After WEEKS of having to be tight-lipped, I am finally able to share the wonderful cover art for WITHER, designed by S&S’s own Lizzy Bromley. Horray!
My grandfather’s wake was this afternoon.
Admittedly, it had been a few years since I’d seen my maternal grandparents, and my happiest memories of them are clouded by that gaussian blur of early childhood. Still, when I saw his charming smile in black and white, atop the paragraphed summary of his life, he was just as I remembered him. His paragraph read like a list of accomplishments: his children, grandchildren, military time served; loved his country; loved God. He was 89 years old.
In the end, a paragraph is all most of us will get.
Still, 89 years is a long time. The best parts of my grandfather’s life happened before I was born. I’d always had the romantic notion that my grandfather and grandmother had one of those impenetrable loves. That one could not exist without the other. That when they were young, when my grandmother had her bangs rolled and clipped on her head like a pinup model, and when my grandfather posed shirtless on the beach, as they smiled at the camera they knew what their old age would look like. They knew that they would wear bucket hats and sun visors and he would have to hold her hands as they ascended their porch steps. They knew they would have wood paneling and drinking glasses with chipped citrus fruits painted on.
On the wall of the funeral home, I watched the photos of my grandfather change within the digital frame. But the time in between the black-and-whites and my gaussian memories can only be left to the imagination. I will never know the man who lived in that space. My grandmother will carry some of it with her, and the rest will stay suspended in that place where escaped thoughts and accidentally deleted emails go.
My own father said something, when I was very young, that has stuck with me. He said that when someone close to us dies, it’s best to remember them as they were, not as the body they left behind. (He was actually referring to our dog, and I was crying hysterically at the time, but the message has held true–In fact, I said something to that effect in my father’s eulogy years later). And so, when I knelt at my grandfather’s casket today, I started tallying up the things that made him who he was to me. I will remember my grandfather taking me to the ocean on an overcast afternoon. I will remember his garden, which had a stone staircase that took me into its depths. I’ll remember how that garden felt like the biggest place in the world. I’ll remember that he saved plastic containers, and cardboard boxes with can imprints at the bottoms. I’ll remember garden dirt on his hands, and the way unripened tomatoes fit in his palm two or three at a time.
As for the things I won’t remember, the things I wasn’t there for, I can only say that they mattered. They belonged to him, just like each of our moments belong to us. In the time between the photographs and that final black and white in the newspaper, my grandfather’s life was bright with color, harmonious with sound. I know that he didn’t take a second for granted–Not a day in his garden. Not a single breeze through his hair.
This time of year has become an issue for me. In mid-June, right along with garden supplies and beachwear come the father’s day sales. And ads. And store signs. And television marathons.
My father died four years ago, quite unexpectedly. The anniversary of that date slips quietly by on the calendar, and though I might draw the odd sharp breath or two, I do little to acknowledge it. Many of my closest friends see me on the anniversary and never know it. And in this blog entry it’s likely I’ve already used the word “father” more than I have since 2006.
Since my father’s death, I’ve graduated from college; I’ve trudged through countless office jobs and killed as many plants; my first book will be out in less than a year; I have cats and a great apartment and have learned how to take care of a tomato plant without killing it. And if you want the truth, I am terrified by how much has changed, how much I’ve evolved as a person, without the presence of the man who supported and encouraged me for twenty-one years.
I don’t talk about it, think about it, or even write about it very often. And when father’s day approaches every year, I avert my gaze. I change the channel. On the topic of fathers, I am an ellipsis. An empty space.
And this father’s day, though I won’t be buying a card or making that phone call, I will put this out there: I did have a father. A great one. One who taught me how to drive, who hid Mario figurines in my room when I was little, wrote me silly postcards for no reason other than to say he was proud of me. I had a father who, during the premiere of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, turned to me for no reason at all and said, “One day, kid, you’ll do great things.”
I love that feeling I get when I finish a good book, and when I set it down, the house is really quiet, and my candle that’s been burning for hours as I read is about to die.
(Of course, seeing as how I live downstairs from a nocturnal herd of elephants, any quiet night is a gift)
These are the things I’m staring at when my eyes need a break from the computer screen as I mow through my editorial letter: Antique boxes, line edits, ballet flats, and TS Eliot of course…
I am being aggressively haunted by fleeting ideas.
Yesterday, I got this idea while I was driving aimlessly with my windows down, enjoying the first real week of spring weather. I could see a snapshot in my head of these people, and their bloody, horrible predicament, and my immediate thought was, “Ooo! That just might be twisted enough to make into a story.” But then, no, that was it. One lone, twisted idea, flying out into the breeze and getting smaller and smaller in my rear-view mirror.
The idea hasn’t come back to me since. But it’s left me feeling restless and itchy. Like kid-with-too-much-sugar-forced-to-sit-still-in-church itchy. So my solution was to try creating something. Anything. I opened my new sketchpad, full of nothing but glorious empty pages, and I hunted through the house for a pen (you’d think I’d have one on hand, but locating one took a good fifteen minutes). I sat in my comfy spot on the couch and thought, “This ought to be great.” Annnnd then… nothing. I couldn’t think of a single thing to draw. Not even a stick person. Not even that weird S thing everyone used to draw on their desks when I was in high school.
Of course there is my trilogy to consider. My trilogy, which is all outlined and rich with plot and ideas that, dare I say, make me giddy just to sit here and think about. I have somehow managed to contain that work. I know who the characters are, and what they will be doing. So these little haunts, these odd sentence fragments and nameless faces that appear before soaring off into the ether are something else entirely. What I’m looking at here isn’t a case of writer’s block. It’s not just the idea that eluded me yesterday in the car. It’s not just the sketchpad (which remains unmarked, by the way). I think these ideas are coming from a parallel dimension, with paper houses and paper roads and little paper kittens chasing paper birds. Everything is crisp and clean and waiting for my pen. And here’s my pen, just kinda… sitting here, mocking me, like “Well? What are you gonna do about it?” (Wait, did I just describe the plot to Harold and the Purple Crayon? Anyway…)
I am determined to figure out this bizarre brain block. I am determined to find something twisted and beautiful, and to catch it and pin it to my corkboard so that I can’t fly away this time. Even if I have to break out the purple crayon.
At various times in my life, and usually late at night, I start thinking I should find something profound to say to the internet. The trouble is, I’m not a very profound person, and there’s probably very little I can say that the fine people of the internet haven’t already figured out.
So I guess I’ll just address a question that was posed to me the other day. What made me want to be a writer?
The answer: Nothing. Nothing made me want to be a writer, the same way nothing made me favor purple over lime green. The same way there’s no known scientific reason I cannot do long division in my head. See, I have this theory that sometimes people are just meant to have a specific passion—be it cooking or writing or collecting stray cats—that they will find on their own. Me? I pretty much had it all figured out by the fifth grade. I would write books. I didn’t know what they’d be about, or how I would publish them. In fact it would be another thirteen or so years before I even knew the difference between an agent and an imprint. And my best work at the time had been written in a five-subject mead notebook with my initials written in nail polish on the cover, and I’d misspelled words like “phone.”
I was fortunate enough to have parents who stood behind any interests I held. Over the years they fed their money to competitive swimming, guitar lessons, girl scouts, brownie scouts, and others that all sort of blur indistinguishably together. But under all that was the constant of writing. It was never introduced to me. It was never suggested. It’s not like the Y advertised competitive writing classes on their corkboard. It was just always sort of there. Quiet at first, and then absolutely unavoidable as the years progressed. Every new school year meant a new five-subject notebook, and four of those subjects would be writing, while I’d cram all my class notes into that final subject like an afterthought.
And the thing is, passion like that finds you. It could be anything. It could be a hobby, like ships in a bottle or card tricks. It could be math, science, art. It could be profitable or not. And if you have it, it is not to be ignored. If you have a passion for something, you know about it. Nobody has to tell you. You think about it as you fall asleep at night. It’s there when you get out of bed in the morning. Listen to it. It might not make you a millionaire. It might not even earn recognition. Maybe nobody will discover it years after your death and maybe it won’t inspire future generations. Or maybe it will. That isn’t the point. When I was twelve years old, I didn’t know about advances or editors. I just wrote.
There’s more I could say, about absorbing the blows of rejection, and about researching your craft, and not driving yourself crazy comparing your work to other works. But all of that is part of a different lecture, and it comes much later anyway. Trust me. First and foremost: Whatever it is you want to do in life, if it’s that important, you should do it. Imagine a big bubble surrounding you and blocking out the world, and just do it, because that in itself makes you profound. It makes what you’re doing important.
There are a million generic speechy things I could say (because believe me I am jumping up and down), but I’m just gonna let the release speak for itself since I’m so thrilled with how it reads.
Twenty-five-year old debut author Lauren DeStefano’s THE LAST CHEMICAL GARDEN, the first in a trilogy in a dystopian world, the result of a failed effort to create a perfect race, which has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years, following a sixteen-year-old girl sold as a polygamous bride – yet her husband is hopelessly in love with her and opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought possible, to Alexandra Cooper at Simon & Schuster Children’s, in a major deal, in a pre-empt, for publication beginning in April 2011, by Barbara Poelle at the Irene Goodman Agency(NA).