One of the nicest comments I ever received in the numerous rejection letters that have come my way from publishers and agents and acquisition editors over my writing career is that the sender was sorry not to be accepting my work because my writing had “a lot of heart.” In this heart month of February, Geo and I generally let Valentine’s Day pass with little more than an additional hug, which is never a bad thing. Valentine’s Day could be any day in our house - there’s a big red glass heart in our living room every day of the year.
My glass heart weights two pounds, or if you think in metric, about 900 grams. My human heart likely weighs about a half a pound, or 124 grams. This week I took both my hearts for a trail walk. My human heart was made in Canada. My glass heart was made in Scotland. I received it as a gift from my wonderful Scottish cousins almost twenty years ago. I loved it on sight, just as I loved Scotland on sight when I first visited over five decades ago. Since then I’ve visited Scotland numerous times and hope to go again. I go often in my mind, so it’s not surprising that the family of women who populate my novel She Who Burns have their origins in Scotland.
Without taking the kind rejection-message writer’s words too literally, I sometimes think about what it means for a literary work to have “a lot of heart.” If I’m not specifically writing about hearts, I don’t think about getting that feeling into my words. It’s just there. Perhaps because I’m a sensory writer. I used to say in my workshops that I write with all senses firing. The emotion of the scene is in the details, the ones readers can see and hear and touch and taste. The senses are connected directly to the heart. When I’m walking I often listen to podcasts. One of my favourites is Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. His approach to poetry is magical and his voice is like listening to a beating heart. I would listen to Pádraig read a grocery list.
I have written specifically about hearts once, back in my second book, A Year of Days, published in 2015. It’s a collection of personal essays I wrote in the wake of my mother’s death. On the few occasions that I return to it now, pick it up and leaf through it, I see that the words are still infused with the raw grief I felt back then and feel again in my old words. One chapter is about Valentine’s Day. Below you’ll find excerpts from what I wrote about shopping for Valentine’s Day cards a decade ago. You can tell that romance is the last thing on my mind.
Me in 2015: “When I stand in a greeting-card store in February, I get no sense of the history of Valentine’s Day. No cards show images of St. Valentine, whoever he was. His history is murky. He may or may not have been one of the several saintly men named Valentine who may or may not have lived in Rome in the third century. And one of these men may or may not have been a priest who was executed on February fourteenth. Apparently his crime was that he cured his jailer’s daughter of blindness, and then attempted to convert her father to Christianity. Myths passed down through the centuries tell us that on the night before his execution, the doomed priest sent an endearing note to his jailer’s daughter, perhaps giving him the distinction of composing the very first Valentine’s Day card. But none of this shows on modern-day cards available almost everywhere as soon as all leftover Christmas merchandise disappears from the shelves. Love sells - mythic history not so much.”
Me in 2015: “Why is a Valentine’s Day heart rounded and red? Why is love symbolized by two ear-shaped halves linked together, one facing forwards and one flipped backwards? Some people say that the shape of the symbolic heart comes from the silhouette of two swans facing each other, touching their beaks together. Others claim that it comes from a vague replication of what an actual human heart looks like when removed from the body and plunked down on a cold metal table. Still others argue that it comes from the shape of female genitalia. Whatever its source, the Valentine’s Day heart takes much abuse. It melts, burns, and breaks.”
Me in 2015: “Our physical hearts cannot withstand such abuse. If they melt, burn, or break, we die. Usually our symbolic hearts survive all the melting and the breaking. They may shatter and harden, but we will still breathe and our blood will still flow. If our [real human] hearts undergo the same trauma, we call an ambulance. That is not to say that the symbolic heart and the physical heart are not connected. Emotions felt by our symbolic hearts make our real hearts beat faster or slower, or even skip a beat, thanks to signals from our brains. Such is the complexity of the walking, talking, thinking, feeling corporeal instruments we live in.”
Such writing contortions I underwent back then, working hard to be hardened, to be strong, to hide the battered tattered state my heart was in at the time. Nowadays, my grief is more generally for the state of the world. If anything, my emotions are higher and stronger than ever and virtually impossible to hide. Not that I even try anymore. Because what’s the point of hiding a hurt heart? It just distances you from the ones who can soothe it. So yes, I took my hearts for a long walk along my trail this week and we both felt better for it.
Thanks for reading Me Who Writes. If you enjoyed this issue, please feel free to share with a friend or three. I'll be back in a few weeks.
Such a quirky idea to take both your hearts for a walk on Valentine’s Day. The glass heart is lovely, as, I’m sure, is your own. I’d never thought about the shape of the Valentine heart. Now I’m curious. Thanks for this fun read.
Beautiful as always, friend. And I see some old chestnuts of mine back there behind your lovely new book. ❤️❤️