on writing, mine and others'

This evening I experienced something truly phenomenal, even by New York standards.  I went to an event at Barnes and Noble, a "conversation" between the authors Judy Blume and Tayari Jones.  I'm still not clear on the motivation for bringing these two together - Jones' third novel just came out in paperback, but Blume wasn't promoting anything in particular, and of course has no need to promote anything, and they have such disparate audiences and styles that the attendees were a very mixed group.  But as they talked, I realized that they both write about the same thing, the thing that virtually all serious modern fiction is about: what it means to be and become yourself, what the voices of the silent sound like, and - as Tayari said - what the real secrets are.

I stayed to have books signed by both authors, and spoke to Tayari briefly.  She recognized me but couldn't place me, and I told her I'd taken her fiction class in Illinois.  She remembered me then, and she was surprised and pleased that I'd moved to New York.  When I took her class - years ago, and it seems lifetimes ago - I was lost in my own life, displaced and misplaced and confused about who I was or whether I was anyone at all.  In her class, I wrote story after story with different details but all about the same thing: young women who had lost the person or the thing who made their lives make sense, as I'd lost my own best friend a few years earlier.  I wrote about these women breaking out of their lives, but in my stories they never seemed to go anywhere.  Tayari told me two things: that I should never write about New York until I'd lived here, and that the problem with my stories was that I wrote silent heroines.

It took me years to move to New York, but I realized quickly that she was right about my heroines.  Over the years, I'd written at least a dozen stories about women who, discarding a few details, could have been all the same person.  Deferential, recessive, invisible women.  Deeply unhappy women who told nobody - not their misunderstanding friends or their unsatisfactory boyfriends or their critical mothers, not their therapists or their deities because they typically didn't believe in either, not even themselves - what they wanted in life.  Women who drifted, who wound up in situations that made for interesting stories but difficult lives.  These were the characters I wrote because they were the only characters I really understood, because this was the only way I knew how to be.  My heroines were silent because I had lost my own voice.

After the class ended, I put aside the short stories.  It was summer and I wanted something light and fun.  I began reading children's literature - Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik and A Wrinkle in Time.  Books about girls (there are so few about women) who spoke out loud.  And I read the Harry Potter books for the first time.  I started imagining a girl, part Hermoine and part Harriet and part Anastasia, and a quiet prepubescent life of reading and solitude, and what would happen to that little girl when her life developed a mind of its own.  I started writing, not the kind of drawn-out and heavily wordsmithed writing I'd done previously, but just writing.

I wrote ten pages, took it with me to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, came home inspired, and started writing faster.  Every Saturday I'd sit in Barnes and Noble - I'd bring a sandwich and buy coffee and snacks and stay there for hours, reading children's books and typing - and write another chapter.  I'd write fast, switching settings when I ran out of ideas.  I published the chapters on my university web page, and some of my friends and family read them.  I wrote for a season - eighteen chapters over four or five months - and then it was finished.  I'd written a novel.

The novel was called The Library Cave.  It was a short novel, really more of a novella.  Since then I've revised it, lightly - the project of seriously editing a work of that length is something I don't quite know how to embark on.  I started writing a prequel and a sequel, but neither of them had quite the same magic, or maybe I was just in a different place.  A few months ago, I realized that The Library Cave, which I'd been telling myself I'd finish - revise or expand - for years, was done.  It wasn't perfect, but the time of writing it had ended, and I wanted to release it into the world in a format more cohesive than the list of chapters on my (now very defunct) university web page.

So I published it as a kindle book.  Reader(s), this is an advertisement.  I published it under a pseudonym because I was embarrassed, because I was afraid of putting my name next to something and not having the ability to remove it.  But it's mine, it's out there, and if you're interested you can buy it for $1 or - if you're a Prime member - borrow it for free.