Dear friends,
I have such wonderful readers. I send my deep gratitude to all who sent messages of concern and good wishes after I shared my woes of getting sick while travelling abroad in my last two newsletters. Your thoughts helped me recover and find my footing again. Thank you so much for reading my work and responding to it. It means a lot.
After eight weeks in Spain, Geo and I are finally home. We’ve been home for ten days now. It feels heavenly. Have I told you how wonderful home is? Have I mentioned how positively healing it has been to sleep in our own bed and cook our own food? Within three days of arriving back from Spain, I started to feel so much better. The above photo is of a bridge on a trail near my house. It’s about a thirty minute walk from my front door to that bridge. I listen to the crows banter as I walk. I watch the sky for bald eagles and hawks. It’s a joy to be back walking on these trails after our travel adventures.
My body is returning to normal, but I’m still waiting for the writing urges to kick in. I feel unusually flat inside, kind of wrung out. The voices in my head are usually quite active and noisy, but at the moment they are very subdued. I suppose they will come back on their own, but I’m feeling the need to coax my writing muscles by reminding them how they work. So that’s what I’m doing in this newsletter: reminding my writing self how to write.
Even though I’ve been writing most of my life, I never really know where a new piece comes from or why. Something—a word, an image, a voice—sticks in my head, reverberates and echoes, won’t leave me alone. An inner pressure builds and I’m sure I’d eventually explode if I didn’t write it down somewhere. And as soon as I’ve done that, something new has started.
Where a new piece of writing begins gives no clue as to where it will go. I might start by stringing words together about something I read or a song I like or a painting that moved me or trees I want to embrace or the rudeness of ageism or the absolute idiocy of war or the freedom of birds or the fascinating terror of wind. Big winds make me anxious, but I love watching birds fly in gales, using the gusts and updrafts to dive and soar. That might lead me to the majesty of mountains, which takes me to driving on scary ice-slicked highways. If I stay in my chair long enough, the distractions filter away and what I really need to write about begins to emerge.
If required to define what I have written about in my previous books, I’d say yesterday, today, and tomorrow. How the past is always with us, how our past affects the present, how we need to understand our personal and communal pasts so we can make better choices about where to go next. After I started publishing my work, I also realized that my writing has always included, intentional and otherwise, observations about mothering. Once I was aware of that, I tried writing about anything else. I’d pick a story line about a garbage collector or a car accident about to happen or a dive boat returning to dock at the end of a day. The topic I chose made no difference. I could be writing about racoons and the next thing I know they’re building a nest in a hollow tree trunk and then their babies are howling and somehow it has turned out to be about mothering. As much as I try to avoid the subject, mothering somehow manages to sneak in. It comes in many guises: under-mothering, over-mothering, absent mothering, the work of mothering, the joys of mothering.
I’ve searched through my old papers, looking for what I might have written about before I became a mother, but I can’t find anything. Those old boxes have largely disappeared during our many moves, so that pre-mother part of me has disintegrated. Mothering is like chicken pox - once you’ve had it, you have it in you forever: it lurks inside you, threatens to break out as shingles. Anyway, my early writings are as lost as my pre-chicken-pox self.
About ten years ago, while I was spending some time in Arizona, one of my daughters came to visit. We took a drive up to Sedona, beautiful red rock country where it is said that the earth’s vortices come together and there are psychics on every corner. I am a very grounded practical person who has occasionally been intrigued and entertained by the abstract ethereal world. I like my astrological sign, my Leo-ness, but boilerplate horoscopes bore me. So I was ready to doubt the mysterious elements of the Sedona area. Still, as we hiked over the rust-coloured trails, finding small rock hearts nailed to trees and scattered around the paths, I admit I was fascinated by its unusual beauty.
A few weeks later, I started hearing a new voice in my head. The voice said she was a failed psychic, that she’d done something bad and was on the run. At first, I ignored her, but she was insistent. Write me, she said. I told her I couldn’t because I don’t know anything about psychics. Find a way, she said.
I mulled about her for a week or so and then booked a Tarot card reading. The salon was purple. The only two people in it were me and the reader. She was very kind, non-intrusive, soft-spoken. She said a few things about me that could apply to anyone. She also said some things that felt uniquely about me and were deeply intuitive. Afterwards, I felt a rising curiosity about those cards. In fact, I was so curious that I bought a deck and a book. Then another deck, and another book, and so on. My new interest became somewhat addictive. When I had to find a box to store all my new decks, I reined myself in and sat down to study what I’d collected.
But research and study takes time and the voice in my head kept asking me how it was going. Had I started writing her story yet? Her persistence was becoming quite insistent, so I decided to negotiate. What if, I said, you were less of a psychic and more of a Tarot card reader? She agreed that might work. Keep reading and start writing, she said. I’m not going anywhere, she said.
Of course, stories evolve in the telling and drafting. At the outset, the story was about a Tarot card reader on the run from a crisis in her life. As it grew, it also became about the aftermath of sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, and how difficult it is for women to live in a world shaped by men. Now that my book is finished, I also see that it has a whole lot to say about mothering. A former writing mentor once told me that no matter what I decided to write about, the mother shadow, present or absent, would always be there. Damn, she was right.
I’m telling you all this because I’m preparing to launch my new novel about six generations of women and a vintage deck of Tarot cards that is passed down from one generation to the next. She Who Burns will be available this summer. Watch for the cover reveal and more information in upcoming issues of this newsletter.
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I can't wait to read the Tarot card story.