The knowing becomes real in the making known

I received a copy of The Loft Literary Center’s catalogue in the mail today. The Loft’s mission is to support the artistic development of writers, to foster a writing community, and to build an audience for literature. I don’t know how many areas have literary centers and feel lucky that we do.

The Executive Director, Jocelyn Hale, wrote an opening letter that I really liked. It reminded me of me some years back, (well more than a few…I’m pretty sure I’ve only attended one class at The Loft since the ‘80’s. I was a card-carrying member for more than a few years, though, and still find it a place worth supporting. That I took a class a year or two ago on finding an agent is what got me this catalogue, if not an agent, and it’s probably worth the price of admission even though I can’t say exactly why.) Hale writes:

“I first became a member of the Loft in 1998 and would hover over the catalog conflicted about which class I should take. My emotions were all over the map. I worried that someone would demand a writers’ identification card when I entered the building. I wondered whether I was too advanced. I was sure that I had no talent. I wanted to take all the classes, but felt I had time for none – in fact, if I had any time, shouldn’t I spend it writing? Who was I to write? I should just read a good book. The more time I spent reviewing classes, the more mixed-up I became. Soon the catalog would become dog-eared and filled with sticky notes.”

After enjoying the trip down memory lane that Hale provided, I found myself musing over why I never felt that same confusion of excitement over spiritual offerings that I did over the chance of writing. I wondered if some people do. If they salivate over the catalogues, have visceral reactions to the descriptions of the classes, or feel those same feelings of wondering if they’re too advanced or will be shown to not know anything. I would imagine that sometimes there’s a pull. There’s generally a spiritual event or two each year that I feel a pull toward – as if there’s something there for me – but it’s not quite like with writing.

It may be that I got those “emotions all over the map” feelings over writing classes because I knew that if I was going to join a writing class, I would have to share my writing. I would have to share who I am. I’d have to be vulnerable. I’d have to “put myself out there.”

I still get that confused/excited feeling over writing and all manner of “putting myself out there,” stuff. I still am certain that it’s got a deeply spiritual component to it. I keep attempting to say why, and how it’s needed, mainly because I need it. Like Elizabeth Lesser. She wrote in “Broken Open” about writing an article and then having someone call her to do a workshop based on it. She shared all the feelings she had driving there on the appointed day, and how she wanted to throw up under a tree. I love that stuff. I need it. And I need it spiritually too. I need to hear about those times when an awareness was so painful that vomiting seemed the only way to go. I need people to describe their feelings and to quit trying to teach me things.

I know there are spiritual workshops that cause people to open up too. I haven’t had any desire to go to them. I don’t know why. But I know it doesn’t feel the same at all. Maybe it’s just how I’m made. You don’t ask a Sax player to come play the drums and expect him to come, or at least not to come with the same excitement he’d come with if he was going to be playing his own instrument. A chance to play drums might be fun but it wouldn’t really put you and your instrument, your means of expression, the thing you’re passionate about, the thing that matters to you…on the line. But it’s not exactly that either because it’s not about how much it matters or the passion or the instrument or the expression but more about something in you bursting to get out. That whole – if I don’t write this poem I’ll go insane thing.

These aren’t always the most pleasant feelings in the world, but I wouldn’t want to live without them. There’s some sort of truth and discovery thing that happens from that push or pull to bring what is inside out. It’s there in one of the great Jesus sayings:

“If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.”

And it’s there in The Dialogues of A Course of Love too – all manner of talk about the need to find your voice, come to expression –.

“It is as if through this union, you have learned a great secret that you long to share. But what is it? And how do you share it? How do you convey it? How do you channel it? Through what means can you express it? Can you put it into words, make it into images, tell it in a story? You will feel as if you will burst if you cannot share the union that you touch … How do you let it pass through you to the world? … You must express the unknown that you have touched, experienced, sensed, or felt with such intimacy that it is known to you because the knowing becomes real in the making known.”

It is as if, in following that pull, that internal urge or yearning, you’re finding the voice of God in you.

Puttering

This morning, I slept until 9:00. I thought it was 8:00. Suddenly realizing it was nine, I had to scramble to get to my job by ten. It wasn’t awful. It just reminded me of what it’s like to scramble.

Henry’s mom had spent the night away helping her sister prepare to move. I’d put Henry to bed without incident and then he awoke, at a time I never spotted on the clock, awash with wanting his mom. “I want my mom,” he wailed for what felt like hours. He wouldn’t be consoled. I kept saying, “I understand. Of course you do. It’s okay.” If I tried to touch him to comfort him he got madder and wailed with more vigor. Finally that moment came when I said, “That’s enough,” and scooped him up in my arms, only to find he’d wet through his pajamas. I changed him and read him his Thomas book once again. Then shut out the light. I went back to my bed at twenty after three. About six he crawled into bed with me, got back up to go get his book, and then snuggled in to the curve of my body. We slept until nine. I scrambled.

Back home from work with the house to myself, I do the opposite of scrambling. I putter. I am amazed “on the job” at what I get done in a few hours. I briefly think that I could do the same as home: scramble around and have everything that needs doing done quickly. Then I get up from my desk, heat my coffee, and put away the dishes. I go back to make the bed that I left in my scramble and the cats are sleeping there. I don’t need to disturb them. I’ll make it later. Coming back through the kitchen, I take out the garbage, spray the can with disinfectant, put in a new bag, retrieve my cup from the microwave, return to my desk.

This is puttering. It sets all the scrambling right. I feel back in my element.

It is not without its down side. Pretty soon I’m thinking, ‘Oh hell. I’ve got stuff all mixed up. Writing here, there, and everywhere. Cabin laptop, thumb drive, hard drive, desk top. I know I’ve written something, but where? And who cares?’

It’s a new day.

It is the strangest thing. Somewhere…maybe about three years into my spiritual experiences…I began to need to write with immediacy. Going back to the thoughts of the day before felt like turning back the hands on the clock. I was worried. ‘How,’ I asked myself, ‘can I remain a writer? How can I be a writer if I can’t go back? If I can’t develop a theme? If I can’t stick with anything? If I can’t revise?’ I swear, it feels like a miracle that I got a book written.

My spiritual and writing life has become that of a putterer. It fits my nature. It’s hard to put on a time-schedule. It’s unorganized. My desk rarely gets cleaned. I hardly ever back-up my computer. Everything I have to “try” to get myself to do makes me feel ornery and burdened. There’s a time that will come within the puttering…or not.

And then once in a while I have to scramble. I love the days, like today, when I find it an acceptable way to be.

Small potatoes

I’m having a horrible, horrible, horrible, writing morning. It makes me realize how much a good writing morning gives me. I sit here longer than I should hoping for a little of that “good writing” spark of joy that’ll carry me through my day. When I can do a bit of “good writing,” writing that feels from that “zone” you get in when all else leaves your mind, then I feel as if, no matter what happened yesterday, or might happen today, it hasn’t completely taken me away from myself. I’m still in touch with that place that’s not touched by the craziness of the times, or the particulars like getting your carpet cleaned three days before the grandkid, for the first time ever, decides to shake his sippy cup full of purple juice while he runs through the living room.

I say to Donny, “What are the chances of that?” And he says, “It always happens.”

He’s right. It does.

So you need that place. I need the place where it doesn’t matter.

I need the place where it doesn’t matter that I got my book launch scheduled, (January 7 in case you’re interested.) I need that place where it’s all small potatoes.

I get more anxious about finding that place when I’m working, which I am today. I got a great new client. He lives out in the country. The first day I drove out to meet him (early so that I’d be sure to find the place), it was raining (later turned to snow). I stopped in the middle of the dirt road with plowed fields on both sides. First I turned off the wipers. Then the heater. Then the car. Then I rolled the window down. Listened to the silence. I wrote a poem right there in the car. That’s how moved I was. That’s how empty the road was.

So I know I don’t have to sit here and wait for the zone, but sometimes I do. Sometimes it comes. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes it comes when you’re ready to get up, or you just got up. I just came back after throwing some towels in the dryer. When I look out the window now, there’s that dryer steam billowing into the early morning light. It turns pink and waves around like clouds on the move. It floats in front of the can of apple tree spray that’s hanging from the clothesline, and wafts over the grill, and up into the lilac bushes. It changes color like prisms of light. The sun creeps higher.

Sitting outside the door twiddling your thumbs

I entered the date this morning as I began my journal and it said October 22. It’s not the 22nd. It’s the 23rd. Yesterday I thought it was Wednesday. It was Thursday. Some days, everything feels off. Today is Friday and I’m going to meet my new client. It feels “off” to start a job on a Friday.

Some posts back I talked about taking an assisted living, companioning job. I was indecisive about taking it, and worried the client would depend on me so that, when I was ready to leave the job and get on with my writing life, I wouldn’t feel free to do it. I didn’t want a job I had to commit to. Then I got my first client.

She started trying to get rid of me almost from the day I arrived. The companionship was her family’s idea. She didn’t feel she needed me. She liked me, but she fired me three times before the family and the agency agreed to move on. By the end of the assignment it had grown absolutely hilarious. There was this day, for instance, when I sat outside her apartment door until a friend of hers saw me and went to get her away from a party.

I had all kinds of feelings about the sanctity of the home and the client’s right to choose. I didn’t want to be forced on her. She wanted to handle things one way; her family and the agency another. I was in the middle. But it turned out just plain funny (in a sweet way), a comedy of errors, and everyone was feeling pretty light about it.

I’ve been being shown lately that my worries can be foolish, and that it’s better to act than worry. I can’t always do it though. Can’t always follow what the squares on my calendar tell me to do. Can’t always make my own decision without considering a number of others. Things don’t always work out immediately. Sometimes you sit outside the door twiddling your thumbs.

Sometimes things feel heavy before they feel light.

Someone told me that the middle of change is hardest. I found that interesting, and most likely true. The beginning of change can be kind of exciting, or so startling, or sudden that it has a certain energy. By the end of a change, I suppose it’s not feeling so much like a change anymore, but more like a beginning. But in the middle….

I got a reply from Nouk Sanchez the other day (she’s in Belgium now). It was a response to my question about how much her efforts helped her success along. She told me (among other things) that she’s an introvert, and that radio and television appearances were particularly effortful for her, but that they were also exciting.

I wondered…Was that the beginning? Or the middle? Is the middle when you’re trying to find the new skills for the change that has begun?

I’ve been running with this idea a little bit, the combined idea of worry and change/beginning, middle and end. Is the worry the beginning, and the time when you write to people you don’t know asking, “Can you help me?” the middle?

But here’s the thing. I asked my daughter the other day – “What if you replaced the word “worry” with the word “sensitivity?” I’m very sensitive to what’s happening around me – to other people’s needs – and to my own. As you might imagine, when this appears as worry, it gets on other people’s nerves, not to mention mine. I’m “accused” of being a worrier. The atmosphere gets very heavy.

I don’t know that my daughter bought it, but it might help me to think of it this way, and to reframe my language and actions around the idea.

Financial worries are a kind of sensitivity – maybe a sensitivity you have to the consequences of your inability to act.

The times when you’re trying to find a balance, like the one between the writing life you love and a job that pays, are also a bit about the sensitivity you might have to different needs: the practical ones and the inner ones, yours and those of your partner or family.

Sensitivity was the truth of the situation with my first client. I was sensitive to her feelings of being forced. Then I heard the story from the other side: there were needs the client’s family were feeling; there were medical needs that the prudent nurse on staff didn’t want to have become critical needs. So I didn’t refuse to go back after I was fired the first and second times. I went back. I sat outside the door. I wondered if I was doing the right thing.

Is that rightfully labeled worry? Are we meant to always know the right way to go? Or do we sometimes have to wait and be patient with our conflicting concerns.

Couldn’t it be sensitivity, when you put marketing on the calendar, and then also have to find the ways to market that don’t feel “off?”

I’m pretty sure most writers and spiritual folks are sensitive by nature. We’re open. We observe. We get a sense of what’s going on beneath and beyond what appears to be. I’m not certain – I’m just noodling the idea – but just maybe, if we saw this trait as something other than worry, it might be a lot less heavy, let in a little light from time to time, and even rev up the speed through which we pass the hard middle of change.

...or you'll go insane

Well, I’ve done everything but what I started out to do again. I’ve checked my email (for a response from Ian (my son) because of notice of a virus, which I’m beginning to think is bunk), took a look at the article I wrote yesterday and made a notation at top with the particulars about it like word count (I’m getting so I can’t remember what I did yesterday and certainly not what I wrote), then sent a posting to my other blog and thought, while I’m at, why not do this one too. So, once again, no morning contemplation.

After a while, when you’re expending a bunch of energy trying to get still and in that zone, you realize you’re already there in a certain way, a sort of inspired way. It’s not the same thing as having nothing attracting you this way or that; not the same as the looking out the window time that you’re blessed to get in deep solitude; but it’s like a version of it. Maybe not the e-mail checking, or note taking, but that other place where you intend to sit quietly and you can’t for a churning going on inside of you.

I read an article Sunday about St. Paul’s poet laureate Carol Connolly. She said “A good poem can sometimes catch you unaware in your solar plexus. One line in a poem will open a door for you, and even though it might seem as though it’s not exactly connected to your life, somehow it is.” Then she says, “You get an idea, maybe from something you’ve seen or heard, and it keeps going around and around in your brain. You do whatever it takes to make it a poem or you’ll go insane.”

Doing what you need to do so that you don’t go insane may sound a little harsh, but it speaks to me. You could say as easily, “Doing what you need to do to stay sane,” and it wouldn’t have the same feel. “Doing what you need to do to “get” sane,” isn’t half bad. At any rate, it’s what I do with my mornings, and what writing does for the writer, and every once in a while, for the reader. That’s good enough for me.

Quotes from “Well versed.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 10-18-09, 8E, by Mary Ann Grossmann.

What You're Made Of

Good Lord, Good Lord, I say, as I always do when I look at the date. I’m going to be one of those old ladies who is always moaning the passing of time. I’m in the cabin. I left the heater on all night and it’s 47 in here. But it doesn’t feel half bad. I think that darn read out is like my mind – always getting me to think things are worse than they are.

My friend Mary’s husband John was over for a half hour waiting for Donny yesterday and he asked, “How is everything?” I said, “Uncertain.” Then I talked the whole half hour. When did he become easy to talk to? On my 50th birthday when he asked me what kind of guitar music I like and I said, “The kind that sounds like what you feel inside: like yearning; like loneliness?” And then when he brought some CD’s over? Or when I spoke of the cabin and he said, “You want to see what you’re made of?”

That fiftieth year. February, 2005. The cabin had been completed that fall. I was part of a writing group. I had the group (all dear friends) to the house for my birthday – my idea – my response when Donny asked, “What do you want to do for your birthday?” If I recall correctly, the men walked out to view the cabin and the women, including me, stood at the window of the warm house and looked out.

When John said, “You want to see what you’re made of,” I’d just told him, “All these years as a writer and I’ve rarely had six hours to string together without interruption, without the phone ringing, without other things calling for my attention. I want that.”

“You want to see what you’re made of.”

Isn’t that an odd expression? It was just the right one that night. I’m sure my eyes lit up. I’m thinking, “I want to see what “it’s” like, what my writing will be like when I can write from there. When I can get up in the morning and go out. Be by myself.” And he pulls it in: “You want to see what you’re made of.”

What have you got in there? What’s inside? What are you made of?

Mary Jane, wife of my friend Bob, had stood at the kitchen window with me, viewing the winter cabin that in other seasons gets hidden by a wall of grapevines, and told me, “You’re a good writer. I can write, but not like you.” She’d been reading my writing group essays and a manuscript that grew out of my solitude, the early days of it, before the cabin. Man. I couldn’t have set up my fiftieth birthday party any better than to have one where I got those kinds of gifts. I can’t help but write, would do it if no one liked it, but when you get encouragement! My heart sings with it, it really does.

When I got started in the cabin I never brought anything with me. No work to do. No e-mail. Just whatever came. But the best thing about writing is when it becomes your life. I wrote “The Given Self” out here. There was no division. No division between the work and my life. That, to me is the spiritual life.

Now the work is a little different but still not all that bad. And there’s still mornings I come with nothing.

Being Who You Are Is Not A Luxury

About a week ago, I got the first e-mail from my publisher (O Books) since I submitted my final proofs. It was from the marketing department and addressed those with books coming out in December. Catherine noted that the group was generating a lot of activity on the database and that she was glad to see we were all busy with our marketing efforts. Of course, I immediately felt as if I was trailing behind all those other industrious authors. The e-mail also offered help, but then it suggested where you could find it on the database.

I heard from another author who is doing very well, too. Mick Quinn’s book, “The Uncommon Path,” came out in July. He’s been very busy since then. Nouk Sanchez suggested the contact, and Mick, like Nouk, responded right away to my request for ideas on marketing. He sent me a couple of thing he’d produced and said, “Use the database. It’s a goldmine of contacts.”

Okay, already.

Since receiving the marketing department’s e-mail encouragement I ignored the suggestion that I write a short, bulleted reply about my needs and wrote instead that I don’t know what my needs are and that the things I have done, and am supposed to enter on the database, have not worked out real well. But I also actually sent my first article to a source found on the database, and I was able to enter the fact that I contacted my local paper’s book reviewer and she’d agreed to look at the book. The woman from Barnes and Noble has played a little phone tag with me, but it sounds like a launch site has been found too. This is movement.

So enough, already. I just want to admit outright that I’m one of those people who can think there must be a better way even when all evidence points to the contrary. It’s served me at times in matters of spirit, and since it has, I always at least look at it as an option.

And finally, just to speak of something that feels of my heart, a subject that came up with my friend Mary today, I’ll just give myself a minute’s peace from marketing ideas and talk about that. Mary and I always talk from the heart, and today we were marveling over the idea that it may not only be what keeps us sane, but what keeps us healthy. You know how you get all pent up with your various anxieties? And then how, if you can talk to someone who understands, they practically vanish? This is a large part of heart talk in my book (which I was using as an expression but it is actually a part of “The Given Self” too).

It’s hard to express the difference between heart sharing and general griping, but I’d say you can tell the difference by the way you feel afterwards. If your load feels lightened, you’ve been doing some heart sharing. If you feel drained and irritable, you’ve been doing little more than sharing gripes. I wrote a post not long ago on my alternate blog http://spit-and-vinegar.blogspot.com about this very thing, and the radical idea that what we call complaints, could be seen as acceptance of the way we feel.

I’ve applied the same general principle to the issue of marketing, and I still feel that the matter of energy – what gives a person energy and what drains it – is a good gauge of when you’re following your heart. Now you might say that marketing has nothing to do with following your heart, but the thing is, how can it be any good if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, you’re just doing busy work. The article I submitted came from my heart. I didn’t have to enjoy researching where to submit it so much, but I did have to be in that good energy place to write it and to care enough about it to follow through with the submission.

One of the great lines from “A Course of Love” is “Being who you are is not a luxury.” It’s not for the chosen few who have nothing to gain or lose. It’s for all of us.

One Good Reason to Write

I’ve been feeling terribly unmoved to write lately…to just sit down and write what comes. It’s a feeling that’s been helped along by the Twins winning the central division. Their division-clinching game Tuesday night was about as much emotional tension as I need to feel or expel, and that’s what I do a lot of in writing.

Last night’s game wasn’t bad either. My daughter was out, and Donny and I got the idea of making caramel apples with Henry. I unwrapped individual caramels while I watched the middle innings. I was melting them about the time the tension started and Donny went out in the cold to pick the apples. The game went on so long that when it was over, I took Henry right to bed. This morning all the caramel was sitting like pants around the ankles of the apples. I’d forgotten to refrigerate them.

There was this moment of hope, right before I took Henry to bed, that the Twins might beat the Yankees. I love the way that feels. You can admire the Yankee players all you want but when you see them mix it up with a small-fry team like the Twins, you get the feeling that it’ll take a miracle for the Twins to win and you know that the hope of a miracle is intrinsic to baseball. It wouldn’t be a sport without it.

I feel that way as a writer too, that all the mechanics of writing stand aside for moments of magic or miracles. I’ve got sillier things that run through my mind too though, and for a moment I was imagining myself and my work as the Twins and popular writers and their work as the Yankees. Yes, I know, childish, but it didn’t feel half bad to imagine that kind or possibility being out there, or to imagine there being tons of folks rooting for small writers.

I’d been thinking about this kind of thing a lot anyway but in a more political/social way: about the disparity between the rich and the poor. I was on the Huntington Post blogsite reading an article written by a writer friend - Catherine Ingram’s Report on the Vancouver Peace Summit. She noted how Maria Shriver had asked the Dalai Lama what he worries about. I was glad, first of all, that he had worries (you know how that is…it makes you feel more normal), and then that we shared this one about the great divide between the haves and the have nots.

Then tonight I read a bit of the email newsletter I get from Parker Palmer’s group (couragerewal.org). I found out that Palmer is writing a new book called “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy." He’s worried too. His preview to the opening of his book ended with this:

“If we care about the fate of democracy in America, we can no longer afford to do business as usual in any of the settings of our common life, from schools to the workplace to the public arena, since “business as usual” not only excludes the heart but sends it scurrying to find cover. … We must call upon the better angels of our nature for the sake of restoring ”we, the people“ and our shared quest for a common good.

This, I believe, is a possible impossibility.”

The possible impossibility. The miracle. The Brokenhearted.

It got me feeling in sync…as if…Ah, what’s on my mind and in my heart is out there in some good places.

“The Given Self” begins with talk of heartbreak. It’s another silly thing you do as a writer – you get to feeling that an idea you express is kind of unique to you, and rarely in a good, sane way. You feel like you’re surely going to be found odd, or that what you say will be scarily foreign to what anyone else is feeling. So then you kind of marvel when you hear folks saying the same thing and feel as if they’re using “your” language…”wow…isn’t that cool,” and then begin to have this hope, not the kind that’s like having the right buzz word before it’s a buzz word, but that there’s a common longing that’s coming to expression.

You start to feel part of something. It’s one good reason to write.

Some Kind of a Miracle

I’m beginning to see that if anyone ever begins to follow this blog, that it won’t be for publishing advice. This is as it should be.

It seems to me that there are about three tidbits of information that are actually valuable in life and the rest is all fluff. None of us need more information. And besides which, providing it is about the most boring thing in the world.

For instance, I could tell you how I finally took the calendar off my wall in my office (it still held a snow scene for being on the month of February), and turned it to September, and than had the month I needed turn to October before I wrote anything on it. What I wrote were simple words: research, mailing, database, article, follow-up. You can guess what they mean about as well as I can. They’re telling me to do one thing on Monday, the next on Tuesday and so on. Since I never make lists or use a calendar I can’t yet tell you if these words will actually help me feel empowered, organized, productive or least of all effective. I’m hitting that place where I’m not sure I care.

That’s the only place from which you write words on calendars as if they’ll save you. Remember this. It is important.

Working with inspiration or some spark of creativity is the only thing that’s ever going to make you feel like your work has meaning. Banish me from the Anne Lamott writers circle for saying so (at least if you’re one of those writers who has to be told to sit down and write everyday). If you’re not a writer who needs to discipline yourself to write (which heaven help me I can’t imagine for never having been one), then you do not need to be told to write through the boredom. You are going to write even if all you have to write is your lament about writing stupid words on a stupid calendar.

If you are able to get an agent, and wait a year (or three), and find a publisher who still does marketing for you and does it well, then by all means do so. Do not put yourself through this hell. If you are going to write impatiently and take the route of least resistance, then you will likely end up like me, and be forcing yourself with whatever kind of list or organizing tips you embrace, to do a bunch of stuff you don’t want to do. And if you’ve gone around a certain bend, one of those that come with spirit or age, the kind that says if you have to work that hard, put in that much effort, it is not the right way to go, then you might have to face that place where your dreams are not aligning with your level of ambition. It is why the vast majority people with successful careers establish themselves when they are young and still have the tolerance and the dexterity to jump through the hoops. I am not that young.

I did, however, have a couple of very moving things happen in the past few weeks, and they came of asking for help. It started in one area – a request for help with a family matter – and it felt so good to have asked for help that I asked again in another area – and then some help I hadn’t asked for at all arrived unexpectedly and I felt as if I’d opened the floodgates with the first asking, and as if this was all the universe had been waiting for.

This only just occurred to me, and so like the words on the calendar I can’t tell you it’s going to be the answer, but it suddenly dawned on me that these marketing things are all, at this point, a matter of asking: “Would you like to read my book? Hear what it’s about?”

You can call the powers that be “the universe,” or “God” or “your friends” or even “the media,” (depending on what kind of help you need, which square of a day that you’re standing on, or maybe the contents of your wallet), but I was reminded of the power of asking, the honesty that gets you to do it, and the benevolence that it can, at times unearth. And that reminder gave me just a glimmer of hope, of a non-ambitious, what do I have to lose attitude (to replace my sour one), that comes down to basically, “It can’t hurt to ask.”

Oh, you think it will and you can get yourself all tied up in knots about it, but in the end, when you finally try it, it’s not so bad at all. And in almost every instance, no matter what your query, the nature of the universe, and even specific portions of it, are kind of set up in such a way that need, and response to need, are part of the picture (i.e., book reviewers do need to review books). Whether you phrase it as “help” or not, the chances are there’s somebody out there (including book stores, therapists, and friends) who’s got a stake in saying, “Sure,” and might even feel good about being of service even if they’re not salivating to do so.

So I’ll do a little asking.

But I also want to say that the walls you hit, the places where it doesn’t seem worth it, or where your skills don’t line up with what you need to do, are legitimate places and can bear looking at. We each have limits. They’re not necessarily lazy, slacker, don’t want to work that hard places for which you need to feel small and guilty. For every writer who publishes there’s probably a thousand who write very well and don’t ever try, and another thousand who try once or twice and give up, and a thousand who feel bad about it and a thousand who don’t.

Writing is a beautiful art. It’s full of heart and soul. It makes you feel more vulnerable than a bird that weighs less than a quarter. You’re probably already sensitive by nature, and you’re probably, when it comes right down to it, not bequeathed with too many extroverted genes. You write because you love to write and you spend a lot of time alone, and quite frankly, you like it that way. Having a “successful” book has never been, in other words, the reason you write.

A “small” book is not a defeat. Just read Annie Dillard (“The Writing Life”) if you want backhanded encouragement, or to feel that any book, any good book at all, is some kind of a miracle.