a reason I can’t do something.

60 is wanting to do just as many things as I wanted to do at 15.

60 is wondering why, still, I’m preoccupied with freedom.

60 is starting to think hashtag before pound.

60 is having lived 21,900 days. Which doesn’t seem like so many. If anyone had asked me I would have guessed a person lived hundreds of thousands of days. But then math is not my strong suit.

60 is my own small house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

60 is wearing peace sign earrings and a nevertheless she resisted bracelet.

60 is having not as many days as I have lived still to live.

60 is googling life expectancy. Did you know the longer you live the more years they give you?

60 is 4 adult children—all off on their own—plus a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and girlfriends. And liking them ALL.

60 is four grandchildren. But we are not your mothers’ grandmothers; we are grandmothers who facetime from airplanes.

60 is, as Cal says, one day older than I was yesterday.

60 is walking in the women’s march.

60 is finally liking yoga.

60 is liking socks.

60 is contributing to the ACLU on a monthly basis.

60 is taking 3 prescriptions–for blood pressure, for eyes, and  for hypothyroidism.

60 is still loving to travel–all the movement and that moment the wheels lift off the ground.

60 is strength training twice a week.

60 is feeling happy.

60 is resisting.

60 is still wanting adventure.

60 is almost never wearing makeup.

60 is finally, finally finding clothes that are comfortable, that look good on me, and that look like me–black leggings, a short little black skirt, a long top, and these kick-ass black ankle boots. That is, when I wear something other than black exercise pants.

60 is more adverbs.

60 is 32 years of marriage and still liking each other. He still makes me laugh. 

60 is being born in 1957, the same year as Caroline Kennedy and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

60 is remembering each of the years and understanding that they add up to 60, that they add up to me.

60 is listening to my body instead of telling my body what to do. It’s resting instead of pushing. It’s eating more vegetables, doing qigong energy movements, and having my body say finally. It’s being amazed as, after a year of trying, the weight just falls off.

60 is listening to Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine, The Killer’s Human, the Branches Darlin’, and Roo Panes’ I Was Here…

60 is preparing to do one last revision on novel #4.

60 is knowing the correct form is to put the names of songs in quotes but liking the way they look in italics better.

60 is adding coconut oil, cinnamon, and turmeric to my coffee.

60 is using the word still a lot.

60 is 6 decades on this planet.

60 is gratitude for each of those days in each of those years.

60 is not yet 70 or 80 or 90. It’s not yet 100.

60 is spending a month in my small house on the water.

60 is being excited about the year ahead and the rest of the journey.

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

THIS IS 60

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this was 58

this was 57

Continued appreciation to Lindsey Mead for the inspiration.

I’ve been wanting to write to you all for some time now–all of February really and somehow it’s already the 20th. I’ve chosen to let other things take priority–my novel mainly. I just finished a stretch of working on it everyday for six days in a row, and I’m hoping to make it seven later today.

What I’m listening to now: Untold by Daniel Gidlund over and over again, and the ocean

What I’m reading at night: Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night

What I was drinking while I was writing this: Chakra #2 An Herbal Tea for Passion and Creativity

What I’m smelling still: Big Dipper Wax Works Clarity Tin Candle

This blog I’m loving: Sarah Bousquet talked herself into one true thing a day for 365 days. I was immediately hooked–what a pleasure to follow along on her journey. Any of you who enjoyed my #1truething project will love Sarah’s too. Here’s her first post, and today’s is #32/365. Please click over to One Blue Sail, bask in its gorgeous watercolor header (a Sarah-and-her-2-yr-old-daughter original), and leave her a word or two.

On my todo list for today: walk, read, write, this post

What I’m having trouble with: I remember it’s 2016, but I can’t seem to understand it’s February. When I write the date, I keep starting with 1.

What I learned how to do a few days ago: make the ‘like’ star show up under each comment

What I’m looking at: oh you know what I’m looking at : )

What I’m thinking about: YOU ALL

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Provincetown is where I started these posts, and by happenstance, that’s where I am at this halfway mark–nice symmetry, right? Life crafting itself.

I had thought when this day came I would write what I’d learned so far, what I hope for the second half, that I would count some things.

Provincetown is where life is being rather than doing, where I’m by myself more often than not, where it feels as if my hands hold time. It’s the ideal place to write these posts–well, it’s the ideal place. My life is generally about doing; why does being here make it about being?

I’m outside as much as inside. All the windows and doors are open. I’m not sealed up in a house or a car. There’s no demarcation–no bridge to cross–to get to the other side. There are no sides.

At the halfway point in this practice, I’m watching the sunset as the seals dance by.

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

So one day–March 26, 1995–I pulled over to the side of the road and began to write. That year, I had two other moments of free time and wrote. The next year, a moment appeared in February and again I pulled out a piece of paper. Six more times in 1996.

Women was what I was writing about. Different women and their days. Character. No plot. And vastly revised, these pieces turned into my first novel.

In 1997, I found time to write in January, and after that, I made time. 

At some point I took a creative writing class at a community center in Auburn, Alabama. Then in the summer of 1999, I applied to the Napa Valley Writers Conference, where my first writing teacher was Elizabeth McCracken.

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

Continued appreciation to Lindsey Mead for the inspiration.

This is fifty-eight.

58 is more freedom still than I had last year at 57, probably because I’m becoming more comfortable with exercising it and the people around me are becoming more comfortable with my exercise of it. These days, each month I still spend a week where I want to live—in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

58 is old—the number that is—but I don’t feel old. I feel just the same.

58 is not old—I’m not yet in my 60’s or 70’s or 80’s or 90’s. I’m not yet 100.

58 is 11 little bundles of sticks with 1 across the middle. It’s 3 sticks already in the next bundle.

58 is having lived 21,184 days. Which doesn’t seem like so many.

58 is having not as many days as I have lived still to live.

~

58 is, as my husband says, one day older than I was yesterday.

58 is wondering why the preoccupation with freedom.

58 is wondering if the resistance to being old (I mean older) will ever give way to something else.

58 is taking a risk on a new haircut!

58 is not yet having used age as a reason I can’t do something.

58 is having had a moment on New Year’s Eve when I didn’t want the ball to drop and doing something about it.

58 is being 90 days into a practice of articulating one truth a day about myself and posting it here—acknowledging all the different strands that swirl together into me.

58 is running when I want to.

58 is driving a black Prius instead of the convertible I always thought I wanted.

58 is 4 adult children—all off on their own—plus a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. And liking them ALL. I was 23 when my first child was born. I was 55 when the last one left for college. You do the math.

58 is being a grandmother to three little ones with another one on the way! BUT we are not your mothers’ grandmothers. We do not stay home in house dresses. We are Joni Mitchell.

58 is doing THIS:

58 is not holding so tightly to one dream.

58 is taking blood pressure medicine, damn it.

58 is being a Platinum Medallion Flyer.

58 is feeling happier.

58 is winter having displaced fall as my favorite season.

58 is wearing a Fitbit and often getting 10,000 steps or more.

58 is 30 years of marriage and still liking each other.

58 is being the same age as the very cool Frances McDormand.

58 is going through the family photos, one by one, and remembering the small moments, the fun it was.

58 is hearing my own voice.

58 is being confident about my writing.

58 is listening to The Head and the Heart, Sam Smith, Lady Antebellum, as well as Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel.

~

58 is 5 decades, almost 6.

58 is gratitude for each of those days in each of those years.

58 is being excited about the year ahead and the rest of the journey…which belongs to me.

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

THIS IS 58

this was 57

During the holidays, at a cocktail party, someone asked me how my novel was coming. Can I buy it yet? Another Christmas, I thought, another year where nothing had changed on the outside. I dreaded annual events and these questions to which I had no good answers. But neither did I want people not to ask me about my writing. It was all impossible. But this past Christmas, at this party, standing there holding a glass of wine, no words came out of my mouth. Nothing. A friend standing next to me jumped in, but I came away from the party wondering what was happening to me.

These days, I go to AWP mainly for the people. My writing friends are spread out all over the country, but at AWP a lot of us are in one place at one time for a few days. Sometimes I do attend a panel–if a friend is one of the panelists, if I want to hear a particular writer speak, or if a really interesting topic happens to coincide with really interesting panelists. That was the case for a Friday panel, Fail Better: Successful Writers Talk About Failure, with, among others, Roxane Gay and Rebecca Makkai.

Here was the panel description: “Rejected stories, unfinished novels, bad reviews, poor sales, unmet expectations–failure is an unavoidable part of the writer’s life, and yet we rarely acknowledge it. In this lively and honest conversation, five writers will share their experiences and reflect on questions of success and failure. How do you define success for yourself when the literary world can feel like a zero-sum game? How does failure, by any measure, affect your work? And what does it mean to fail better?”

At the beginning, two of the panelists, Megan Stielstra and Roxane Gay said that what their bios did not say was that it had taken them twenty years to get where they are. The rest of the panel was as you might expect, and then the panelists took questions. This is where,  if I go to a panel, I usually leave, but the room set-up made it obvious if someone left. So I stayed. A woman in the audience stood and asked, “When you were struggling, what about the questions? When things were not going so well, how did you answer the questions about how your writing was going and where can we buy your book? How can we ask gentler questions?”

At that holiday cocktail party, when nothing came out of my mouth, it seemed I was literally losing my voice. Which contributed to my feeling that I had no idea what I thought or felt anymore. Which led to my January 13th post and this project. But in all the years that I’ve been learning how to write, I’ve been making progress. And as you know, I’m a look-on-the-bright-side kind of person. I focus on the good stuff, not the bad. Positive self-talk and all that. So this panel was the first time I put the word failure with what I had been feeling. But instead of making me feel bad, it was like one of Oprah’s Aha moments.

Dean Bakopoulos, a panelist, said he no longer associated failure with writing, only with how he lived–whether or not he was kind. Someone else suggested separating writing from publishing. As in well, the writing part of writing is going great, but the publishing part of writing is out of my control. Another panelist said the fact of the matter is writing is HARD, but the only way you can fail at writing is to quit. These five writers were proof; they were now Successful Writers Talking About Failure.

It wasn’t the cocktail-party questions that were the problem. And although knowing I wasn’t the only one fighting this beast was nice, the panelists’ answers were not the solution. As soon as I knew the beast I was fighting, I knew how to beat him. My writing is the best it’s ever been. I’m just about finished with a novel I feel confident about in every respect. And what’s more, in the last couple of months, and even more so in the last few days, my writing is closer and closer to that mysterious thing I’ve been working toward all these years–being able to express on paper what I’m seeing in my head, from tiny moments to entire lives.

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

A friend and I used to hike the Pine Mountain Trail every year–all twenty-three miles in one day. It was tricky. We had to start at sun-up to have enough hours to complete the trail during daylight. One year, there had been a hurricane, and a lot of trees were down. There was too much space between blazes. Over and over again we got lost, and it was dark before we finished.

I believe that the reader is smart and that the reader likes to think, likes to participate. So I try not to write every little thing. I want to give the reader enough space to find her own path but not so much space that she loses the trail and gets frustrated.

Sometimes, in an effort not to overwrite a piece (a weakness of mine), I go too far and don’t give the reader enough blue blazes. I believe that happened yesterday. So a few minutes ago I added a bit more to that post.

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice