I have been writing forever. Heck, I’ve even called myself a writer since the age of 4 when I realized I was one. It was so easy accepting this atelier then… kids quickly choose, without fear of judgment, what they want to be. Astronaut. Firefighter. President.
Writer.
I just spent the last weekend in service to the board and membership of the Cascade Writers Workshop in Bremerton, WA.
(Photos and thoughts from both Cascades and Centrum/Port Townsend forthcoming in a debrief next week.)
In the last 24 hours, the following things have happened:
- I got my first book review (5 stars!) for Cul de Sac Stories on Amazon.
- I found out some of the people I truly idolize in my own writing life are actually going to come to my book launch party on Thursday.
- I sold a book to the grocery store checkout clerk and sealed a visit to her book group for later this summer/fall.
- I discovered a full-page feature on me and my relationship to Centrum in my registration packet.
- Someone went out of their way to tell me (to my face, without a prompt from me) that they get a bazillion newsletters and blogs and Substacks, but mine is one of the only few that she actually reads every single time.
- Someone else told me (again, without prompting) that they read my other book (Intention Tremor) and they’re planning to write a review because, not only did they like the book, but it spoke to them as the family member of someone who died from multiple sclerosis. They shared that the book is a functional roadmap for how to live with chronic illness. (Dang, but this is precisely what I had hoped to accomplish!)
You can tell yourself you’re a writer all you want, and it’s good to do this simple thing, it’s good to take ownership over your purpose, without waiting for others to validate. Do it. Do it now. You need nobody else to legitimize this.
But when others respond to you, as a Writer, by reading your book, buying it, selling it, celebrating it, studying it… That’s a different kind of identity made manifest, the one that says “We see you, and your words matter.”
Some writers only write for themselves. For me, the writing is not really for me, it’s for so many other people (the subject for a different kind of post or essay).
I have lived most of my 59 years in some kind of imposed isolation, early on as the quiet girl who didn’t have a voice in her family, then later as a working stay-at-home mom (working from home), editor, writer, publisher (and now podcaster/filmmaker). I’ve always only ever been behind the scenes.
Invisible.
The only pictures you really have of me are the most recent selfies that I’ve taken in the last year or so… I’ve always been the person behind the camera, otherwise.
To feel seen is nothing short of a fucking miracle.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a ginormous, big advance, several-book deal or a publisher whose name everyone recognizes. (That said, I am ridiculously humbled and proud to be part of the stable of Aqueduct Press.)
What matters is that I wrote some things that matter to me, things that I worked ceaselessly for years to hone and craft into something meaningful, not just to me, but to anyone who needs to read what I have to say.
I truly think myself a vehicle as a writer anyway, a channel of something bigger, that I’m just the mechanism for. I mean, that’s the way it feels when I’m in the flow… like there’s water rushing through a pipe. The flow is the water, I am the pipe.
Also what matters… the meaning I made for this book, now packaged into a collection of stories that are meant to either resonate or illuminate, has been received, perceived, and acknowledged.
(A writer needs a reader to complete the contract, after all. Do books even exist if nobody reads them? I say No.)
Today I learned (TIL) that people are acting, outside of my control, to support this effort I have been making all these years basically in the dark.
I go to bed now fatigued by too many social activities jammed into the same schedule, too little sleep trying to do and be all the things…
…but with all the recharge in the world, confirming that I do not, in fact, write in a vacuum.
I will say it again as I say thank you to everyone who has been there for me… in my early years, or in these latest of days.