The Gathering

Last week I attended The Gathering literary conference in La Plume, PA. It was an amazing four days of lectures, workshops, wine receptions and delicous food. I met wonderful people and was inspired, humbled and awed by the talks of Greg Maguire (author of Wicked); poet Nancy Willard; Loung Ung, who wrote the memoir First They Killed My Father, from a chilling five-year-old perspective of her early life in Cambodia; and the great Sir Salman Rushdie, who has received almost every major literary award as a writer, and who had to live in hiding for ten years during which there was a death sentence placed on him by the Ayatolah Khomeini. It has been almost eleven years since the lifting of the fatwa, and he would rather put that period of his life behind him, but people still question him about that time, and his book, The Satanic Verses, that created much ado about, really, nothing (the passage that caused the uproar was merely a dream sequence meant, Rushdie said, more for humor. It suggested the prophet Mohammed once prayed to a mystical bird goddess), and his publishers would love for him to write a memoir. But as he said, he didn't become a writer to write about himself. For him, writing is as much about social change as it is invention. He believes it is more important than ever to write books that reveal what our governments try to hide from us, quoting Abraham Lincoln's remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe : "So you're the little lady that started this big war. " Citing the scene in Saul Bellow's, The Dean's December, in which an incessantly barking dog demands, "For God's sake, open the Universe a little more!" Sir Rushdie asserts that it is the artist's weighty task to be the expander of the Universe. Amen.

Finding Treasures

I am dedicating part of this summer to finding treasures to add to my flower garden. Last Wednesday I went to the auction in Crumpton Md and found this lovely brass table topped with shards of blue glass. When the sun shines it sparkles like bits of saphire--and only for ten bucks. It truly is the little things in life that make it all worth it. Lunch with an old friend. A kayak down a still creek bordered by trumpet vine. The cry of a lone blue heron.

Frog Heaven

Look closely and you'll see the little frog that has taken up residency in our garage for the summer. He has become the favorite play-toy for our four cats (they are ever so gentle), and he is a wonderful late night companion when I am shuttling flowers back and forth from our kitchen to the flower shed outside. At each passage, he hops along beside me, boldy staring up at me with those big, dark, pop-eyes. He has it made with the cats' water bowl for his swims, and as we leave the light on in the garage, bugs get fried then fall to the garage floor nicely grilled for him. For a bed, he sleeps inside Don's work boots. Good digs.

Visualization

Let me introduce you to Jonathon J.J. Sebastian Cabot Kitty (aka The Fud, short for Fuzzy Wuzzy, which turned into Fudda Wudda). Two years ago it had been five years since Don and I lost our last orange cat, and I was thinking it was time for an orange kitten, much to Don's dissent, as we already had three cats. But I kept seeing this orange kitten in my mind and looked on-line at all the little orange cuties, though I was having no luck in convincing Don. But then I went to my grandmother's farm in Pennsylvania for a week that summer, and the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was this little orange fuzzball on her back deck. "One of the male strays found him in the woods and brought him up here for food," my grandmother said. "I call him Pee Wee," she said. "He needs a good home." Done. It didn't take long for Don to fall in love with him, or my other cats. He is the sweetest soul, with a trill for a purr (characteristic of a Maine Coon). And a peacemaker--he will go right in between my two males who have no love for each other and say in his gentle way, "Come on guys, fighting won't solve anything." In short, he was just what we all needed. And I have to believe that just the right literary agent will come along soon. Nothing, really, ever comes out of the blue. Prepare the soil, plant the seed, then water and fertilize what will be.

Audience

So I received my first rejection from one of the agents I pitched at the Writing Conference in NYC. She said she read the first 50 pages of my novel and came to this conclusion: young girls in their twenties wouldn't be interested in it, because it was written in present tense and about a young girl in the late eighties, not gritty enough for current days. And women in their forties and fifties wouldn't be interested in it--they would only be interested in it if it was written in past tense, with a narrator now in her mid-forties, looking back on her days in her mid-twenties. . . hmmm. . . . When I wrote this novel I thought nothing about audience in such a specific way, okay, I didn't think about my audience at all. . . Someone very wise once told me to put all marketing aspects out of my mind when I write, and it's the only way I was able to write a novel from the heart . . . Another wise person told me that you have to write for yourself--the publishing business is too competitive to count on. Writers are weeded out for a million different reasons: one common one being that the agent is already representing a novel too similar to the one in question. . . maybe one about a woman in her mid-forties who goes back to the Jersey Shore and reminisces about her time spent there in her mid-twenties. . . Another wise person said, and this one was an agent: "The chaos theory is at play here". . . Who would've guessed that all ages, young and old, of both sexes, would be drawn to Harry Potter? Or that women of all ages are being seduced by Twilight. I honestly don't think it's about relating to a character--it's more about being transported to another world.

Marketing 2

Inadvertently (while learning how to post pictures on this blog), I deleted my last post about marketing my novel at the "pitch slam" in NYC. So for those who didn't get a chance to read it, I was stressing over the fact that I had to distill ten years of hard labor into one tiny paragraph. . . And that it would have to be me that made the sale, rather than the novel itself, to the agents. . . I've really only ever sold things that sell themselves: records, grilled cheese sandwiches, flowers. . . my husband is the one that can sell ice to Eskimos. . . he's the talker, I'm the writer. . . But I had to step up to bat and do the best I could this past Tuesday at the Writer's Digest Conference, and I was surprised by how calm I was. . . I took the advice of many and just spoke from my heart. I believe in this novel. And I believe I conveyed it to the agents I spoke with. Time will tell now if they have the passion I do for the characters I've lived with for so long.

Volunteers

It is that time of year in the garden when all the little volunteers start popping up--plants that were self-seeded from last year, blown in the wind and scattered seemingly willy-nilly. Last year, after the daffodils were done, the entire patch became a bed of daisies, all volunteers from nearly half-an-acre away. Easy money one would say, unless the volunteers drown out a more valuable crop, but this rarely happens. It is as if they know where they can unobtrusively take up space, where they have the best chances of thriving: i.e. shade loving plants never self-seed in the sun and visa versa. Volunteers are not weeds, as the original plants were cultivated and planted at one time, such as a theme in a work of art that proliferates--in the garden of words they are the repeated motif. Once planted, the design will continue to emerge in the work, a subtle design that doesn't wish to over-power, just provide that nuanced color of meaning.