I think over 65 people! It was a great book launch! That’s Jennifer Sperry Steinorth introducing me.
That’s it. I’m exhausted. I’m so exhausted (add to this my back pain) I’m not planning any more readings for a while. But the book launch was wonderful! A large room full of people! I should have had the snacks catered, but instead I went to Costco, limped my way down the aisles using the cart as a walker and bought mega-boxes of not-very-well-considered snacks. Oh well.
James Wright
What I really want to write about is writers. Writers hole up, I’d say. They want quiet and time to think. Not just think, but time to let the mind settle so it can sink down below the ordinary. It’s fluid and surprising under there, before thought hardens as it reaches the surface. This is not a willed quality. Writers are just this way. Most of us know how to be temporarily gregarious. I have practiced all my life to be “normal.” You know what I mean if you’re like me. You carefully rest your mind on the surface, say the surface things, unless you’re exceptionally brave and just stand in a corner, silently. The great poet James Wright did that. He would stand aside, even if the gathering was in his honor, and say nothing. Nothing. But then, put him with baseball fans and he would light up and talk.
There are certain requirements for real writing, the kind that changes people. There’s a Buddhist prayer that begins “May all beings be happy, free from suffering….” but the way I learned it added, after each attribute, “and the root of suffering.” It isn’t enough to be free from suffering momentarily on the surface. It’s important to reach the root of it, see it all the way down to where it starts. Point being, seeing requires stillness, looking longer than for a moment into the self.
I love the actual reading, people listening and appreciating. Truth is, I couldn’t write without the memory of that audience because the words don’t stand alone. They’re connectors to others. I don’t write thinking of that, but there’s the sense that that’s where the words are ultimately going. Outward.
But truth is, it exhausts me. Some people are energized by people. I’m the other kind of person. My daughter Kelly gave me Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain). The book helps, if you’re like this.
There’s always a person, or people, out there when you write. Words were invented to talk to them. In that sense, the only true introvert is one who doesn’t talk. But even if you don’t talk, you’re still thinking, and the thinking is having a conversation, attending the party, right?
Helen Raica-Klotz and me, under the sign for the cider named after my book.
I should say also, I loved what I called my Antrim County book launch at Bee Well Meadery in Bellaire. It’s a small space, maybe 12-14 people there, but they were mostly young, listening carefully, very enthusiastic, and asked great questions afterward. I was energized.
At this time of my life I seem to be shedding rather than accumulating. My often difficult and varied life now wants to shed itself in words. If words were leaves, they’d be bright colors.
I used to love jumping in piles of leaves. I grew in in the Ozark mountains, with its gorgeous sugar maples, red maples, oaks, gingkos. Their crunching and rustling. Their swishing, their whispering across the sidewalk. The world felt malleable and all before me to mess with. To pile up and collapse the piles. I’m still doing it.