Dear Especially After Breaking: What If You Decide With The Full Force Of Your Own Formidable Wisdom?
From the Archive | Lit Salon on subjecting our tenderest, most vulnerable and heart-soaked material to the "brutality" of publishing + the magic of milkweed, crow & moon + a possible middle ground
Dear Jeannine,
Many years ago, I won’t tell you how many, except to say the world was very different then, and quieter, I gave birth to a baby girl.
I want to tell you the whole truth about it, which is that I was a teenaged mother, unwed and terrified. But, also, I was—strangely—a little bit happy about the circumstance of becoming pregnant, for reasons that I did not understand then and still do not fully understand now. I was not particularly, prior to my daughter’s birth, familiar with or enamored with babies, as some friends of that time were wont to be. I was more interested in the physical world and its workings: the silken mystery of the milkweed pods in fall, the behavior of the homebody ravens that roosted in our rural Minnesota trees, the shape of moonlight on snow. But, as with the surprise of my small, secret happiness over the pregnancy, I discovered, once my daughter actually came into being, with her dark eyes and hands that curled open and shut like flowers, that I was unexpectedly well suited for the task of caring for her.
Mind you, I wasn’t alone in the responsibility, thankfully—I could never have managed had it not been for my parents. They were unusually, even stubbornly (considering the social ramifications they themselves endured) supportive of me, their only child. So much so that my daughter and I lived with them for the first several years of her life, as I completed my high school credits and got myself into a nursing career, a wise decision that worked extremely well for my daughter and me, a happy outcome that I owe in part to my mother’s guidance, for she, too, was a nurse.
By the time my daughter entered first grade, I took on full-time work at a pediatric practice, where I was able to report on a regular schedule compatible with my daughter’s school hours. That’s also when I began to make stories. It started off simply enough, with little adventure tales I dreamed up for my daughter, stories of secret happenings in the natural world, where the silken mystery of the milkweed pods or the inner sanctum of those homebody crows or the strange cavernous spaces beneath the crusted surface of moonlight on snow would reveal themselves to an especially attentive child, a child like my daughter. In these stories, the physical world I have always loved would open like the doors of a wardrobe to a lively, thrumming universe beyond the one of our common knowledge.
Eventually, I felt compelled to write the stories down for my daughter, so that we would have them later, perhaps for sharing with my daughter’s own child one day, if ever she were to have one. And I found that when I wrote the stories down, they changed, and not for the worse, as I feared they might. Instead, they grew more radiant, as I chiseled each image and clarified each turn of fate. I even found myself giving the girl in the stories a bit more angularity, a bit more particularity, edges that were rougher and realer, so that she felt, I think, more precise and articulated, as if I would know her face and voice if I were to run into her at the Red Owl. In their written form, the stories became light-filled in a way I never could have predicted. I loved them, to tell you the truth. And in that love, I recognized something else, which was my own sensibility for not just the natural world and its mysteries, but also for the words to convey the world.
I was becoming, it seemed, a real writer.
Then, on a winter day when my daughter was nine years old, an unspeakable thing happened. The ice was of the black, invisible kind, and the school bus couldn’t stop, there was simply nothing anyone could have done. She was sitting in the front. I don’t wish to say more about it. This was all a long time ago for the world, but not for me. The clock inside a mother’s heart runs differently, and stops at frequent intervals, especially after breaking.
I never married or had another child, but I did continue a rich and fulfilling career in nursing, while remaining close to my parents until they passed, one after the next, about ten years ago.
My question for you now pertains to the stories I wrote all those years ago. For a long time, I forgot about them, so to speak. What that means is that I chose to stow them away in a cedar chest with other special, painful, beautiful reminders of this great love I’d been fortunate enough to have in my life for too short a time.
Now, as an older woman, I’ve pulled the stories out again, finally, and they’ve become my evening reading. In the words and worlds of these stories, my daughter lives. And I’m surprised at how lovely they are, generally speaking. I dreamed them for my beloved child, yes, but they have about them that quality of transcendence that is more than a child’s tale. I could easily adapt them in that manner people do now with fairy tales, using the same frames to hold more mature literature. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just sentimental, but I don’t think so. I’ve never been prone to excess sentiment, and especially not since losing my girl. The stories, I am quite convinced, are good.
And because the stories are good, I can’t help but wonder if I should try to shine them up in one way or another, whether for children or adults, I’m not yet sure, and share them with the world—you know, submit them for publication to a journal or collect them into a manuscript that might become a slender novella of a kind? Despite being older, I’m only rather recently retired from nursing, and have perfectly decent internet skills. Here I am on Substack, after all! So I am capable of researching the publishing questions on my own, although I am very happy for your advice should you have any, since I have never submitted anything for publication at any point in my whole long life, and I know it's a fairly brutal affair these days, the publishing bit. I’ve lived long enough to face that down that kind of brutality, but not without some reservations.
Which brings me to the deeper and more pointed question I bring to you: Should I stop now, before I even begin, and keep these stories of the heart safe for myself and for the memory of my daughter, rather than subjecting them to a process that might break the spell of beauty into which I now enter whenever I sit with them, whenever I enter their meticulously and lovingly drawn worlds?
What would you do, if the stories, and the circumstances, were your own?
Love,
Especially After Breaking
Dear Especially,
I had to look up the whole bit about crows being homebodies, just based on your one potent, quietly spellbinding comment about them. It turns out that, according to the National Wildlife Federation, you are exactly right (not surprising): “Young mature birds eventually set out on their own to start their own families, although some crows may stay at home for up to seven years.”
Your letter shows that there are so many ways to be a writer. So many ways to do as you say, and “convey the world.” And I want you to know that I’ve never received a question like yours—which is more than a question. You’ve brought me with you into those shapes of moonlight on snow. I am very grateful.
So grateful that I feel, I have to admit, a bit protective of your milkweed, crow & moon stories, these radiant creations, alive and thrumming in their own right, that you’ve sheltered, for all these years, inside the memory of your daughter which itself lives inside your partly broken heart. That sheltering, in itself, feels like a wildly creative act, a living act, a building and overseeing of what you call a “thrumming universe beyond the one of our common knowledge.”
I feel, somehow, as if seeing those stories sitting in the dustbin of Submittable—duly marked as “received” or “in progress” or “declined”—may not be the most sensible or loving path for you, your stories, or your soft heart.
I don’t want to patronize you, however. You are very clearly a strong, intelligent woman, and if you feel you want to submit these stories (revised or not) for publication, one at a time or as a manuscript, you should by all means do so. And of course, you didn’t mention self-publishing on Substack, but that’s an avenue as well, just a different one.
Just know that even if you decide to pursue publishing your stories, that choice will not make them more of anything that they are not already, and it could make them less, simply by overlaying the magic of what you now feel for them with the patina of grief and commerce inherent to the publishing process.
Even now, in my own mind, your stories, which I’ve never read, have changed me, just for the special light of memory you’ve cast around them. I hope that whatever you do, you will prioritize the drop of oil that keeps that light aglow.
All this said, I want to bring your own attention to something else in your beautiful letter, which is the part where you said to me, “I was becoming, it seemed, a real writer.” I hear the truth of this in your letter. You felt it then, and I feel it now.
To think, you saw this in yourself all those years ago! Before life did as life does, and knocked the breath out of you. Still, you retained your keen sense of observation. That’s clear in your letter. And your words. That, too, is clear. This suggests you are, even now, continuing to become the real writer you were back then, and, as happens, even realer.
With that in mind, Especially, I wonder about a middle ground.
What if, instead of sending out your milkweed, crow & moon stories (which is how I think of them, based on your lovely description), you started with stories written anew, stories written now? Fiction or non, it matters not, you need only bring yourself to bear in saying something wholly, irrefutably real and true from your vantage point today.
Maybe in that way you could first navigate what you call the brutality of publishing with that newer material less wholly drenched in spirit, so that if you are to experience your first literary rejection, you needn’t have that particular pain bound to the stories you created for and with your daughter. (By the way, I have written repeatedly about the intersection of the art of writing and the commercial aspects of publishing, including here.)
Once you get your sea legs with the whole business side of the thing, you can decide with the full force of your own formidable wisdom whether you wish to send the milkweed stories through the same process.
Whatever you decide, may the spell of beauty around these meticulously and lovingly drawn worlds never, ever break. If they ever do find their way into the world, I certainly want to know about it.
Love,
Jeannine
If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy these others from the archive:
I Was A Child in A Child’s Body
Some Might Have Called the Roses Garish
This is My Body, Filling My Body
THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS
Advanced Techniques for Writing that Stirs Emotion
Study with me next month! Registration opens May 17, paid and founding members receive 10% & 15% discounted tuition respectively, codes sent to eligible members on registration morning.
Oh my, what a beautiful exchange!! This letter was so heartbreaking and beautiful. I second everything that you said here Jeannine, as I too, feel very protective of this material. I will also encourage you to consider Substack as an option. I have submitted so many stories and poems through submittable to various literary magazines to have them repeatedly “declined”. (And rarely, yes, accepted.) After so many rejections I was convinced something was fundamentally “wrong” with my writing. But lo and behold, when I published the same poems on Substack, they were shared widely and I have received so many beautiful comments/ messages on why/ how they resonated with people. The publishing world can be too cruel sometimes to stomach. And the decisions are so random. But with, or without publishing, I’d say, keep on writing! You are a beautiful writer!
Oh, the beauty in this letter. I was moved to tears, both by the heartbeat of the letter and response. And if being "a real writer" means moving something inside of people with the written word, then yes, yes, yes, a real writer. Regardless of where those stories go, their existence touches something deep inside of me and it seems the story of those stories is one of its own- one that's alive with ache and beauty all at once. "The shape of moonlight on snow" took my breath away, I reread and drank in that line more than once. Thank you for this. I hope this woman continues to write with the full force of her formidable wisdom. ♥︎