Giving Thanks and Birthing a Book

I am in the throes of preparing my book for publication after attending the Independent Author's conference sponsored by Book Baby in Philadelphia. They convinced me that Indie publishing is the wave of the future. I like the idea of pod books for the ecology: books sent back are often damaged or destroyed whereas you only buy a pod because you want it. I like having the ability to purchase boxes of books to sell at readings, workshops and events. And I like the fact that I can download a manuscript and have a book out in three months or less, whereas I have been waiting years to find the right and perfect fit in traditional publishing, one I am starting to believe doesn't exist. Not because there aren't potential readers but because my book doesn't fit in the right categories. It is a love story with the land of Israel and her people and two lovers, one an irresistible but dangerous charmer and one a comforting friend who can't commit, but it's not a romance. It tells the story of a country embroiled in civil conflict but it's not a political or historical commentary and it doesn't balance reporting about the Palestinian people's struggles with the Israelis I encountered. It is about the steps a woman takes in her own healing process but it's only the first beginning steps and not the completed journey.

It will be considered women's fiction, I suppose, but it is about contradictions, the ideal of peace and how hard it is to achieve, the light and the dark, the yearning for freedom and the yearning to belong, the desire to stay and the impossibility of doing what it takes to make it happen. The entire undercurrent of dreams: the dream for peace, belonging, love, and humanity against a backdrop of strikes, demonstrations, mandatory army duty, tear gas, suicide bombings, and imminent war.

It is also about life and death.

What I didn't know is that the revisions would bring up all the emotions I felt at the time they happened and the time of the initial writing.

What I didn't know is that I have extraordinary beta-readers who give me insight into what I thought I said and what I really wrote down, what makes the book work and what makes it less than fluid, and why I wrote the darn thing in the first place.

Catch a Dream: a woman's healing journey in a country embroiled in civil conflict.

It takes a village to birth a child: the steady voice saying, "You can do it! Push! Stop! Breathe! Push!" The nurse who offers you a cool washcloth or ice chips or checks your blood pressure, the delivery doctor who knows what to do when things escalate or go wrong or you need medical intervention. The mid-wife who has taught you to pay attention to your own body signals. The pre-natal friends who cheer you through the nausea and doubt and exhaustion of pregnancy, the friends who come to cheer the newborn and bring chocolate cake and clean up your kitchen. The family who gathers around in welcome of the new being, the community who acknowledge here is hope and a new beginning.

So it is with the birth of a book. The many friends who are cheering you on, offering their feed-back, encouragement, and critiques. The friends who will love your story, love the disturbing questions, love the fact that not everything has a tidy happy ending but only a prelude to provoking ponderings. I love happy endings. Catch a Dream is not happy in the way you might expect but it ends with a sense of hope. I learned from my own journey of falling in love with the irresistible dangerous lover and wanting to stay in a place where I didn't really belong is that not all dreams are meant to come true. But this one, the one of a book in my hands, written with my own tears and questions and contemplation and insight and love, is about to.

Where do stories begin: A word or an image?

Where do stories begin? A sentence…a word, an image, a character, a dream, a question, a puzzle, a mystery, a hope, an overheard conversation, a picture, a feeling? Or is it the story itself which is compelling you: the struggle through crisis towards the happy ending, the illness and grief followed by healing, the joy found and hope revived after heartbreak, the resiliency of the human spirit, your spirit? Do memoir and novels begin the same ways? Do you begin with a character or a story?

My novels always begin with a character or characters. The birth of a child and the midwife-medicine woman-priestess disturbed and enthralled by the signs that appear is how my story MoonSense starts. One novel began with the image of a Mexican mother keening into the ground because her son has left to go up to El Norte. A young woman vacations in Mexico when her traveling companion mysteriosuly disappears. Eventually these two characters will meet. Another began with an elderly woman watching from a window in her wheelchair, lonely and aching for companionship, a grumpy, stubborn woman who must face her own difficult personality. And another starts with a singer who songs heal but has a family secret she must uncover.

A poem, however, may begin with an emotion and an image from the world around me, where I happen to be sitting, in nature, in a cafe, or on a bus, for example.

Memoir has to begin with a story, as well, but where do we start? Which memory do we choose? In Flowers in the Wind, my memoir of ten years of communal living, I wanted to start with the first time I walked into the hostel and met the people who would become my family, the tribe I had been seeking, for the rest of my life. But I had to fill in the reasons why this was an important encounter. I had to write about the influence of the ‘60s and the ways that freedom was intertwined with wanting to belong, a sense of belonging. Without that urgency of wanting to belong, the story of joining a commune and sticking with in despite the challenges and shadows does not make sense. Why would I give up my own choices, why would I allow my autonomy to be taken away, unless there was an investment, a huge emotional investment? I believed we were heading towards salvation, towards perfection, toward being able to heal the blind and the lame and take care of the oppressed, and that these people were mine to keep.

But then I had to tell the story of the first time I traveled to Mexico and was shocked by the extreme poverty and humbled by the simple grace of the family who received us into their home, a home without even a toilet, who treated us as special, important guests even though we barely spoke their language and hardly had anything in common except faith in Jesus. And how I recognized my own selfishness and self-centeredness.

And then I realized I had to go back even further, to the epiphany at Arlington Cemetery when I was 11 years old and suddenly awakened to a belief that war is wrong. The moment I became a pacifist. The moment that became my purpose when the anti-war movement started and I felt I had found my tribe, those who believed as I did in peace and love.

This is different than the memoir of living in Israel for three years which begins with getting off the ferry boat and ends with leaving on an airplane, a cut and dried beginning and ending.

Where does you story begin, with the moment that changed your life? Which moment? The one that set in motion the search for answers, the one that broke your heart and set you up to long for love, the one that was a dream of something you would hope for the rest of your life, the choices made out of disappointment, the choices made out of strength?