The Vanishing Point

Here's a photo snapped at sunset off the Oregon Coast while my author husband and I were spending a few days on a writing retreat. My new novel, Widow's Walk, had just reached a scene in which the main character, a widow, is instructed to look into the vanishing point. How could I communicate how terrifying this was for her, but at the same time, compelling?

John and I had just finished an early dinner at the Asana Bistro and returned to our cabin to sit on the bench while the sun went down. We'd watch for the green flash. But what I saw was something that, because of the story I've been trying to tell for months now, felt even more stunning. I was looking right out over the ocean at was was clearly the vanishing point. The clouds, the water, the point of light, all those colors around that SPACE just shook me with a realization that I needed, somehow, to get into my book.

Twice in this life I have been widowed. I know the secrets that widows hesitate to tell. About a week after the death of my first husband another widow took me off into a corner and in a low voice said, "Honey, no one but maybe I will tell you this, but..." and then she told me one detail of her own reaction to her husband's death that stopped my breath for a moment. If she could do as she had done, then it might be possible for me to also do what I needed to survive.

Two years after my second husband died and I had just married my third (!), I thought I might write a trilogy of husband books. After the first one, The Root of Beauty, I hit a wall of impossibility. And then it came to me: This isn't about the husbands. This is about widowing itself. It needs to be a novel. I sat down at my computer and the first lines of Widow's Walk emerged.

"I woke thinking nothing had happened, thinking the green curtains an ocean the way they waved, forgetting where I was and why and who I might be with—a stranger I imagined I knew but never knew. I'd slipped my hand from his, pretending then, pretending now, constructing our reality on a breath, on a wave, and believing it."

I'm hoping to share bits of this writing experience here from time to time. There's so much I still haven't imagined.

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