Saving Grace

I found this community last July, during a very difficult time. I had only begun writing again in March, and in June, catastrophe struck, taking my audience of one away from me. I had just found my voice again, and I found a self-publishing poetry challenge on Facebook and did it. Pomegranates was the result.

Then, on July 11, I stumbled across a post from Vocal, about the challenges. I told my husband about it and said I would give it a try. Sometime toward the end of August, I visited my stats page for the first time and saw that I was earning per read.

I started sending my students to my page (not telling them it was me) to choose something to discuss. I didn’t do this to push my work on my students but to cheat the algorithm, trick it into thinking I was a bot to make my work require scrutiny.

It seemed to work—I started having to verify my humanity, and a few weeks later, I got my first top story. A month later, I showed in the Sonnet of Shadows challenge. Some prominent creators started reading and commenting on my work. I felt sufficiently seen and stopped sending students to my page.

I became less timid, opened the door to everything within me, reactivating my linguistic knowledge and bringing my canonical reading up out of my subconscious. I started reading literary criticism again. My Yeats, Auden, Frost, and Cummings anthologies became familiar places again. My Norton Shakespeare moved back into an accessible place on my best bookcase. Flannery, Eudora, and Katherine Anne demanded my attention again, and Eliot sang louder than he ever has inside me.

Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck patiently waited for me to come back to them, had a party for me when I showed up and started doing the hard work—revising and editing for the sake of the reader, slaughtering my darlings with broad strokes of my blade, tightening language, reading my work aloud and finding the places where the mind and eyes are ignorant of the mouth’s knowledge, editing the text to conform to the mouth.

Then I came back to fiction with purpose, with characters demanding to speak, voices from different experiences and attitudes all clamoring for my attention simultaneously. I began to separate the voices, let them speak and tell their experiences. I had no idea how it all fit together.

I see the shape and structure of the novel now. I know which bricks to lay where, how to keep the mortar clean, nearly invisible. All of these voices live in the same community, Garden City, which is my Yoknapatawpha County. I know where it’s going, but two of my characters have come into their own, and they might not do what I want them to do. I certainly can’t force them now that they’re walking around and speaking for themselves.

Language holds meaning, and the way we use it shapes that meaning. When I write, I hear echoes of what I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot (maybe not as much as Annie, but I’m no slouch when it comes to reading the greats). I never try to silence those echoes. In fact, if they’re faint, I return to the source and reread. Macbeth. The Wayward Bus. Sanctuary. And on and on.

I haven’t even been here a year, and I can say with certainty that this community saved me, not just my life but my voice, which will outlive my life.