Time in Book Years

Tomorrow is A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest’s 5 month anniversary. But what is that in book years? It seems like a hundred years ago that I found out it would be published by Torrey House Press, another hundred that I went on book tour with my dog Ducky in an old pickup for six weeks across the American West. I feel lucky to have gotten to experience these things: for the places I got to visit and for the people I met and for seeing this book take shape that I spent so many quiet, solitary hours working on. It’s always a treat to receive emails here and there from readers who write to say that this book meant something to them. And for the author/book talks, where people kindly argued with each other (about the ending especially!) and where there were jokes and seriousness and some real sharing.

I was nervous to go on book tour because one of the last times I read my work to strangers was at a writing workshop that I’m incredibly fond of, with a room full of supportive, beautiful humans where I completely lost my shit and choked (literally) on tears while my voice came and went and went up and down three octaves as I turned a bright and horrible red and wanted to die a little (no, a lot), and finally made it through (a miracle) and scurried off to my room where I didn’t sleep all night because I felt so ashamed. Yep, that’s the writing life too, at least for me. 

But then, that didn’t happen on book tour because it had already happened and I had learned some things. That’s what writing is too, trying some things and learning some things and sometimes embarrassing oneself. And sometimes there are shame spirals that last all night. And sometimes on those same nights there are huge owls right outside your window in the trees who decide to keep you company while you try to shake the bad feelings like a fever, and your tears slowly dry up. 

I wish I could deny that it is validating to have something published, but I can’t. Every time a literary journal picks up one of my short stories I feel a vibrant rush. I think it’s also called joy. And to have had something as long as a novel published in this age is, to be honest, shocking. But it’s also ego. And that’s growing increasingly boring, generally speaking. 

What I know though for sure now, is that getting published is not the same thing as writing, and it is definitely not as interesting. I admit it is thrilling to realize that people you don’t know are reading the words you strung together. There was a young adult who came to the reading at the Eugene Public Library who had read the book and kept asking just the most interesting and thoughtful questions. They were in the back row with their short bangs and black hair, just a smart and glowing human. How phenomenal that they read this book and then showed up to the library on a humid Thursday night during a summer heat wave. 

But again—and I’m writing in circles because it is circular—the best thing about writing is actually writing. And another incredible thing about writing is that anyone can do it and it requires nothing more than a pencil and a few minutes stolen from whatever life you’re living. 

And editing too, which some love and some despise: that process of getting in there, bloodied up to your elbows, and looking at what you created from different angles, for reading it aloud in the bathroom to see how it sounds coming out through hard teeth, to listen to its rhythms as your lonely voice bounces off the half-lit walls, to sit back down with it, at 6am, and then 9am (sometimes in a closet, sometimes in a truck, sometimes even at a desk) and then the rest of the day in stolen moments, like the poison oak you can’t stop scratching once you let yourself start. It’s the poison oak you got when you went on a walk with your story printed out and folded into your back pocket, because you wanted to read it to the trees too. (They were not impressed.)

So, I’m thinking that each month of a book’s life is actually nine years. If true, Wounded Deer at five months is fifty-four years old now. For anyone reading this who thinks that’s old, it’s not. Around then is when things start getting really good, I hear.

There’s a woman I talked to recently who guts fish near the dock in my coastal Oregon town. I was waiting for some black cod and she started telling me how her great-grandmother was one of the Oompa-Loompas. 

“Do you ever write your stories down?” I asked her. 

“No, but I should,” she said. “I have so many.” 

And that’s the best part: we all do.