Today (Jan. 29) something special is going on in the blogging community, which is that a number of us are getting together in support of a writer, Patry Francis, who is having the trade paperback version of her book released today, but is unfortunately unable to promote it because she is in the midst of dealing with some serious medical issues. Her book is called The Liar’s Diary and it sounds terrific. This is the premise: What would you do if your best friend was murdered—and your teenaged son was accused of the crime? How far would you go to protect him? (Her website is at www.patryfrancis.com and you can read her blog there and order the book. If you want.)

I’ve never met Patry, though I do enjoy her blog, and we are published by the same people (Plume) and our books were both mentioned in an article about potential Oprah picks, though mine was considered unlikely. Which is probably a whole other blog entry, that I should have written a while ago, but the point is that I sympathize and relate with Patry’s story. She struggled for years to get her book written, then published; she has four children and worked as a waitress and at a moment when she should be basking in happiness and reading good reviews, she is having to worry about cancer. Her prognosis actually sounds very good, but  cancer is scary, and you hear that word and your mind shuts down. Or mine does anyway.

Recently I went through a scare myself and I had to meet with a gynecological oncological surgeon, who is truly not anyone you ever want to have to meet. (Although as a person, he seemed quite lovely.) My husband and I had to sit in his waiting room for a while, and my husband is rapidly approaching sainthood in my eyes, because I am not a good patient. I worry a lot, and I express my worry quite vehemently, and the way I express it is by going over and over the words that doctors have said to me, analyzing each and every word for potential nuance. People have approached the Bible with less analysis than I bring to these conversations.  Anyway, after about an hour and a half of sitting in the waiting room and watching it get dark, (and coming to the obvious metaphorical conclusions about my life), we were called in to meet with this doctor.

He seemed very smart and talented, but he just about scared me to death by telling me about every possible thing I might have or ever would have or might pass along to my children, and my husband, desperate to bring some order to this situation, said to him, “We have to make sure Sue’s well because she has a book coming out.” And the doctor looked at me and said, “Oh, and who’s publishing it?” and then, as I sat there, looking, I suspect, as enthusiastic and fresh as a used tissue, he said to me, “And where do you get your ideas?” Which just goes to show, that no matter what the situation, people are always going to be intrigued by writers. 

Anyway, I have to have the wretched surgery, but my prognosis is good and now I’ve wandered away from Patry, who is supposed to be the point of this blog. So all best wishes for courage and health to Patry, along with lots of book sales and fun things. And I think my next entry will be about publicists and will not contain any information at all of a scary nature.
 

What follows is a strange, and yet, I think, inspiring story about how I came to have my short story, “Triplet,” published in anderbo literary magazine.

More than a decade ago, I went to a wedding shower and it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. It took place in a VFW hall in upstate New York and it was bleak and grotesque and the wedding party carried on a running joke about a five foot long hero (sandwich), the memory of which still gives me chills. At that time, I had just started writing short stories, but I was still pretty much defined by my full-time job, which was that I was a mother staying home with my kids. I loved my life, and yet I was feeling somewhat desperate for intellectual conversation, and I remember crying on the drive back, worried that my life was turning into a joke, or even worse, into a cliché.

So, I got home, feeling desperate and unappreciated, which is good mulch for starting a story, and I found myself writing about a woman, who is one of a set of triplets, who must decide if she is going to sleep with a man who is pursuing her because he is obsessed with triplets. Yeah, I don’t know where that came from either, except that there is a house in the story that I saw on my drive home from the shower.

Soon thereafter, I happened to be reading through the classified ads in Poets & Writers and happened to see an ad for a man who was looking to teach writing, one on one.  In his ad, Rick Rofihe said he’d had more stories published in The New Yorker than any other writer, and I was impressed by that, and so I called. And over a period of a few months, we met for coffee and he read my stories, and I learned a lot from him, and I sent off a number of the revised stories, and they were published.  This went on for some time, and I remember we worked on “Triplet,” which is what I wound up naming the story (for good reason) and then I don’t remember what happened except that I got swept up with writing my first novel, and so I didn’t send out “Triplet” for consideration, the way I might have done. Instead I filed it away and sort of forgot about it.

TEN YEARS WENT BY.

 Or possibly eight. But it was a while.

By then I had started teaching at Gotham and I noticed that Rick was on the list of teachers and I may have even said hello to him at a holiday party, but the essential thing to keep in mind was that he had not seen my story in quite a while. And then, one day, I came home from dinner at Pizza Hut and there was a message on my machine from Rick saying that he was starting up a new magazine, called anderbo, and that he had always liked my story, “Triplet,” and he wondered if it had been published. Immediately I dashed up stairs, opened up my file cabinet, and there it was. Just where I had left it all those years ago. I read through it and it was like reading something by somebody else. The person who had written it was long gone, but I liked her and I figured, what the heck. So I sent it out to Rick, and thank heavens, he still liked it.

“Triplet” is still posted and anderbo itself is doing very well, and Rick has recently announced a new contest for novels involving vegetarianism.  (There’s more to it than that, but I can’t remember.) And the other day I got an group e mail from Rick, notifying all subscribers to anderbo that one of his writers (me) was having a book published and the title of his e mail was, “from anderbo to plume/penguin.”

So, there are a bunch of lessons I could take away from this story, but the one that jumps out at me is that there is just no predicting what is going to happen with your writing life. And it’s all probably going to take a lot longer than you think it will. And thank you to Rick and anderbo.

So what about you. What have you written out of desperation?