It’s New Year’s Day, the day we mark the quick gallop of time. It feels like everything is about to change. Last year at this time my determination focused on getting a publisher. Today, with a publication date firmly on the calendar for June, I hold the book in my hands, printed on my home printer from the typeset document my publisher sent me. A Jumbo Clip to holds it all together, but it looks beautiful to me.
Now we have to get it into the world.
It’s 3 PM, almost time for our hand-made boats to go out on the harbor with candles and our New Year’s wishes. Today, I have to ask myself: what does all this mean to me?
My decision to go with a traditional publisher followed my desire to get my work into the world. As a playwright and performer who came lately to these professions, I largely carved out my audiences myself – one envelope, fax and phone call at a time – well before social media. Although we toured areas of the US, Canada, England and Ireland to standing ovations and excellent reviews (www.fatsalmon.ca), although our film SINGING THE BONES screened around the world, I still felt that my light flickered under a bushel. I felt part of a world of my own making, but not part of the world outside.
Since signing the contract in August (no easy feat!), I’ve learned to be more patient, to await the decisions of others. To accept that I don’t have complete control over a project I have created. I’ve learned to turn to friends to understand that a cover I did not choose could work for my book. In my choice to get my work into the world, I have to rely on and trust others to help me.
But at this complex, emotional time of year, I know in my heart that the novel itself, A THEORY OF EXPANDE
D LOVE is in many ways, a love letter to my family, and Annie is the courageous, quirky character I wish I could have been when I was twelve. The story is fictional, colored with authentic details of living in a huge devout, Catholic family in the Sixties. When I was 25 I wanted to be a writer, but I knew I had no perspective. On January 1, 2015 the perspective gained from a lifetime of lessons is woven into my story. My life separated from my family of origin. Of being different from them. But loving them just the same.
This year, miles and miles from my family of origin, but close to the family of most of my life, at dusk, as the community gathered in our yearly ritual, I chose ‘good health’ as my wish for 2015. As serendipity would have it, Andreas Schroeder, a well-known author and professor of creative writing, offered to put my boat in the water. And then he did. He waded into Roberts Creek and pushed my little wooden cardboard-and-string boat, with my wishes out to sea, into the world.
After a ‘poll’ of friends in person, on Facebook and email, I received about 116 votes for ‘the cartwheel’ and 67 votes for ‘the girls on the back of the car’. Everyone who voted, voiced support and interest. The publisher independently chose the cover that won the vote.
THIS MONTH Light Messages is sending out Advance Review Copies for people who would like to read A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, and who promise to review it. If you are one of those people, please contact me at [email protected] with your email, phone and mailing address.
A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE is a coming-of-age story featuring a feisty yet gullible adolescent, trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963.
Surrounded by twelve brothers and sisters, and desperate for attention, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the short list to be elected the first American pope. Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when ‘The Hands’ visit her in her bed, when her sister becomes pregnant “out of wedlock,” Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their Catholic reputation. Questioning all she has believed, and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
