Planning a family reunion this summer? Whether your group convenes at someone’s home, at a campsite in the Adirondacks or a dude ranch in Montana, a little planning will help ensure that far-flung friends and family member meet and greet, talk during the event, and remember the visit fondly long after it ends. 

Why leave food preparation to just a few?
Divide the adults (and kids, too, depending on ages) into mixed, non-family groups and assign them each a meal, which they are responsible to plan, cook, serve, and clean up. This eases the workload and gives people a chance to mingle.

Rent a pizza oven for one meal, and have everyone make their own. Give prizes for tastiest, most creative, most unusual… (Try Fairy-ring Mushroom, Prosciutto, and Leek from Little Island.http://www.girlichef.com/2014/06/mush… )

Bake cupcakes and set out frosting, sprinkles, candies… and have people decorate their own. 

During meals it can help to have a few prompts to kick start conversation:
Have everyone come up with two true statements about themselves and one falsehood. Guess which one is the lie. 

Ask people to get out one item from their wallet or purse and tell something about themselves based on it. 

Periodically ring a chime and have everyone answer one of the following: 
1. What was/is your dream job and why?
2. Which celebrity/famous person would you like to invite for dinner and why?
3. What is your dream vacation destination and why?
4. What is/was your favorite subject in school? Why?
5. If you were an animal, which animal would you be and why?
6. What is your favorite food / movie/ book / sport…?
7. What is the most important item you pack in your suitcase?
8. Name one modern convenience you couldn’t live without.

Some structured activities between meals will get people laughing and talking, rather than gazing at their tablets and smartphones.
Give everyone a sheet of paper and have them write down one or two things about themselves that others aren’t likely to know (and that they don’t mind others knowing, i.e., not that upcoming elective surgery.) Then have them fold the paper into an airplane. (Be forewarned, some folks will spend a long time on this.) Line up and launch the planes. Allow several tries and some time to refine designs. After the final flight, everyone retrieves someone else’s plane from those scattered about the lawn and tries to match the plane with the owner by what’s written inside. (You can award a prize for the plane that flies the farthest, most creative flight pattern, best design…) 

Organize games of sardines (a variation on hide and seek: when you find the person hiding, you hide with them); blob tag (each person who gets tagged attaches themselves to the person who’s “it,” and runs with them to tag the others). 
Plan a scavenger hunt.

Crafts are a great way to bring people together.
Give everyone a sheet of paper, and ask them to make their coat of arms. Post these somewhere prominent. 

Have people paint t-shirts or faces. 

Ask each family to make a page for a family scrapbook. (Alert folks to bring photographs and items with them.) If you don’t have the materials for a scrapbook, make a photo exhibit.

If you have computer access, get people to post photos and entries into a family blog or Facebook page.

Other forms of entertainment:
Put together a family band and give a performance one evening. Have some noisemakers, drums, spoons… available for those with less skill and training, but who’d like to join the fun. 

Announce a book club. Have everyone read the book in advance (maybe Little Island; it’s about a family gathering, after all), and then discuss it in a fun setting like hiking up a mountain, or floating on rafts.

Make a video of the event.

Use Skype video to call those who couldn’t be there so they feel included.

Downtime
Remember that absence makes the heart grow fonder and allow some solo time for walks, naps, and reading.

All my life I’ve enjoyed stringing words together and watching what appears on the page. While, initially, the writing process is solitary, at some point you bring in readers. Some authors do this early on: members of their writing groups read ten to fifteen pages every few weeks throughout the gestation period. Others, like me, wait until the whole manuscript is finished before handing it off to a few trusted readers. We then wait, anxiously, for their feedback. It’s not unlike sending your child off to school for the first time. Will others like her? Will he behave? Is she as delightful and precocious as I think? (Yes, yes, and no.)

You ask for feedback and, guess what? Your readers give it. Thus begins the first of many conversations you, the author, will have about your manuscript. A manuscript that is no longer entirely yours once you open the door and invite others in. “I liked this part.” “I found this part (the same part) kind of boring.” “Loved the protagonist.” “I just couldn’t relate to the protagonist.”

And so you turn to the solitary task of revising, but the writing feels different now because others have read your words and been moved by them (for better or worse). A conversation that you previously had just with yourself now has other people listening in.

Then you send the manuscript to your agent (or an agent, or many agents) and the conversation grows. The agent sends it to an editor. The conversation grows even more. That editor buys the manuscript, and the conversation grows again, and now it’s no longer just about the story. It’s about marketing and cover art and blurbs and reviews and marketing.

Soon publicists become involved and managing editors and copy editors. And the marketing department is still weighing in via your editor. And then you’re talking to booksellers and bloggers and media people. Once the book is published you again hear from readers. These are not all family and friends (although some, maybe a lot, will be). They won’t all like your book. But, if you’re hearing from them, through email or reviews or in person, they were moved by your words and are now part of the conversation.

A whole little industry evolves around your manuscript. A manuscript that started with you, alone at your desk, coming up with an idea, writing down that first word, and then the 80,000 or so that followed.

Writing is a kind of alchemy. Authors assemble letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs… And, in doing so, create emotion and conversation. What an amazing process that I’m blessed to be part of.

With that, I hope you’ll leave a comment about this post, or books that moved you to contact an author or write a review, or any other topic that seems relevant.

Alternately winging and stalking around our local wildlife rehabilitation office, investigating the philodendron leaves, the computer keyboard, the top of the bookcase, a stray piece of paper, an electrical cord, a bit of red pepper… is a juvenile Corvus brachyrhynchos, American crow. Last spring, a nearby resident found this bird, then a nestling that had apparently fallen from its nest, and brought him to his house. The man and his family fed the crow (no small task as nestlings must eat every half hour) and provided shelter and affection. The crow survived and, in the process, became thoroughly imprinted on humans. Being a crow and more curious than was good for him, he somehow injured his beak, and the man brought him to the wildlife rehabilitation center.

The website, http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/babycrow.htm warns that, while baby crows might seem to make appealing pets (being exceedingly curious, crows can be quite entertaining) it’s important to remember that, because they’re wild animals, keeping them as pets is illegal. It is also a lot of work. Crows are extremely social and will demand constant interaction. Constant. This crow spends part of every day in the wildlife office, where he flies from bookcase to file cabinet, hops from chair to shoulder (and, keep in mind, crows cannot be diapered) splashes in the pan of water staff members have provided for him, and strews his food, including “pinks:” hairless, control mice donated to the wildlife rehab department by labs. There’s one reclining on the chair beside me now, and another submerged in the water basin. Having a crow around is not unlike having a toddler under foot, albeit one with very odd eating habits.

The crow has just stolen a staff member’s pencil from her desk and now struts off with it. She trades the pencil for a pea pod so she can get back to work. The crow accepts the exchange, and then tosses the pod on the floor. The staff member returns it to him. He drops it again. She, wisely, leaves it there. Within seconds, the crow has hopped down from the back of her chair, vigorously disemboweled the pea pod, removed the peas, and scattered them across the floor.

Now bored, he stalks around the office, holding the peapod with one foot, occasionally tearing at it with his beak, which is very sharp. I know this, because he has communicated his displeasure at my insistence that he not peck at my keyboard by pecking at my hand. The crow, like most toddlers, does not like the word, “no.”

The rehab staff is now this young crow’s “murder” (crow flock). They play catch with him using a balled up bit of paper towel, bring him “toys” to keep him stimulated: a feather, an empty gum package, dog toys, a chicken foot dangling on a string… He’s especially taken with computers, however, and pecks relentless at the towels covering the office computer and printer. He eyes mine greedily as he parades around the office now holding a peanut in his beak. Crows in captivity require special care and lots of patience.

What should you do if you find a baby crow on the ground? 

If the young bird has almost no feathers and cannot perch by itself, i.e., a nestling, or you are certain that the bird has been injured, call a local wildlife expert. If the bird is partially or fully feathered and can perch by itself, it’s probably a fledgling. Leave it alone. The parents may well be nearby, watching. Watch to be sure the bird isn’t injured or in danger. If you have a pet with you, restrain it. If necessary, move the bird to a high, well-protected branch for safety. To avoid imprinting, try not to let the young crow see your face. (At our rehabilitation center, staff members don feathered masks whenever they feed any of the young raptors.)

Once imprinted on people, crows are unafraid of them and cannot be trusted in public areas, such as neighborhoods or schools, where uninitiated humans (especially Hitchcock fans) are likely to misinterpret a crow landing on their shoulder and giving them a few friendly pecks on the neck. Nor can imprinted crows ever be returned successfully to the wild. Not realizing that they’re birds, they’re vulnerable to attacks from other crows and raptors. The Cornell website reports that crow ownership generally ends in one of two ways: “1) The crows start leaving for a day or so at a time (usually in the fall), and then are never seen again, or 2) some neighbor… kills them when they are too friendly/aggressive.”

There’s good reason for the law that prohibits individuals from capturing and keeping wild animals. As adapted to captivity as this crow, now gazing out the office window may be, he would have been better off left wild.

Each spring in Vermont I shuttle from garden center to garden center, buying plants to fill what appear to be holes in my garden. I fill pots and window boxes with Moo-Do and pile in as much color as possible. (Impatiens do the trick with, really, very little effort on my part.) Gerananium, angelonia, lavender… go into pots. Lettuce, basil, and bean seeds land, inexpertly, in four, 3X3 foot raised beds. Cherry tomatoes live in large pots on the patio. I water, fertilize, and anticipate. 

For weeks, it seems, not much happens. Then I forget to check on things for a few days and when I go back, those holes in the garden turn out to have been the spaces the plants needed when they grew to full size. Lilies now overshadow iris, echinacea fight for space and light, the phlox has marched right over the sedum, and monarda has insinuated itself everywhere. Out in the vegetable patch, the basil has gone to seed, and the deer ate half the lettuce. Okay, so maybe my absence was slightly longer than a few days, but still. 

Novels, if you leave them alone for too long, will also run amok. When life first calls me away from a new manuscript I’m working on, I experience acute separation anxiety. I long for those relationships I’ve come to rely on and the characters who’ve kept me company for months. Plots often unfold as I go along, so writing a novel engenders almost as much eager anticipation as reading one. What will he say the next time they meet? When will she discover the girl’s true identity? It’s like a thirst for knowledge. 

By day three, my anxiety becomes nostalgia for friends fondly remembered. By day ten I have trouble recalling characters’ names. By day fouteen I am afraid to go back. Much as I am when I haven’t visited my garden in two weeks. (See note above.)

My initial reaction when faced with my garden in mid-July, after a two-week hiatus, if the weather has been (as it was this summer) very wet is panic. “This garden looks terrible!” I say to anyone who’ll listen. “What was I thinking planting all those lilies?” Those lilies looked so petite and perky in June! They now bristle with unadorned stems, their foliage sags, spent blossoms litter the ground. “Off with their heads!” I want to start pulling plants immediately, despite the fact that it is 90 degrees and digging them up will, truly, leave some holes in my garden.

Gardening is a process. So is writing. It is a love of the process-as much as, or more than-the outcome, that gardeners and writers must learn to cultivate. There are days, even weeks, when my garden looks great. And days and weeks when it doesn’t. The same is true with a new manuscript-or even one well into a fourth or fifth draft. Moderation is the key. Putting in too much material, too early, tempting as it is, isn’t good in either medium. Impulsivity rarely pays off: whacking out huge sections of a book or garden now often leads to regret later. Better to pull weeds, edge, take notes, contemplate, watch, wait. Just don’t leave it alone for too long.

I was asked recently what books influenced me in writing Little Island. It was a tough question to answer, in that every book I’ve ever read, beginning with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, has influenced me as a writer in some way. That said, my greatest influence for Little Island was not a book at all, but a weekend spent in Maine…

Next door, in a rented cottage, an extended family began to gather. My husband and I had a second floor unit with a balcony, which gave me an ideal vantage point from which to observe my neighbors’ comings and goings. (Writers are notoriously nosy.) I watched family members arrive, greet one another with great enthusiasm, and then cluster on their front and back lawns and on the rocks below the cottage. As darkness fell, the men migrated onto the deck and the women into the kitchen.

The next morning, more cars arrived; by midday the driveway was empty. Later, towels had appeared on the deck to dry, and croquet wickets had sprung up on the front lawn. At dinner that night, in an adjoining dining room, our neighbors, about fifteen strong, loudly celebrated an elderly relative’s birthday or anniversary: the presumptive reason for their gathering.

Their ebb and flow reminded me of our family, which gathers annually for a reunion. We greet one another, ask the requisite questions about jobs, houses, children, and then move on to more substantive conversations, few of which are ever completed satisfactorily. The weekends comprise a series of truncated interactions over meals, games, and cups of coffee all of which leave me exhausted, but wishing we had more time. I love these fractured, somewhat chaotic gatherings, and decided to replicate one in Little Island: it would be a story about a close-knit family that gathers for a weekend on an island in Maine.

It turns out that close-knit families do not make for interesting plots. So, I gave each member of the Little family, as he or she arrives on Little Island, far more “baggage” the suitcases they tote across the threshold. Their issues become subplots that contribute to the central plot (as happens in life). Although I selected one character, Joy, to carry the through-line, I thought it important to present each family member’s story and perspective, and so wrote it from multiple points of view. I could claim Barbara Kingsolver’s masterful, The Poisonwood Bible as an influence for this style. Did I re-read it while writing Little Island? No. I didn’t even think of it until I had to write a piece for someone about literary influences on my book. When I Googled “novels multiple points of view,” there it was. It is one of my favorites, though, so I have no problem giving Kingsolver credit.

It seemed logical to organize my book into three sections. “Gathering:” as each character prepares for this weekend en famille, and we see what each character is “packing” for the weekend; “Gathered,” once the family is all on the island; and “Gone,” after one character reveals a secret that fractures the rather delicate connections holding the Little family together, and each heads off in a different direction. I suppose I could credit two other favorite books, Julia Glass’s Three Junes and E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India, both organized in three sections, as having influenced my decision to do this. But I don’t know… I feel like I’m reaching here.

One definite literary influence for the structure of Little Island was The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Fagin. He presents his emotional story in very short chapters, which I thought would work well as a device to simulate the disjointed nature of a family gathering.

In terms of content for my book, Sue Miller’s extraordinary Family Picturesmight have been an early influence. Miller’s book about how a single act (in Miller’s case, the birth of an autistic child) can disrupt a family is a theme I explored in both Her Sister’s Shadow and in Little Island. Families are systems, and what we know from Systems Theory is that a disruption anywhere affects the whole. But I was also in organization development for years and took lots of counseling classes, so who’s to say those didn’t influence me just as much as Miller’s book? (Also, I grew up in a fairly dysfunctional family.)

For inspiration about the setting, I did pour over several beloved books about Maine: Here on the Island, text and photography by Charles Pratt; Exploring the Maine Coast, by Alan Nyiri; Our Point of View: Fourteen Years at a Maine Lighthouse, by Thomas and Lee Ann Szelog; and The Penninsula, by Louise Dickinson Rich. Then again, I’ve spent part of every summer of my life on the Maine coast.

Writers are readers and tend to be an impressionable bunch. We work hard to find our own voices and those of  their characters and therefore, I know many authors, myself included, who won’t read fiction while working on a manuscript because we don’t want to be derivative, don’t want to be influenced by another author or book. I guess it’s a fair question to ask an author, but it not an easy one to answer.

One of the characters in my new novel Little Island is an empty nester, her only son having just left for college. I am an empty nester now too, as I spent the summer feeding baby birds at the Vermont Institute for Natural Science. It was a life-changing experience.

I’ve printed the beginning of the blog below. But a picture really is worth a thousand words, so click here for the text with photos. (http://vtnature.blogspot.com/2013/10/empty-nest-syndrome.html)

For the past three months I have been one of many volunteers feeding orphaned baby birds at the Vermont Institute for Natural Science (VINS). A dozen robins, several grackles and European starlings; a few phoebes, chickadees, and nuthatches; one cedar waxwing, one flicker, two mockingbirds, a hermit thrush, and a few song sparrows, among many others, have passed through our facility.

In one week’s time, a hatchling, which somewhat resembles a clam with a beak and legs, becomes a nestling: a soft pile of feather and bone wedged into a nest. By the following week that soft dumpling is in the fledgling room, having discovered one morning that he (or she) has wings, but isn’t quite sure what to do with them. Staff members furnish these fledgling enclosures with tree branches and trunks (custom designed for the species of bird) and what were so recently clam-like hatchlings, soar, and occasionally crash land, from perch to perch, teaching themselves to fly. Had they not been orphaned, their parents would have taught them how.

Before they learn to fly, baby birds engage in four primary activities. The first two are eating and pooping. We baby bird feeders are responsible for what goes on at both ends. The most practiced and least squeamish among us develop the dexterity to catch the little gelatinous missiles before they hit the side of the nest or the floor of the incubator or box. Barehanded. It’s not difficult, really, to judge when the bird is about to send one off. They hike their bottoms up to the edge of the nest and let fly over the side. At least that is what their genetic programming tells them they are doing. Nestlings aren’t especially coordinated, and occasionally, quite often, actually, the gelatinous goop lands in or on the nest, or even on a nest-mate.

The nests, I should point out, are not charming assemblages of twigs and leaves, bits of seed fluff, and the occasional aesthetic decoration that you see in the wild. Ours are utilitarian nests that we construct from Cool Whip containers, washcloths, paper towels, and toilet paper, wound into a coil the correct diameter to accommodate the number of nesting birds. Sometimes this will be a clutch of four. Sometimes a single, orphaned bird, the family cat or dog having dispatched its siblings and parents.

The third baby bird activity is making noise. They chirp, peep, screech, tweet (really)… Merely sliding open the door of an incubator that’s housing a clutch or two of hatchlings elicits paroxysms of delight from its occupants, or so I interpret the boundless enthusiasm. As the door slides open, the hatchlings, lying limp in their nests, lids shut tight over bulbous eyes, the only signs of life the almost imperceptible beating of their miniscule hearts, shoot upright on bandy little legs, sometimes nearly launching themselves right over the side of the nest in their exuberance. Beaks open, they peep as though their lives depend on it. Which, in the wild, would be true. It is thrilling to receive such a hearty welcome.

At this stage we feed them formula, delivered via syringe, down the gullet. Baby birds need a lot of sleep (the fourth activity). All that excitement: the opening of eyes, the standing, the squeaking, sometimes so exhausts the little fellows that they nod off between swallows. A gentle tap, tap on the side of the incubator, or slowly closing and reopening the door is enough to startle them awake and, up they spring, beaks agape, necks upstretched, so happy to see you. I’m aware that I’m anthropomorphizing here. Theirs is a programmed response, having nothing to do with me. Still. What a feeling.

Once the hatchlings become nestlings we offer them tiny bits of scrambled egg, mealworms, fruit, and soaked cat food. Generally, tiny beaks open obligingly as soon as we appear (generally hourly), and eagerly accept six to eight morsels. Some species are greedy and noisy: grackles, for instance, and will keep begging. Others, phoebes and bluebirds, are fussier and satisfied earlier. These species seem more independent, more interested in growing wing feathers and learning to fly than being forceps-fed.

Once the birds are in the fledgling enclosures, dishes of water are introduced and experiments in bathing begin. What fun! The sheets and towels covering the floors are soon soaked. Changing a wet sheet in a five by six foot enclosure, housing five bobbing robins, a grackle, a starling, and four phoebes sailing around overhead and scolding, is not easy. It also has risks. Hats are recommended. At this point the birds are also given dishes of food so they can learn to self-feed. The bluebirds, ever inventive, spend far more time liberating mealworms than consuming them.

Feeding them in these enclosures is an exercise in patience and faith. They are now mobile and believe they are ready to fly free. Think adolescence. It’s difficult to keep track of who’s been fed and who hasn’t. Birds occasional land on the food dish you’re holding, or your head, shoulder, or hand, making feeding even more challenging, but also great fun: A bluebird on the hand is worth any number in the bush.

The birds, once fully-fledged and self-feeding, are moved to an outdoor aviary, where they can perfect those flight skills they’ve so recently discovered. And then we say goodbye. I can only hope that the birds will be able to translate what they learned at VINS into the wild: encounter blueberries, say, and with a flash of recognition, know they’re safe to eat.

Bidding farewell to a group each week after my shift knowing that, by the following week, they might be gone, was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I grew attached to these little duffers, who trusted me to show up with my syringe or forceps at the prescribed time, to remember who’d been fed and who hadn’t, to make sure everyone got enough, and to keep their enclosure clean. I tried not to bond, since these were wild creatures that, sadly, wouldn’t benefit from learning to trust humans. But I did.

And now nesting season is winding down, and birds are getting ready to fly south, even, I hope, some that I helped raise. The counters in the VINS “nursery” are nearly bare of boxes, and empty Cool Whip containers stand stacked in the corner like beach chairs at summer’s end, reminding me of all the fun I had with my little feathered friends. I wish those fledglings long lives, smooth sailing, and many healthy broods of their own, none of which ever need care in our facility, because that would mean they’d been orphaned.

A mother’s job is to raise her children to become independent, but then, when they gain that independence, we grieve, not only for the little ones we’ve lost but for who we were and what we had. It is a mother’s nature to care for another. My baby birds are grown, the nests are empty, and I miss them all greatly.

I like to teach memoir, because memoir bridges the space between fiction and non-fiction. I encourage students to employ tools of the fiction writer: character, setting, and plot. Fiction writers have three avenues from which to generate material: observation, imagination, and investigation. Memoirists have all these available as well.

One difference, it is said, between fiction and non-fiction, is that fiction has to make sense. The memoirists’ work does not have to “make sense,” because it is believed by both author and reader, to be “true.” 

But a memoir, by definition, is drawn from memory, and memory is notoriously fallible. “Memory has its own story to tell,” says Tobias Wolff. Not only do humans view events through a “selfish” lens, we also remember them this way. This does not make them false. 

I encourage students to make their stories vivid and interesting. Not to lie, but to employ what I call, The Buttercup Principle. A former class participant once wrote a piece about spending the summer on her grandfather’s farm. “My grandfather had a calf,” she wrote. “I think its name was Buttercup.” 

Do you feel duped by her having given the calf a name that might not have been true? As soon as you hear the name can’t you picture that calf? I can. It’s a jersey in my version. It has a wide, wet, rubbery-looking nose, soft brown eyes, a cowlick on its forehead that sticks straight up, and it’s knock-kneed. 

Making memoirs interesting does not mean making them up. (If you do that, just call it fiction.) It means make them colorful and alive. Add dialogue and detail, but only if they cleave close to the truth. As long as the fundamentals of the story are true, readers receive such embellishments with open arms. 

Most importantly, though, memoir needs to find a universal truth. “Most good memoir turns out not to be about the memoirist at all…” says Bill Roorbach in Writing Life Stories, which he co-wrote with Kristen Keckler. “The reader becomes a stand-in for the I, and the life of the I becomes the life of the reader.” 

We read other people’s stories to better understand and appreciate our own stories and lives. Therefore, the memoirist must answer the all-important question: so what? She must dig down to find the meaning beneath the events. Because it is this meaning that will resonate most deeply with the reader.

We often find, when we read a memoir, that long forgotten events in our own lives surface. We place ourselves into another’s situation and ask, What would I do? Would I have been so brave? Maintained such good humor? Chances are, of course, the memoirist was neither as brave nor good-humored at the time of the event, but rather gained those through the perspective of time. Looking back on an event is quite different from living through it. Also, the act of recalling and retelling, promotes learning. The author gains wisdom, temerity, and humor. 

And it takes courage to look back and examine one’s life so closely that you can recreate it for another in a way that informs and entertains. It makes one vulnerable and exposed in a way only a few are willing. 

All those who submit their work for publication or into a contest show this courage. 

In beginning to tell your story you surpass probably fifty percent of people who say, “Boy, do I have a story to tell.” Half of them will never begin to tell it.
In completing your stories you surpass seventy-five percent of those with a story to tell. Some begin, few finish.

In submitting your work you surpassed ninety percent of those with stories to write and the gumption to write them. Very, very few take that final step and send it out into the world. Where, I am sorry to say, it will be judged.

I recently had the honor of judging such a contest. I enjoyed each and every one of the entries. Each had moments of greatness, of pathos, of humor, of beauty. I was asked to pick two winners, and so I went with the two that spoke most to me and possessed elements of good drama. Each had an “arc:” a beginning, middle, and end; presented vivid, sympathetic characters; delivered a “message;” and answered the question, “so what?” Each conveyed a deeper meaning, a universal truth, in the events.

Tote Bags ‘n’ Blogs: Katharine Britton: The Buttercup Principle: Where is the line between fiction and non-fiction?

I used to walk my dog along a mowed path through a field near my house. At the end of the field, a small wooden bridge led across a stream and connected that path to a trail on the other side. This trail cut through a glade and fed into another, larger field, used primarily by the town for organized sports, but also by townspeople to fly kites, hit tennis balls, picnic, watch their children play on swings, or, as I regularly did, walk a loop with their dog. We skirted the athletic fields on our trail, following the shoulder of the stream spanned by that small, wooden bridge. 

Making our orbit, Maggie and I inevitably met other dogs and their humans. Usually, one of us reversed direction, being more interested in having company than in covering new ground.

Pip, a Jack Russell Terrier, liked to play soccer with a hard plastic ball, as we walked, kicking it with his front legs or pushing it with his nose as he ran, frenzied, down the trail. He did this in all weather, occasionally losing the ball in the tall grass of summer, or in the deep snow outside the trail in the winter, the trail itself having become as hard and slick as a luge track. Deuce, a Shitzu, had a fetish for tennis balls, and if we took our eyes off him for even an instant, he tore back to the tennis courts, scouting the perimeter for stray balls, which were then impossible to pry from his tiny jaws.

Maggie and I looked forward to encounters with these two, as well as with Willy, Finnegan, Emma, Pearl, and dozens of others dogs and their people, whom we met along the trail. The dogs roughhoused, while we strolled, discussing the weather, town politics, and family matters.

Hurricane Irene put an end to these casual encounters. She eroded the trail along the brook through the glade to such a degree that the property owners deemed it too dangerous and took down the bridge and barricaded the trail. Without the bridge, the loop was broken. 

Friends that I had made and looked forward to catching up with, I no longer saw. Maggie and I now parked at one end or the other of the path and walked as far as the glade that connected the two fields. There, we were forced to stop and turn around, like salmon, confounded by a dam. Discouraged and dissatisfied, we’d head back to the car, our walk truncated. Eventually we stopped going altogether.

Ours was a small loss compared to what many suffered, but it was, never-the-less, significant. The bonds that we had forged, the connections made, were gone, and it struck me what a big difference a small wooden bridge can make in a community. Caused me to take a closer look at other such “bridges:” newspapers, the post office, the general store, town meeting, and wonder what will become of us when these are all gone, too, as it seems they one day might.

We were all grateful to the owners of the property for building that bridge and allowing us to cut through their glade for all those years. And we knew that they were well within their right to take down their bridge to protect themselves from potential lawsuits. Perhaps they had simply grown tired of us parading across their land and used Irene as a convenient excuse. That was their right, too. 

But I wondered if they knew what an important role that humble structure had played. How many lives and relationships had been affected when they took it down. And then I wondered what structures I might unwittingly have provided for others that I decided, one day, to take down, having become too tired or fearful to continue to maintain them. It seems worth taking a look, because some bridges, no matter how small, lead somewhere very important indeed.

For much of my life, I heard stories from my mother about her family and their house on Boston’s South Shore. One story, about the death of one of her three sisters, caught and held my attention. Not wanting simply to retell my mother’s story, I began to write a novel about two estranged sisters who reunite in their childhood home. For this story my primary question was: What would drive sisters apart? And then, what might bring them back together? My theme was forgiveness. 

I hadn’t the slightest idea how to write a novel when I started (nor, by the way, do I have any sisters), but I wrote character studies, backstory, and dozens of disconnected scenes; I drew floor plans of the house and diagrams of the yard; I covered index cards with birthdates, anniversaries, and other important demographics. I was greedy and impatient. I wanted not only to write, but to publish, a novel. 

My characters talked quite freely, venting their resentments, explaining their side of the rift, detailing what they did, and did not, approve of in their sibling. And, would, if I did not visit them for long periods of time, turn those invectives on me. But, while my characters would talk and muse endlessly, what they would not do was get up off the couch and leave the house. I had reams of material, very little of it forward moving. It was not a cohesive whole. I was missing the plot. 

After a few years I lost faith, abandoned the project, sighed deeply, put the manuscript in a drawer, got married, built a house, pursued my career, bought a dog. But the story refused to lie dormant in that drawer. So when I had an opportunity to enroll in a Master’s program with a concentration in creative writing, I took it. Perhaps, I thought, someone will teach me how to write a novel. That was just over ten years ago. 

I took fiction, and wrote a story about a hairdresser. My professor asked if I’d ever been one. I have not. He said, “Write something else,” and gave me a B. I decided that I was not destined to be a fiction writer and took screenwriting, although I’d never read a screenplay and couldn’t name even one prominent screenwriter. Our assignment was to write a 120-page script. We had ten weeks. I thought immediately of my two sisters, languishing in the bottom drawer of my desk, searching for a reason to leave the house. Screenplays require action, dialogue, and a minimum of description. They have no vehicle for interior monologue. Just what my two chatty, thoughtful ladies, ensconced on the sofa, in their rambling childhood home, needed. My professor loved it. And I had uncovered my plot. 

Meanwhile, I had written another novel. When I thought the manuscript was ready, I sent it out to a half a dozen agents. One by one I filed their rejection letters (often hand-written on my query letter) took a deep breath, and sent the manuscript out to six more. One agent finally agreed to take me on. I reached for a paper bag into which I could breathe, so as not to pass out from hyperventilating. 

She started sending my manuscript out to editors at publishing houses, and I held my breath, awaiting their replies. They came in, rejections, five at a time, and my agent would send it out to another five. Twenty-five editors eventually rejected it. 

We were at around rejection number twenty-three when I completed HER SISTER’S SHADOW and sent it to my agent. The third editor who received it, liked it, but wanted the characters younger and one of them nicer. I took deep, centering breaths, made those revisions, and we had an offer. Again the hyperventilating. I’d done it!

The book sold reasonably well (the new phenomenal, says my editor), well enough that she wanted to see another. So I wrote one. Quickly, impatiently, greedily, confident that I now knew how, and sent it to my agent in February, my breath held, waiting for her glowing report. She finally read it in April, by which time I had nearly passed out. (See past blog entry, “Waiting.”)

I exhaled, took a deep breath, and began the revisions she recommended. I made them at a dead sprint, breathing hard, not wanting to delay the process, and she sent it on to my editor. According to our contract, the editor had 30 days to read it. Again I waited, breath held. At day #29.5 she got back to us. “Liked it a lot,” she said, but wanted me to tell the story from a different character’s point-of-view. “Could you revise, say, the first 100 pages, and resubmit?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, after a few calming breaths, “No problem.” The word submission, beginning to take on an altogether more sinister meaning.

I made the changes; she bought the book.

I am ecstatic. But, here’s the thing, publishing a novel is like granting strangers custody of your child while you retain only visitation rights. With luck, your child’s new custodians will be loving, but no one will ever love your book, or your characters, the way you do. 

So, if your dream is to publish a book, as mine was, then pursue that dream with gusto and prepare for a ride that is alternately exciting, frustrating, heady, and discouraging, and will, at times, take your breath away. Take the time, now, to appreciate your characters, while they are still all yours. Wake up each morning eager to see what pranks they’ve been up to overnight, and what new adventures they will take you on. Love the writing part and keep writing as you wait, patiently and without expectation, for agents and editors to get back to you. And, through it all, don’t forget to breathe.