Me and Tommy Orange

 In good company at Eras Bookstore

Thanks to the way bookshops and libraries organize books, I'm butting up against one of my favorite authors! I couldn't ask for a better position. We even happen to be color coordinated. 😃

To cap off my novel's birthday month I spent the afternoon at this new bookstore in Oxford, Michigan.

Tell me that checkered tablecloth isn't corny as all get-out?! Like I'm at a picnic. I meant to buy a plain black one but time got away from me.

Finally, I just want to say that because of the power of "local", independent bookstores are growing in number and popularity, helping their communities and the authors they support. Bookshop is the best way to access your own favorite local bookstore.

Onwards and upwards in this pursuit of the written word, doing what we all love best. 

Yvonne

Human

The Out-Of-Sorts Time For Novelists

If you are a writer, could you base a novel on a single solitary memory from your childhood? 

Sometimes that's all that's needed to jumpstart a story.

For me it was a barefoot boy beckoning from an adjacent dock on a Northern Michigan lake,  the boomerang that wouldn't come back, and the boy who lived with his family in a migrant's shack and one day stopped coming to school.

Writing is a solitary business (why writers love to write). Yet we eavesdrop and belly up to the bar where interesting people rub shoulders and words flow and ideas percolate to flow off our fingertips onto the white expanse of a screen or a notebook or a bar napkin.

Some of the reasons I'm passionate about writing and the natural world are explained here  (the scary out-of-the-way, desolate places our dad would park our pop-up camper on family vacations), along with some of my favorite immersive fiction from 2023 and the novels whose readers I felt would enjoy Let Evening Come.  But I wonder how accurate my assumptions are.

I've been asked, if I  had to do anything other than write, what would it be? I would like to hide in the upper branches of a tree. Drop raspberries in a basket tied at my waist and stomp grapes. Walk the fencerow to the rear of the farm to see the eagle's nest I've heard tell of, a mere hundred-acre walk away.

With one project complete and out of my hands while another is stalled and yet another still percolating like a an old coffee pot, I'm stuck in that out-of-sorts time for a writer. So, why not do some of those things? Why let a 20-mile-an-hour wind dissuade me, or a cold rain, or a mass of turbulent clouds skuttling across the sky to hide the sun as if another eclipse were underway? Why do I let the mundane eat away at the day, like the moon to the sun, or suddenly find myself daydreaming in front of the open refrigerator as if dinner will miraculously appear? Why let the out-of-sorts-time interfere with a walk along a fencerow to discover an eagle's nest rumored to be as big as a dining room table and maybe . . . maybe even catch sight of an adult in the act of remodeling or adding to last years structure.

Now that would be something to write about!

The Interview And the Robin

MIRACLES OF SPRING

 

While answering questions about my writing in an Interview with the publisher, two plump robins engage in a mating dance on snow-crusted grass outside my window. They fly their affair into the maple, bare as a February field, and find foothold in the crook of a branch for spring is coming and there's work to be done.

The miracle of the greening.  

The poets at What's Going On (the mighty foursome!) reminded me that all around there are miracles in our midst. We only have to stop and look to see the plump robin in a new light, how she fends off the blue jays through patience and perseverance. 

Then there's the first pop of green in the towering birch trees that seemed to happen overnight.

Speaking of miracles, my launch party at Inscribe Books went off without a hitch! Another miracle. A day I dedicated to my grandma who bolstered my fragile self-esteem through adolescence; to my father who collated copies of my early poems, bound them together with his stapler and titled the collection The Farmer’s Daughter; and to Mother who always wanted to know what I was doing if I hadn’t stopped in for a visit—immersed in a novel I regretfully never shared with her.

        I'm sorry Mom. 

        I wish you had been here. 

I reacquainted with some long lost friends tonight at our local library, coming together over a book. Now that's a miracle! It's a miracle that this book is out in the world. A miracle that someone wanted to interview little ol' me. Proof that (yes Mother) patience pays off and perseverance is a virtue.