Writing Is a Solitary Gig. Yes! Road Show! Maybe Give It a Bit More ‘Gas’

About library presentations . . .

I am busy getting ready to do a library presentation. I haven’t done one in a while and need to get reactivated after pandemic sloth. Writing is a solitary gig and being out with people who ask questions about the writing but also about subjects that crop up in it …is renewing.

I am experimenting with using a non-fiction partner, someone who won’t compete with my book sales, but one that will add interest and richness to the presentation as well as offer her or him good exposure. Michael Good is with me because I asked him to proof my draft of “Deadly Turn.” A bird naturalist with a guiding business, he’s also testified at wind power hearings about the core conservation issues I have in the mystery.

Here’s how I go about prepping for the day

I send out a press release blurb that is convenient for a library to use. I send it out in Word and encourage them to edit in any way that works for them. It should have something “sexy” . . .

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Risk Placing Real Emotion at the Center of Your Work

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work.”  Author Anne Lamott

“Anne Lamott understands better than anyone that writers need help. . . She writes so well, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that she, too, has trouble with writing. That’s what’s so deeply comforting about this book.” The Wall Street Journal 

I am, lately, needing inspiration so I’m rereading “Bird by Bird” and now, sharing some with you! 

“Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”   

Listen to her, here.  And if you haven’t found this amazing interview series with “old ladies” interviewed by Julia Lewis-Dreyfus, here she interviews Anne Lamott. (Wow. Well, don’t miss the Jane Fonda one either.)

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

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Welcome Yourself Back Into Your Writing

The challenge! After a long break, how to reenter a manuscript? (Or a report or anything that’s been sitting for a while.)

How to re-engage with the original urge to tell a particular story?

I use several devices to bring myself “home” to a manuscript. I read it out loud. Sometimes I have my computer’s read function read it to me. I call a friend and read over a passage and ask for feedback and then there’s my Essential Note Library.

When I have been away from writing for a while, I visit notes I left that are designed to bring me home to the writing. (I rework and update my library often and keep it on the first page of whatever I’m creating. If I have to leave the project for a while, I take some time to first leave a trail of engaging notes and questions to welcome me back.)

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Henry David Slept Here: Maine’s Wild Economy

For millions of nature and literature lovers, Henry David Thoreau’s rhapsodic prose about living “simply” in nature is part of their outdoor, spiritual creed.

However, often when Thoreau lovers use his prose to justify conservation, many north woods residents (even folks who own dog-eared copies of his work) are more apt to grumble about “outsiders who know nothing about real life, spouting dumb reasons for not cutting trees.”

Thoreau believed there was a “higher law affecting our relation to pines.”  In his (diaries of his travels to Ktaadn (sic), Chesuncook, the Allagash and the East Branch from the years 1846-1957) “The Maine Woods” he asks, “Is it the lumberman, then who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best?”

And confirming some of the locals’ worst fears, he answers, “No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and let’s them stand. … It is the living spirit of the tree, not its sprit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as important as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”

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