I don’t think I’m the only one who spent the entire Jane Campion movie looking for the dog. I know. I know. Psalm 22. The dog-shape in the rock formation. But I learned all that after I saw it. There should have been a real dog in the story. Somewhere. (Or I’d accept a title emendation: “The Power of the (metaphorical) Dog.” Moving on. At an upcoming Zoom meeting with my editor, I’m supposed to give an elevator pitch for my novel that will make hearers want to read it. I’m going to run it past you, gentle readers. Tell me if my attempt makes you want to read the book (I promise you won’t hurt my feelings. At 79, I have hardly any feelings left to hurt, a benefit of aging not often mentioned). Here goes: On the one hand, my book, An Invitation to the Party, has a stubborn Great Pyrenees named Vera, who neither speaks nor dies in the novel. There are also greyhounds and a golden retriever (ditto on the not dying and not speaking). There are no cats to speak of. On the other hand, the main character, Garnet, who wants no part of that 70th birthday party referred to in the title, is an opinionated elderly female. A feminist. An agnostic. Worse, she’s a poet so there is actual poetry. There’s a precocious ten-year-old great-niece, and an annoying ex-husband who lives down the street, a good sister and a bad brother. A prodigal daughter. There’s death, but there’s also sex (and adultery!) (and true love!). And dementia, schadenfreude, karma and, briefly, bowling. Things catch fire and burn. Twice! Reader Discretion Advised: This book contains smoking, alcohol consumption, irresponsible behavior by all parties - with the exception of that ten-year-old and the dogs, and an occasional f-word. Come for the good dogs. Stay for the party.
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During the 1980’s, Xenia nursing home resident, Helen Hooven Santmyer, at eighty-seven, published . . .And Ladies of the Club, her 1,300-page novel of small-town life. It landed on the NYT bestseller list for 37 weeks, at number-one for seven of them. The paperback edition sold more than a million copies. At the time, I was teaching elementary school down the road in Yellow Springs, harboring my own dream of becoming a writer, and doing nothing to make it come true. I don’t know why (immaturity?) I found the whole thing so funny, the old woman, the best seller, the media circus. I laughed, that’s going to be me, not the bestseller part, the finally-publish-a-novel-in-your-eighties part. It turns out karma does indeed exist. My first novel, An Invitation to the Party, will be published summer, 2023. I will have just turned 81, something I find horrifying and, yes, hilarious. Personifying the definition of cock-eyed optimist, I’ve begun a second novel. If you find yourself in my situation-my father summed it up as “old too soon, smart too late,” I’ll share a little trick that works for me. When I’m writing, and only then, I have convinced myself that I will live forever. No need to rush, or worse, to quit. No need to worry you won’t finish this thing you’ve begun. You have all the time in the world. This works no matter what the unrealized ambition. And if you believe that, in your special case, it’s obviously too late, that people will laugh at you for trying, take heart. The universe will hear their laughter and take note. Writers write stories in many ways. This is only one way. My way.
When I begin a story, even a long story like a novel, I have no master plan, no plot outline to guide me, no timeline, no list of characters. I sit down at the keyboard, open a new document, and wait for somebody to walk in. I don't turn anyone away. I've found that when I kick one character out, all the rest head for the door too. In fact, when I attempt to in any way control characters, they turn their backs and refuse to acknowledge my existence. In my upcoming novel, An Invitation to the Party, that first character was Vera, the Great Pyrenees. (I do know where she came from. I am a daily reader of the witty, acerbic, heartbreaking FB posts from Nashville attorney, Jean Harris's Great Pyr Rescue, www.facebook.com/bigfluffydogrescue.) Discovering Vera's name was easy. It was right there on her red collar. Upon arrival, she companionably flopped down next to me to wait. Before long, Garnet, her owner - such a laughable term, nobody owns a Great Pyr, usually it's the other way round - showed up. Somehow, I knew her name immediately. It's not always so easy. Sometimes someone nameless wanders into the story. Then I have to take a clue from the Grimm brothers' Rumplestiltskin, and start guessing. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I know when I finally get it right. Then and only then does she or he (or they) make eye contact and start talking to me. I was trying to figure out how to organize poems I’d collected into the manuscript that became How the Universe Says Yes to Me, when I came across something online called Notes from the Universe, which offered a daily email, from a benevolent universe, filled with positivity, affirmation, and assurances that the subscriber was in charge of her own destiny. Hmmm, I thought, that’s soooo not the way it works for me. The universe felt in my mind like a powerful, hormonal, female presence that did not especially care if I was happy or loved, and definitely was not interested in my being in control of anything. My poems often explored that suspicion. And voila!, just like that, I had a title for the manuscript and inspiration for seven poems I subsequently wrote that form the heart of that collection. Here’s the first: The universe’s favorite word is yes. The word she uses most often is no. It’s a mystery. She doesn’t understand it herself. The cover of How the Universe Says Yes to Me is a watercolor that started out as an exercise in pouring different colors of paint over a plastic art paper called yupo. I didn’t set out to paint my idea of the universe but when I was done, I looked at the finished exercise and again thought, hmmm. My editor agreed. Serendipity! |
We tend to write about what we know. I am a writer, thus this blog: Why write? What, when, where to write? Stay tuned. Archives
April 2024
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