Sunday, June 06, 2010
Through the Dark Valley of Publishing
Journal Entry 1:
My agent has submitted my latest memoir, Gone Home, for consideration for publication. She has written a lovely letter, pitching several editors at houses that include St. Martin’s, Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Tarcher, Little Brown and so many others.
She writes: I'm very pleased to be sending you Jennifer Lauck's new memoir GONE HOME.
This is the book that will take the readers of her phenomenally bestselling Blackbird to the place they will want to go next. Beyond her story of
childhood abuse and survival, Jennifer travels the terrain that brings her
to become a fully realized person - a mother, a partner, and most of all a
woman who experiences the life that's in front of her. It is Jennifer's
search for her biological/birth mother that finally opens her understanding
of motherhood, a path for which she has had neither models nor direction,
and the source of her lifelong elusive seeking. It is her experience with
her birthmother that seals her quest for identity and ultimately allows her
to embrace just who she is in the world.
The power of this book resides in Jennifer's telling. Her subject will also
impact the great number of people who are affected by adoption - the 500,000 U.S. women who seek to adopt each year, the 150,000 children who are adopted annually, and the over 50 million adult adoptees in the US today…
I’m impressed by my agent’s letter. I’m touched.
To this point, I have been spinning from the writing of the story—the sheer intensity of creation, which itself is a process of utter absorption—and haven’t thought of it as powerful or good or even bad. It just is. I’ve witnessed a life. What feels important is to get it right—to have been generous to all who have played a part in the story of my life. I’ve been careful to conceal the identity of those who won’t want their lives connected to mine. I’ve checked in with all those who are beloved to me—the ones in the inner circle. I’ve read Gone Home aloud to my own children, since they are on nearly every page. My son cried. My daughter asked important questions. My former husband read it and he cried too. He wasn’t displeased. He said I had been accurate and fair. He said, “you did it, Jen. You hit it out of the ball park.” 
The day we submit the book to NY editors falls between my son’s thirteenth birthday and my former husbands forty ninth birthday. It feels like carnival to go out in the midst of these celebrations that consume our family attention. I am high on ice cream and cake and gift buying.
Journal Entry 2
Eight days have passed in shattering silence and a form of amnesia has set in. I don’t know what I have written. I’m a blank. In this void, I become sure the book is just terrible. Horrible. No, it’s sauerkraut. Oh, the voices that come in the night—the wailing of doubt. I’m driven deeper into my meditation practice at dawn and at mid-day, I’m the one whimpering in the corner of the yoga studio—counting each exhale and reminding myself that the evilness in my mind are just thoughts. “Thoughts are harmless,” I tell myself. It hurts to breathe and be.
Journal Entry 3
I have a theory. When my agent has bad news, she sends an email.
When she bears good news, she calls.
Ten days have passed when the first email comes. As I read it, my internal organs feel like they are being gripped in a vise. She writes, “It’s BEA (a national book fair in NY), everyone is swamped. No news is good news.”
Journal Entry 4
Twelve days have passed when a new email arrives. “Okay, four presses have bowed out,” she writes. “Too much like Blackbird, one editor said. She obviously didn’t read the book. I expected this. No big deal. We’ll talk next week.”
Another email comes, my agent has forwarded a note from an editor who wants a full proposal and includes this as her reason: “I'm sure you're well aware that a beautifully written literary book isn't enough these days, so if you can prepare some materials for us by Monday that would be wonderful.”
I write back to my agent, “does this mean she likes the book?”
My agent writes back, “she hasn’t finish it yet, she’s only a third of the way in.”
Journal Entry 5
A quiet Sunday. It rains so much, I conjure images of the ark and animals paired up, two by two. It’s June in Portland. The Rose Festival.
While the children play at their father’s house, I pull together a proposal. I compare my book to other books on the market place. I write things like: “My book is better because…” “I am affiliated with all the right organizations like….” “You will make money if you buy my book because….” 
This feels sad to me—like I’m grinding dead fish into chum. I remind myself that fish guts are important—chum helps the garden grow.
Journal Entry 6
What does it mean, to write a book? What does it matter even? Why do we do it? More importantly, why do I do it?
I guess the only answer I can come up with is this. I had to do it.
Did I ever expect publication when I wrote Blackbird, in 1998? No. The opposite was true. I expected nothing and when publication came—I was bewildered and as amnesiac as I am today. When I get a letter saying something good about Blackbird, I re-read pages within my own book. I try to see what the letter-writer saw. I shake my head.
Now that I have had the experience of publication though, I expect to be published and to be successful even. During all this waiting, I tell myself I will be a failure without both.
It is not what happens to my book that hurts, or even if anyone ever reads what I have laid out, so carefully, on the page. What hurts is my own thinking that doesn’t go to the depths of truth. Is a human beings value in being purchased for publication? Is a person’s worth measured by recognition? And yet, I must ask, how does a writer, a creator, an artist, sustain herself without publication? How can a writer, a creator, an artist carry on with her work? What of the future? What of feeding the children? (Questions of feeding my well-fed children can always get me shaking.)
These are the hard questions and the ones posed—in dark hours—by every artist. It’s cliché perhaps but I cannot help but turn to Virginia Woolf, who wrote of a room of ones own and money of ones own too. Didn’t Woolf makes us remember that so many great women thinkers and creators of our time will never put a pen to paper because they languish in busy-ness over pots on the stove and diapers that need changing? Who am I then to complain? To worry? At least I have the freedom to have written four books about my life—and two novels—and countless entries on the blog.
What is true is my true good fortune.
What is true is that I need to think more deeply about my own calculation of success and failure. I need a new system of measurement. 
No one needs to see a flower open to the sky to make that happening a miracle. The flower is sustained by the earth, at its root. And by the water that falls abundantly. And by the worm, that works the soil. And also by the light that rises each day. The flower lives, the flower is perfect and the flower dies—all in a moment—all without fanfare or publication or a paycheck.
Why can’t I be like the flower?
Which one of us is more alive?
Finally, with these questions, my thoughts are silent. I have no more voices that wail of disaster. There is finally quiet—that birthright of life.
I think a taco would be nice, for dinner. I stop writing, for now.
2 Comments:
Beautiful, thoughtful writing. Insightful and deep and ending with the thought of a taco. I love, love love it. Thanks ever so.
Thank you! Great to see you here. xo
Post a Comment
<< Home