One of the joys of writing is how it connects you to other people. The discussions we have in my writing group are deep, thoughtful, and caring. My publisher, Stephanie Larkin, of Emperor Books is a constant source of encouragement and energy.
However, figuring out how to design and promote the book has been less fun. It requires a lot of cold-calling and asking for attention, which can feel shameful.
One unexpected joy of publishing came with the cover design of Against the Grain.
I had to reach out to people who live or lived in Northern California to find images, and I ended up having warm exchanges where they introduced me to other people.
That was how I happened upon Brian Maebius, who designed the cover for the hardcover version above. I’ll tell you later how I nearly drove Stephanie crazy with our paperback cover design, which is also beautiful. I offered to pay Brian, but he refused. Such is the devotion redwoods inspire. And such are the people who love them.
It was a community that connected like the mycorrhizae connect the trees underground. It’s hard to explain how much this means to me, especially as our country seems to be coming apart at the seams. Here, in his own words is why he did it.
Brian Maebius
“I attended a graduate program in Scientific Illustration at UC Santa Cruz in 2000-01 (The program is now part of CSU Monterey Bay. My wife and I rented a small cabin surrounded by redwoods in Lompico, near Felton, CA, a short drive to Santa Cruz campus. It was such a neat experience with the misty fog, salamanders, banana slugs, trillium, ferns and towering trees. We had to climb 150 stairs up the hillside from our parking spot near the creek to get to the cabin. I’m always happy to contribute to any author/artist that promotes conservation of such a unique ecosystem like the coastal redwoods.
We have a related tree in the Texas Hill Country. The bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) is closely related to Montezuma cypress in Mexico. It grows along the rivers and creeks around Dripping Springs. Some are 800 years or older. I’ve planted quite a few in the grotto and along the creek on our property. They’re not quite as tall as coastal redwoods, but they should reach 120 feet one day! Another fascinating and related tree is the Dawn redwood, Metasequoia, rediscovered in China in the 1940s, and previously known from Cretaceous fossil record.”
Davidson Family Photo, taken by my dad. Camping or picnicking somewhere in south America.
When you write about family, publishing your first book isn’t always the happy occasion you think it should be. My first novel Blue Woman Burning will be published by Red Penguin Books on November 23rd. Instead of excitement and joy, I’m riding a see-saw between dread and numbness. It has been SUCH a long and confusing journey with so many stops, starts, revisions, and reinventions. Though excellent work can be written in the thick of emotional turmoil, I had to grow a few decades to write mine. When I began it (34 years ago!), I was too stuck in its emotional backwaters to understand and complete it.
Discovering Direction
The novel started with a short story I wrote after I had been accepted to a graduate creative writing program at the University at Albany in 1988. It was about an 18-month family stay in Chile during my childhood. I wrote in a charming, humorous voice, which I later figured out was only to protect myself from pain caused by family dynamics. I used magical realism to externalize my perceptions.
I had no idea how to end the story because I was angry with the main character, Eustacia, based loosely on my mother. I didn’t know the main character angered me, though. It was so charming how she didn’t know how many children she had; how she accidentally packed a child into shipping container and blithely congratulated herself for her brilliance when it was discovered; how she named them all after her own body parts. When I discovered my anger, the ending came with an explosion.
Long story short, autobiographical material confused and distracted me. We really did drive from Santiago, Chile to Upstate New York in a Dodge Dart as the novel depicts. We really did get stuck in the altiplano, a high desert plateau. But that wasn’t what the book was about. It took me a long time to realize the novel was about me being trapped in a Bermuda triangle between my mother, my brother and myself. Yet, I wasn’t even the main character in the original version!
Huge revisions later, I cobbled together something presentable in 1999. I found an agent, and she sent it to all the best publishers. Somewhere in my basement lurks a copy of a very complimentary rejection from Grove Press.
She asked me to revise. There was clearly something wrong with it. I and my writing style had changed so much in those twelve years of writing the novel, that it felt like I had jammed two different bodies together. The bones just didn’t match up no matter how much I massaged the skin. I was sick of it, I had just had a baby, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
I needed a few more decades of growth to get past the emotional pain of the autobiographical material. That’s when I was able to ask myself the real question all writer need to ask to complete a novel: “What do my characters need?” Not, “What do I need?” The latter is a great question for therapy and for getting started. But it doesn’t end there.
So, many more revisions later—and I don’t mean mere edits, but rather, throwing out half a book and writing a new half, then throwing out half of that, and reorganizing and trying new points of views— Blue Woman Burning is both my first novel and my tenth novel, all rolled into one lifetime of learning. I also just learned it is the first book in a new imprint for Red Penguin Books. I’m honored.
And now? I want people to read it…and I don’t want people to read it. I want it to be wildly successful…and I also know that the chances of that are slim. I’ve been working hard to promote the hell out of it, but I still have a day job, the task is endless, and I have a secret fear that the publicity gods just don’t like me. Maybe I enjoy the secondary gains of obscurity too much: protection. Will obscurity continue to protect me? Probably.
Family Fallout…
I have warned my family about the autographical content. I was worried about my mother reading it, as I knew she would recognize herself and also the places where I fictionalized. There’s a death in the novel that I know would wound her. Sadly, at the age of 98, she doesn’t remember much. Yet, it is sadly fortunate that my novel is being released now: I can share my accomplishment with her, AND I know she won’t be able to read it.
Speaking of which, at her insistence and against my better judgement a few weeks ago, I agreed to read the prologue aloud to her. Not surprisingly, cherubic and charming narcissist that she is, she interrupted me twenty times to tell me how it really was, and how I should revise. I explained that the book was finished, and she told me she was trying to help me improve it. I said, for the first time in my life, “It doesn’t need improvement.” Though I had to take a restroom break, I marveled at how little the exchange hurt. Twenty years ago, it would have cut deeply and lastingly. Whew. Growth!
But there’s the rest of my family. I worry about that my two older sisters, who are not in the novel, will feel exposed by having the family in the public eye. I wonder do they feel bad about being left out entirely? Then there’s a fictional version of my younger brother. Will he mind how I characterized some of his surface attributes?
I am most worried about my older brother’s feelings. The character based on him, Ovid, is a major character in the novel. I have spoken with my brother about it, and he has graciously applauded my publication and told me not to worry about how the character is depicted. Still, will friends call and ask, “Did that really happen?”
I told him a writer can never capture a whole of a human being on paper (at least, I can’t). I’m also hugely aware of how unreliable memory is and how biased we all are. That is my defense. He is okay with me noting that he is bi-polar in real life. But I clearly took it to a more dramatic level in the novel. It made a better story. It was not wish fulfillment. A writer says to themselves, “What is the worst possible thing that could happen to this character?” and then they do it. I won’t spoil it for you.
Let me just end by observing that there is a huge danger to having a writer in the family. More books are more autobiographical than most authors let on. They expose family and friends even when cleverly disguised. There is also a huge danger in being the (published) writer in the family The writer dares to shape the family narrative how they see fit. The writer gets the last word. But do I?
So let me be clear, as the acknowledgment of Blue Woman Burning says, “Thanks also to my family of origin for adventures in distant lands, arguments and inspiration, and for your forbearance, as I borrow family stories and likenesses, and change them wildly” to make a better story. There will be some fallout, no doubt, but I will endeavor to embrace the learning that will follow.
Meanwhile, friends and family will be joining me at a launch party on December 9th in Saratoga Springs, NY, and expect I will feel the joy, then.
Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring a variety of social media platforms to cultivate an audience for my upcoming book releases. I must have listened to the same podcasts as all the other writers (Creative Penn, The Bestseller Experiment) because there’s so much chatter out there, it’s hard to hear ourselves speak. We’ve all become slaves to whatever shifting algorithm these platforms use to determine who gets the views. So now, not only do we have to write, we have to master fifteen new apps. And often, to use an app, you have to master another one first. We have to become our own marketing mavens.
There’s a high likelihood we’ve been tricked into becoming human battery cells à la Matrix for the benefit of the social media CEOS and advertisers. Oh well.
Here’s what I’ve learned. My Tiktok following has stagnated at less than 200, and the number of likes and views seem to be inversely related to the time I spend making them. Tiktok likes humor, spectacle, self-branding, and imitation (via “dueting” and “stitching”). I know, right? I should write a glossary. Anyway, I can be humorous, but not wildly so, and being ADHD, I thrive on variety, so I’m not really suited to Tiktok. They say it’s four young people, anyway.
Also, Tiktok doesn’t foster the kind of literary audience I’m looking for with a few exceptions, like Panic_Kyle. Finally, I’m NOT going to do the literal song and dance routine required of Tiktok authors. I’ve got nothing against dancing. I just like to do it for fun, not for selling books.
In contrast, Twitter has a stronger literary community. In a few short weeks I’ve doubled my followers by seeking out like-minded authors. There’s a strong ethos in Twitter that if someone follows you, you follow them back. Replying to posts is as important to posting your own thoughts. I find my best twitter replies are instinctive– the ones I don’t think too hard about. It’s like trying to see the Northern Lights when they are visible in NY. They are so faint that if you look at the sky too hard to you don’t see them. You have to cultivate a fuzzy focus.
My Twitter follower number seems to hover at about 44% of the number of people I follow. I’ve gone from not understanding Twitter to looking forward to engaging with strangers about New Yorker articles. In fact, I almost look forward to checking my Twitter messages more than my text messages. Worrisome. Borg induction? Social dissolution? Hope not.
Nevertheless, I enjoy the video editing app on Tiktok. It provides a set of creative constraints, visual tools, and copyrighted sound clips. It has prompted to me to revise, edit, and shorten previously written works, just for the hell of it – which is a good thing.
So, last night, I took a poem from the previous post “November Bones” and, in the effort to fit it into a 60-second Tiktok with visuals and music, I “stripped it down to the bones,” a process I enjoy as much as earth does in the poem, now an “Ode to Death.” A similar thing occurred with my flash fiction, “Lilith Confesses.” I like how the app forces me to weigh each word individually. So, it might not get me views, and it might not sell any books, but it does something far more important. It stimulates curiosity and creativity. Algorithm be damned. See what you think. But don’t think too hard.
I was delighted to be invited to be on Vox Pop with Barbara Chepaitis and Ray Graf as we talked about the creative process. Had to tell myself as I watched the clock count down to the second we were on air– it’s just a conversation with a good friend. Only one f-up– when I said the title of Anne Lamott’s essay, “Shitty First Drafts.” Ironic that we can teach that in public college, but can’t say it on public radio. Almost gave them a heart attack because of the fines they would get. Luckily, they have a delay and were able to catch it and bleep it out! Exciting.
Barbara Chepaitis is author of 12 published novels, including her most recent The Aquarius Project, about a young woman who can wish people dead. She’ll be telling ghost stories with Whispering Bones this October, and is currently working with some Lithuanian folks on her screenplay, The Amber. She teaches performance and writing at the College of St. Rose.
My novel, Blue Woman Burning, a road-trip in search of family with lashings of the supernatural, will be published this November by Red Penguin Books. My short story collection Strange Appetites won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award and will be re-released soon! Oct 26! As you know, I am a Distinguished Professor of writing at SUNY Adirondack, and recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Listen here, but not before you subscribe to my mailing list for a free digital copy of my collection of short stories, Strange Appetites. For more description, check out the books tab above.
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You might be thinking, “Gosh she’s gullible,” but teaching at a community college for almost thirty years has taught me that the absence of financial resources magnifies all problems to an often unbelievable degree. If you’ve got money to spare, when your car breaks down, you get it fixed. It’s inconvenient. But when you’re living on the edge, a breakdown triggers an avalanche, like you lose your job because you can’t get to work and your stress triggers an autoimmune disorder, and on it goes. Sure, there are those students whose grandmother seems to die at least five times in one semester, and who halfway into the semester say they didn’t do their homework because they had no idea a book was required… but even those kinds of excuses can be hiding larger problems like ADHD or chronic shame. So I’ve learned to take their problems seriously and seek solutions that match.
Anyway-love you guys! Would rather teach at SUNY Adirondack than most private colleges any day.
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A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson 