Picture this: you are a 15 year old girl, a knock at your mother's door, and the leader of your church seeking refuge. So the story goes, my great grandmother, and yes she is two generations back from me: children late in life by her, my grandfather and my father; but she was the one who hid Joseph Smith when an angry mob was after him. Not my great grand father as I'd first thought. She hid him in her mother's flour bin and when the mob had passed and the coast was clear he came out, white with flour dust. He blessed her and told her she'd live to be one hundred. Born in 1820 in Illinois, she died on the family homestead in Willard, Utah at age 99.
This business of writing is hard. Self-discipline must be inherent in the personality for a writer to find success in the publishing world. Perfect word placement matters less than luck, it seems. The right decision to M.F.A. or not to M.F.A., or which conference to attend and why, weighs heavy on the individual writer. As in life in general, the world of writing and publishing can get bogged down with decision-making rather than the creation of some beautiful piece of literature.
Just last week some writing friends met for dinner to celebrate the good fortune of one of our group. The Antioch Writers Workshop(www.antiochwritersworkshop.com) has been home to this group for several years now. Through workshops with critical facilitators and soft-spoken people, who could be called Word Whisperers, we have polished our work and encouraged each other in terms of our own writing.
Shuly Cawood (www.shulycawood.com), wrote and published a memoir, just as I aspire to do. She had been invited to do a First-Book talk and reading at the workshop. Envy could edge out any feelings of celebration, if I let it. But I've read her book, The Going and the Goodbye (https://www.amazon.com/Going-Goodbye). I passed it along to my daughter who was going through a break-up, like Shuly describes in her memoir. At dinner, when I asked about her process, she said that it takes persistence.
Yes, persistence. Don't give up. Keep working at it, keep making contacts, keep listening to the voice within, not the voices around us. My memoir has been seen by three agents, none of which is willing to represent the book. Each one having some tidbit of wisdom about my work: beautiful, but too quiet for a first book. That's okay. I know it's good, unique, it's my story.
A few of us walked together to the venue where Shuly would read that evening. And as we walked I thought about my great grandmother, Nancy. At 15-years-old, she listened to the voice within that told her to harbor someone she believed in. Right or wrong, she did what she felt was best. And with Joseph Smith's blessing, she lived out a persistent life. She bore twelve children, followed her husband and the rest of the Latter Day Saints across the plains, lived in the sometimes harsh land of Northern Utah and made it fruitful. Groves of peaches, cherries, and apples still produce on what was once our family's homestead. So as the group of us walked along and talked about writers we knew, I could have gotten jealous of the accomplishments of others. Instead, I said, "Not my circus, not my monkeys."
Like my grandmother, I will persist in listening to my voice, the voice within, that continues to whisper that I truly do have something to say and it's something of value.