The Generosity of Readers

The light and shadow, solidity and wisp, Autumn. I had more brilliant pictures of Fall color more intense than any here since I arrived eighteen years ago. But this one captures best the complexity of my readers' comments and the effect they have had on my re-write of Widow's Walk. Five talented and generous people have now read my first draft, and a few more are right in the middle of it. Already their comments are giving the narrative more depth and filling it in where I took too much for granted.

I spend from three days to a week or more with each reader, returning to the narrative through their eyes, listening as deeply as is possible for me to their questions, suggestions, confusions, reactions. Each reader has his or her unique gift that motivated me to request their assistance, from personal experience with the flow and content in this novel, to a particularly accomplished sense of literary structure, to a creative ability with language, to a habit of reading contemplatively. None of them disappoint, and all are focused and keen in their critique.

I am so excited! Here I am, experiencing my novel again and again with the comments of each reader, It's a bit like this: if I were a painter I would be pondering my canvas and another very skilled painter would be standing at my shoulder pointing out this and that. A stroke of aquamarine, perhaps, or a thread-thin line of crimson cutting through. Soften the sharp edge of orange. Apply a tiny bit of gold leaf, just here, like sunlight in the summer field.

Do my readers know how much they give to me? Because of them I continue. They are so close to me as I undertake this task that I feel them, each of them, in my heart and mind, my fingers and my soul. With each of them I write this book again. I see the difference even a comma in the absolutely right place makes. (Do you see how I scrambled the words of that last sentence against all the rules? I love doing that!)

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Carol in the Hand of God

Carol in the Hand of God My friend Carol died yesterday. She'd been ill for a while and was on dialysis, but none of us thought her passage would come so soon. She already was on her journey from this world to the next when I took this picture of storm clouds at sunset Tuesday evening, just hours before her death the next day. At first I saw only the amazing combination of clouds, rainbow and color. And I saw the strange burst of light. But not until yesterday evening, after I heard she had dropped her body and was on her way, did my eyes adjust to see that Hand formed by the clouds. Nor did I see that the light seemed to have a human form, leaning foward, a spirit taking flight. Carol? Some of us do this--see the Virgin Mary in the ice crystals on a window, Jesus in the bark of a tree. Normally we'd see ice; we'd see the tree. It's the timing that makes the difference. It's the coming together of two realities, normally disconnected, but suddenly one even...

WIDOW'S WALK IS PUBLISHED

I Have Always Been With You Artist: Shiloh Sophia WIDOW'S WALK, A NOVEL · FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018 A sense of loss followed me like a shadow all my life. Real loss. Actual dead and gone kind of loss. Maybe it’s like that for everyone; who can know unless they tell you? From early childhood I knew I’d have to do something about this haunting or it would eat me up. There’s an old 16 mm film of me as a three-year-old circling the tiny grave of a bird that died--a tiny yellow chicken that my neighbor Minnie Osborn gave me from her coop. I’m performing a kind of ritual, like a priest circling the altar with incense. You can see the tears on my cheeks. As life goes on we lose a lot of who and what we love, those people and things that make us what we are. Maybe every experience of love continues as a part of us. Maybe we are made of the bits and pieces of the content of every moment we’ve lived--all we’ve seen and heard and touched and smelled, every gaze, embr...

Getting Close

The printer’s proof is in the mail on its way to me. And here is the book’s cover with Shiloh Sophia’s painting. To my eye She is the perfect image of the Widow in all her paradox. She is the meeting place of opposites: the fiery annihilation of all that was formerly known, meeting the transformation in the present moment; the interpenetration of all colors and forms; the stillness of inner being with the evolution of new life; the suffering heart out of which grows the Tree of Life; the breath of Divine Spirit from which emerges the personal story; the sacred Rose, woman’s mandala of integration and wholeness. She is Wisdom, the brilliance of love, truth and beauty. After examining my options for publication and balancing them with my understanding of how my writing life fits into the variations of energies in this world, I’ve chosen to continue publishing independently, using CreateSpace as printer, and John’s and my CyberScribe Publications as my publishing imprint. Since 198...

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