Keeping it Simple: Memoir Finds a Publisher.

Of all the ways I considered announcing this, simple wins out. Here goes.

My memoir, tentatively titled Every Loss Story is a Love Story: The Father Daughter Reunion, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2018.

If you don't know, the road here was anything but simple, and under the calm simplicity of that sentence, I'm actually screaming with joy, dancing in gratitude, and exploding with a mixture of relief, incredulity, affirmation, and humble pride. 

(Because everyone was out and busy when I got the final news at six on Monday, I had a simple solo dinner. But there was wine (and a nice card) a few hours later when some of the menfolk got back. Yes, hubby owes me a celebratory night out!)

I have a zillion people to acknowledge and thank. For now a blanket thank-you will have to do, to everyone who has and continues to help, by cheering me on, listening to my ideas, reading my pages, offering feedback, sharing publishing advice, telling me plainly when I'm wrong, and of course, by commiserating and celebrating.

Though I've published hundreds of articles, essays, and short memoir pieces over the last couple of decades, and though I've contributed essays to several anthologies, and even though I've ghostwritten chapters and manuscripts--this already feels quite different: my name alone, on the spine.

It feels like my book found its perfect (and, in retrospect, logical) home at University of Nevada Press (more on why in a future post). I'm looking forward to working with the enthusiastic professionals there, who have made me feel like a warmly welcomed and respected artist, from the day I first chatted with the press director at a writers conference this past winter.

I hope you will follow along in my journey from here to next year's published book. I'll try to share useful information that in turn may help other writers. 

In a few days, I begin revisions the publisher wants in a few weeks time. Today and tomorrow, I'm working on completing my author questionnaire and organizing notes with my ideas for PR and marketing. (I did after all, spend 12 years in public relations!)

Here goes.

Of Print, Pixels, and Publication

I've gotten used to posting a link when something I've written has found its way to publication; even when a piece appears in a print journal, there's often an online version too. But not always. Since I'm a writer-who-came-of-age-in-the-time-of-typewriters, there's a part of me that finds a print-only publication quite satisfying. But since I'm also a writer-who-has-adapted-and-loves-the-online-world, it also feels a bit odd.

"The Nurse We Needed" is a piece of flash nonfiction excerpted from my memoir manuscript, and appears in the Fall 2014 issue of The Healing Muse (volume 14). When the package arrived with my two contributor copies, I had a sense of nostalgia…postal mail, the printed word, the glossy cover, the discovery of fanning through the pages, the small thrill of flipping back and forth from table of contents to contributor bios to individual random pieces of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork.

Okay, enough nostalgia. I'll admit too, there was a smidge of disappointment that I couldn't oh-so-easily put up a link to my work. But that soon passed.

Then I was on to my usual habit—scanning to see if any writers I know and/or admire also have work included. I don't know why this makes me so happy when it happens. It's not about validation (okay, that's a lie, if I found myself in the same journal or anthology as, say, Joan Didion…) so much as knowing I'm in this literary world together with other kindred souls.

Immediately, I found two brilliant, linked pieces of  micro flash nonfiction by Rita Ciresi, a colleague and fellow MFA faculty member. I also recognized several other names in the nonfiction listings, and a smattering of those in the poetry section as well. Next, I read randomly from all over the journal, and admired some of the visual art, too.

The Healing Muse is produced by the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the Upstate (NY) Medical University, with a focus on work about illness, health, loss, the body, hospitals, healthcare, grief, sickness, care giving, medical workers, and other related topics. There is plenty of good work in this issue, representing so much rich experience. 

Editor-in-chief Deidre Neilen wrote in her Editor's Note, "Here is another paradox: the journal feels so light in my hands, yet it contains the weight of complex histories and the impossible questions they provoke."

My piece feels that way, at least for me: it's about what little I know actually happened, what I surely can never know, and what I imagine might have happened between my father and the hospice nurse who saw him only once, and very shortly before he died, alone.

Three weeks ago, I had made plans to participate in a reading and 14^th anniversary celebration on the Upstate Medical campus, adjacent to my undergraduate alma mater, Syracuse University; it seemed an ideal quick road-trip getaway. But the universe laughed, my plans folded, and so now that I can't post a photo from the event, and instead of a link to my work, here's the page where you can buy a copy of the Fall 2014 issue of The Healing Muse ($10). Or maybe you have a piece of work you'd like to submit.

I'd also like to give one blog reader a copy of the Fall issue. Just leave a comment by midnight on Tuesday, November 24 (must have U.S. postal address and a trackback web contact).

Writers and Their Coffee: All the Regular Reasons, Plus Mine

It won't startle anyone to find a writer with fingers on keyboard, a cup of steaming coffee within easy reach.

I start my day in my home office with a cup of coffee, and I look forward to it. As the day unspools, I head down to the kitchen to refill my oversize mug whenever I need a mental break from the awful draft on the screen, or when the draft in my older house nips at my ankles, or I know that if I don't unfold my legs soon they may refuse to hold me up in a few hours.

But I'm not a coffee hound, not even a gotta-have-my-coffee-or-I'm-grumpy girl. (I'm grumpy in the morning, but it's not about coffee.) Coffee lovers, true coffee lovers, will find the following appalling: Though I won't turn down an expertly blended cappuccino from a skilled barista, I don't care what brand I drink, at home I drink instant, I dump two Splenda packets in the cup, and use only skim lactose-free milk. And  – I drink only decaf. 

That's because other than savoring the way that first cup warms me on a chill New Jersey winter day, I'm fairly sure the only  reason I drink coffee is that it helps me feel closer to my father. And it was always thus: my coffee habit (three or four cups a day most days, less in the summer), began wholly as a way to share something with him, decades ago when it seemed we weren't sharing anything.

But like many revelations in the life of a writer of memoir and personal essay, I did not understand this at all until I had a brief experience I could have discounted and forgotten. But writers of personal nonfiction don't do that - we file things away, and pull them out for reasons we don't always understand. That's what happened: I had an unnerving, but in retrospect, lovely experience surrounding a cup of coffee a few weeks after my father died—and then weeks after that, I began to write about it. That was seven years ago. 

I tinkered with that flash nonfiction piece about coffee sporadically for a few months, then put it away. For a long time. I’m not sure if I did that on purpose—following my own advice about creating mental and emotional distance from both the experience and from the early draft, so I could revise/rewrite it properly later—or if those early paragraphs perhaps felt too flimsy to develop into anything, or too personal.

But the event (which lasted just a little over an hour), and the feeling that triggered the essay (which lasted for years), finally nudged me to work on it again. I had to be attentive to the line between sentiment and sentimentality. I worked on it again. And again. Got some feedback, tweaked, and then understood that I had a place for it within a much longer essay in my memoir manuscript.

I began to send the short flash piece out last summer, and I'm so pleased that Gravel Magazine liked it enough to publish it in their March issue. I'm also happy that the editor chose this photo of my father holding me, to accompany it. 

If you've ever spent time in a coffee shop and maybe had a strange encounter while there, or you've felt that someone who was gone was in some small way still there, I hope that you will take a few minutes (it's that short) to read "Coffee Regular."

Top image (coffee cup):  by Waferboard via Flickr Creative Commons; Photo, bottom, Lisa Romeo, all rights reserved.

What Kind of Essay? The answer is in...the essay.

If you've been a regular here, you may know that I'm putting the final touches on a manuscript--a memoir about the relationship that developed between me and my father (just before, but mostly) after, his death, told in linked essays. 

Some are more narrative than others, some more lyrical. One is long and segmented; a few are short forms. How and why each essay takes the shape and form it does relies on so many factors, and frankly often the *answer* doesn't reveal itself until far along in the revision process.

The rest of the time, I'm typically just following some instinct that's difficult to explain. The material knows, often, what it wants to be. The story knows how it wants to be told. Lately, I trust that if I listen carefully enough and resist the urge to be right about an initial impulse, I can hear when subsequent drafts are telling me something different.

An excerpted essay from the manuscript, with the title of "Eyes, Hands, Hotel, Hospital," is included in the December issue of an online journal with its own distinctly intriguing name, Halfway Down the Stairs.

If I had listened to my initial idea of how this particular piece of the story--my final visits to my father's hospital room--should exist on the page, it might have been three separate things: a light piece about my father, afflicted with Alzheimer's, thinking the hotel was a hospital; a long (and likely maudlin and unruly) prose poem about how his eyes unnerved me; and an essay about how comforted and upset I was by the look and feel of his hands even as everything else about his body was deteriorating. 

But early pages can be squirrelly, and after a dozen or so combined drafts, I put each one away for a while. 

At some point, I realized that it was all connected to those final days, everything running together, a collage of eyes and hands, memories of all the fine hotels we'd stayed at during my childhood, and finally, the reality of the hospital. It wasn't three pieces, it was one -- and a rather straight-ahead narrative essay at that

Which is not to say it might not have worked the other way, ten other ways. But this way felt right.

Here is part of middle of the essay, a section where I write of my father's confusion about where he was.

In the hospital, I asked my father if he wanted me to rub on some hand cream. He shrugged, but I did it anyway. I thought, What the heck, it will kill some time. After, he began what had, at least while I'd been here, become his daily litany of why he must be allowed to leave this place:

They can't keep me here against my will.
I know the law.
If I want to leave, I can you know.
Get them to call me a taxi.
Where's my suitcase? I want to go.
Get your mother; she'll know what to do. (This one I could not help laughing at out loud. My father always did everything related to travel, finances, and dealing with management or authorities; and he always reminded everyone that he alone was qualified to do so.)
Take me home.
I want to go home.
Why can't I go home? (This one I had trouble answering, even glibly, because I wanted to know the same thing. Why couldn't my mother allow him to come home—to his 5,000 square foot house, the one with extra bedrooms and spare bathrooms and wide doorways, the one built with polyester money—instead of making nursing home arrangements?)
Where is my ticket, my passport, the concierge?
When is that damned bellboy coming back?
They make me wait, for what?

I hope you will hop over to Halfway Down the Stairs (where there is a lot of engaging work), and read "Eyes, Hands, Hotel, Hospital."

A Summer Full of Publication

This summer has been good to me, publication-wise.* Excerpts from my memoir manuscript have been appearing in literary journals with a bit more frequency, including the narrative piece, "Old Men Who Write," which is now part of the first online issue of Under The Sun.

It traces my experience several years ago when a writing class I offered at my local library brought me into contact with two elderly men who -- what else? -- reminded me so strongly of my father, and the confusion this caused me as I worked hard to maintain our respective roles.

Here's a bit of it, which picks up in the middle of a class, and focuses on one student, Robert, who is 90 years old:

...I begin a discussion about reaching back in our lives for stories, and I notice Robert’s brown-flecked big hand resting on a small diary, the once-black leather worn to dull brown on all edges. I ask him about it. 

“This is my diary from when I was a boy, in the 1920s. Oh, there’s a lot of stories in here, you bet,” he says.  I expect him to say more, but he quiets, nods, and taps his fingers on the book.  For a second, I want to reach across and push open the clasp (does it still lock, I wonder?), but of course I do not. 

“I hope you’re thinking of writing about some of those times?” I ask, stupidly impressed with myself. 

“Oh, I don’t know. It was all so long ago. I’m pretty old, you know,” he says, his hand stroking the book, his eyes averted to a shelf of nearby reference books. 

“Well, that’s okay,” I say, not knowing what else to say. 

Robert throws his arms up in the air and smiles. “It’s okay that I’m old? Well, thank you very much!” The lightheartedness is back in his tone, the tease returned to his watery eye.Everyone laughs. I notice he’s crossed his stilt-like legs one over the other at the knee the way my father used to and, also like my father, that on his eyeglasses a frayed Band-Aid cushions the part over the bridge of his nose. I am glad to have my notes to concentrate on, printed out, slid into plastic sheet protectors, in a neat three-ring binder, because I don’t know what will happen if I keep looking Robert’s way. As I discuss writing, I glance at each student and try to ignore Robert’s slow nods, the way he raises an index finger in the air and dips it slightly to signal his agreement. 

I can’t look, and I can’t look away.

You can read the whole thing here.

There's a bit of a full-circle moment about this. It comes just as I'm preparing to present brief, interactive writing workshops at a bunch of senior citizen centers in southern New Jersey this week. 

Life is like that sometimes.  Writing too.

*Oh, the rejections still arrive too; but when there's a good acceptance/publication run, and it coincides with an otherwise stressful couple of months, you bet I'm going to brag just a little bit!