connections

My mind has been buzzing these last days with thoughts about form and function in creative nonfiction, memoir as discovery, and the role writing plays in memory revision. Both of my classes are underway now, and I'm loving them. My students are so smart and engaged.

I realized this week that I love teaching two classes at once because often the ideas being mulled over by students in one class speak to the ideas being mulled over by the students in the other class. How cool is that? The constant back-and-forth keeps me thinking and making connections. Add to that the prep for next weekend's Mother Words Retreat, and, well, you can imagine my busy busy brain.

So today I'm simply going to leave you with this photo of the snowman Stella and I made a few weeks ago:



Sad snowman. Sad, sad snowman. (Can anyone guess what we used for the eyes?)

a thought about winter

We’ve gotten more snow here. I pulled back the curtain this morning, and said, shit, more snow. But now, as I stare out the window in my tiny office and I’m blinded by whiteness, by the glinting and sparkling of billions and billions of snowflakes in the bright sun, I have to admit that it’s quite pretty. (Of course, it would have glinted and blinded me without the extra two inches. But whatever. I’m trying to be positive.)

But really—and this is me being positive again—the sky is blue and February is half over. Eventually, spring will come and I will be able to take the girls to the park, pull Zoë down the sidewalk in the wagon as Stella zips past us on her bike. We will be able to rake the yard, and I will sit on the back step sipping a glass of white wine as I watch the girls dig for worms. That sounds perfect.

I’ve heard people say—hell, I’ve said it myself—that Minnesota winters build character. But right about now I’d take less character. And really, what do we mean by character? We’re just trying to excuse the fact that everyone in this state is crabby for three (and sometimes four) months, and then, as soon as the thaw comes, we all stream outdoors to walk in groups around the lakes, smiling at strangers, laughing uncontrollably. We make plans, become social again. We are *reborn*.

I’d just as soon take happy year-round, thank you very much.

The thing I’m looking forward to most is running. I actually ran, slowly, yesterday. I stepped carefully over ice and snow, music blaring into my ears. And it's true that I felt alive. But I can’t wait to run in shorts and a t-shirt along the river as the trees begin to turn green. I can’t wait to nod and smile—we’re so happy!—at the other folks out running and walking and smiling. I’ll be so damn positive you won’t even recognize me. I promise.

lost and found: a memoir of mothers

I have been meaning to post about Kate St. Vincent Vogl’s Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers for months and months. Kate read as part of the 3rd Annual Mother Words Reading last fall at the Loft, and her lovely memoir is a story of adoption, love, and what it means to be a mother.

Just after Kate St. Vincent Vogl’s mother died of ovarian cancer, Kate received a phone call late one night. The woman on the other end of the phone began ticking off facts about Kate’s life and her parents' lives. Then the woman said, “I gave birth to a baby girl.” She named the day, the month, and the year that Kate was born. Then she said, “Would that be you?”

Lost and Found is the story of losing one mother and finding another mother, and as the often-moving narrative progresses, we see Kate broaden her idea of family and learn to accept and love her birthmother, Val.

Kate St. Vincent Vogl will be reading this Friday, February 12th at 7 p.m. at Birchbark Books (owned by the amazing Louise Erdrich) in Minneapolis, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to talk with Kate here at Mother Words. Thanks for agreeing to this short-notice e-mail interview, Kate.

KH: Kate, I love how present your writer-self is in the narrative. I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how writing this story helped (or didn’t help) you process it. What were the biggest discoveries you made during the writing of this memoir?

KSV: Thanks, Kate. Thanks especially for this chance to share my story with your readers.

This is such a great question, for these discoveries happen on both the personal and professional level. Let’s talk personal discoveries first—though I should say that when Meredith Hall was asked if writing a memoir was therapeutic, she balked at the notion that a memoirist should seek that as part of the goal of getting her story onto the page. Considering her success in Without A Map, I think I’ll defer to her expertise. Yet I’m the type of person who needs to talk things out in order to understand what I think of something. So, I won’t call the process therapeutic, but I will call it enlightening. Until I sat down to write it, I hadn’t realized how far I’d come in my willingness to bridge a connection with Val. I had to go back to my original emails to my friend Christin telling her about Val’s call to recapture that moment. I’d forgotten I wasn’t interested in developing any sort of a relationship with her. I had to step back into that moment and recapture that desire to keep her at arm’s length and then bring the reader to where I am today. In looking over those old e-mails, I was also able to tap into the voice I wanted to use in the telling. I wanted to draw the reader in close, so I tell the story much as I would tell it to my friend. Women in the book clubs I’ve joined have noted that intimacy, so I’m glad I’ve been able to make that connection with readers.

On a professional level, I learned a lot from writing this as well. This was the story I wanted to write when I first started writing seriously almost 15 years ago, but I knew I didn’t have the tools to be able to write it yet. So I set it aside and wrote an awful first novel. With 100,000 words under my belt (and 5 revisions of each and every word), I was finally ready to write this story. I could finally write an effective scene—or at least a decent one—and I could carry a narrative arc. I could parse dialogue down to its essence, and when it came time for revising, I could recognize which scenes needed to be added and which ones really should be cut. (Okay, so some were easier to cut than others.)

I should also note that some of my biggest discoveries came not in the writing, but in the marketing of this book. In speaking at national conferences, I realized just how many people out there hunger for mother words—that’s something.


KH: In Lost and Found, you write a lot about your sister and your sometimes strained relationship with her. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached this material, both while you were writing and when you were ready to publish it?

KSV: That’s so interesting—at many readings people noted how they wished I’d written even more about my sister! And at one point I had, but my editor (the very accomplished Patricia Weaver Francisco) reminded me that writing is an art—but not a martial art. So a chapter of my memoir that focused on my sister ended up on the cutting room floor. Which was better, really. It’s a memoir of mothers, after all—not a memoir of sisters.

That example is indicative of my writing process. What I tried to do was get my heart on the page, to include what my motivations were, what mattered to me. That’s the essence of characterization, isn’t it? Once I got it down in that crummy first draft, as Ann Lamott calls it (she actually calls it a much naughtier word!), then I had to decide what to do with it.

When I started writing this memoir in full, there was one person I definitely had to get the okay from to write it: Val. I wrote out a draft of the first three chapters, in which I write about me not wanting a birthday card from Val and how I admitted I was a snot for being that way. (At least I was honest, if not very nice.) So you can imagine how I held my breath for Val’s reaction. And I have to hand it to her, Val called me right up and said, “Absolutely, you have to write this. You have to share everything.” It was important to her that other birthmothers know they weren’t alone in the darkness they lived in, not knowing whether the child they surrendered was okay or not.

Once I wrote the story, there were of course others I needed clearance from. Val gave the okay once more as I started sending it out to agents. And then I shared it with Nor, my birthfather’s sister, and she loved it. (My BookShelf article in this month’s Minnesota Women’s Press touches on this.) I then also shared it with Nor’s sister, Welling. And I shared it with Dad, but he still hasn’t been able to read the whole thing yet. It’s still too hard for him to think about Mom.

As for my sister Aimee, I asked her from the beginning if it was okay to write about being adopted, and Aimee was totally okay with that. So I went with it. When I gave her a copy to look over, Aimee had only one change—she was working at the country club when Mom died, not the Ponderosa. So that was easy enough to fix.


KH: How did this book change (or not change) your relationship with your birthmother, Val?

KSV: It brought us much closer together. Sharing with her the writing of my novel was a big first step. There is a vulnerability in sharing a work in progress. Add on top of that sharing your innermost feelings about topics you don’t normally talk about—motherhood and the role played in your life by those closest to you. Why don’t we do this? There is such a need for this out there, so I applaud you, Kate, for getting these Mother Words out to folks.

When the book came out, Val and I presented it jointly to the national adoption conference. I shared what happened from my perspective, and she shared it from hers. There was such a demand in response to our presentation that I had to return to the area just a few months later to take our story to many of the local bookstores. It’s been wonderfully rewarding to be able to give back by sharing with others the gift Val had given me.


KH: The chronology of Lost and Found moves back and forward in time, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you settled on this structure. Did it come early or later in the writing process?

KSV: The book opens with the initial phone call Val made to me and then establishes my dad’s initial reaction (“There’s always enough love to go around,” he said, “but I’m not sharing holidays!”). The narrative goes from her call to a vacation we actually did all share together—my birthmother and her husband, my father and step-mom, and my family. And though we’d grown close over that 13-year period, Val and I still had secrets left to share. This story shows what it took to get there, what we still were afraid to reveal to one another.

In that process, there is some context a reader needs in order to understand the full import of what’s happening. There’s some weaving of time on the life-changing events covered in that time-frame, and that way the reader can see what happened before and how it compares to now. Always, always, you need to show the reader why it’s relevant to what’s happening in the moment. You need to keep it tight, or else you lose that forward momentum of your story.

I’m not a linear writer. I prefer stories to be much more complex that that, like the effect Tobias Wolff achieves in Bullet to the Brain. Or even any of Tim O’Brian’s work. And so it’s that peeling back the onion of a character and an event as in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours that I strive to emulate.


KH: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Does anything about your writing process change as you move from one genre to the next?

As I share with my students in my multi-genre classes at the Loft, there are many similarities between the two. Indeed, Vivian Gornick points out that we have a situation and a story in our memoir, much like we have themes and plots within our fiction. Likewise, just as a narrative arc is essential to good story in fiction, so too will it serve a narrative well in memoir.

I teach a class through the Hennepin County Libraries about the basics of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In an hour, I have to explain the unifying elements of all three. Luckily, there are key techniques we do use for them all. Most importantly as writers we must create effective images for our readers. Without that, we are nothing. Carol Bly in her Passionate, Accurate Story talks about the need to cull out of our stories all the plurals and generics. If there’s one thing I would tell writers to do, it’s that.

The other thing is to show why it matters. Why is it essential for them to find out what happens? This goes to the story question, and it goes to plot development, and it goes to character development too. If you’ve got all three, you’ve got a story your reader has to read, no matter what the genre.


KH: Lost and Found is in its second printing now. Can you talk a little bit about changes you made to the memoir before the second printing? What was this process like for you?

KSV: The cover is the most noticeable change, so let me start there. Right after I got the book contract from North Star, the Adoption Network Cleveland asked me to speak at their upcoming national adoption conference. It was in just five weeks, and North Star had said the publishing process would take at least 6 months. But with this opportunity, North Star said they could get me copies to have in hand. I can’t tell you how amazing they were in their efforts. The offset printing process alone is a 3 week process and we had to get final edits in 2 weeks—turning around in 5 weeks what New York publishers usually take 2 years to do. But to do so, I had to go with the cover design they came up with. It was good, but I wanted to go with more of a periwinkle cover, to bring in my mom’s name, Peri. So I worked with Sandra Benitez’s cover designer to come up with the design for the second printing. Then I was able to include on the back and inside covers some of the good reviews that had started coming out for the book, too.

Going to a second printing gave me the chance to correct a couple of typos (sigh… I had three book clubs and five other readers and still we missed the apostrophe in “smokers’ coughs”). Turned out I did need to change some of the wording, too, especially that describing one of Mom’s friends. As important as it is to capture an image in words, I don’t know of many women who’d love to know that their eyes have turned milky since the last time you saw them. (!) The point I was trying to make for this beautiful friend of my mom’s was that I could see time passing over her in a way that would never touch my mom.

But there was also a much more serious change I decided to make between the first and second printing. Right in the midst of making the final changes, I got a call from the Catholic Spirit. There was a reporter who was going to run a feature article on my book. “I’m really enjoying it,” she said. “But I got to page 65 and it says here that you’re pro-choice. Is that true?”

I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t believe everything she reads in print, but that line was absolutely true. I lost the interview, I lost the chance to connect with readers. So for the second printing, I pulled the line. I don’t know if I did the right thing. But I did leave in (towards the end after the reader understands how much I honor my birthmother Val) that if I’d been in Val’s position, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to do what she did. To me, I am saying the same thing but in a less politicized way. Hopefully it’s framed so I can get my message across to an even broader audience.

I’m thinking next round I’ll try fiction and then I can just blame the issue on my made-up characters.


KH: I’d love to hear about some of the reactions/responses you’ve gotten to the memoir.

I’ve been very fortunate in the positive responses I’ve received. The best part by far is having people tell me how much they’ve been touched by my words. That they had to put the book down at times because they were so moved by my words. To have some women have to put on sunglasses in the middle of my reading because they are crying so hard.

And just today, I was answering some questions for someone from Ohio who’ll be doing my book for her book club this Friday and she said she cries every time she reads the ending. I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I suppose that might not be too nice of me to say it’s a good day at the office when I make someone cry, but I think as writers what we strive for is to connect with our readers on an emotional level, and to achieve that—well, then, we’ve done our job.


KH: Kate, you are a writing teacher, as well. What advice would you give to emerging writers working on their first books?

Get your heart upon the page. Write about what matters to your character, and for that you need to understand what it is that your character wants that she can’t get. That’s the essence of any story.

Maybe we laughed at Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give as she sat at the computer laughing and crying and carrying on as she wrote. But we all do a bit of that as we write. It’s been said that if there’re no tears in the writer, there’re no tears in the reader, and the more I do and teach this, the more firmly I believe that. You need to write about what you care most about, and your reader will care about it, too. You can write about real life as I did, or you can fictionalize it. I think of Ron Carlson’s famous quote. “Did it happen? No. Is it true? Yes.” It’s that truth we want to capture in what we write.

The hard part is this: that truth doesn’t show up in our first drafts. So be patient with it. Listen to what your writing is telling you. The key to being a good writer is being a really good at revising, at revisioning. In that way we can turn our writing into all that it’s meant to be.


Thanks for taking the time to visit Mother Words, Kate!

Don’t miss Kate St. Vincent Vogl at Birchbark Books this Friday, February 12th at 7 p.m. To learn more about Kate’s writing, visit her website.

the other side of perseverance

Last week, I found myself staring longingly at mail carriers, watching them tromp through the deep snow, doing their rounds. And I thought, I could do that. That could be my job. I’m organized and I’m a perfectionist (though I’ve tried hard not to be). But perfectionism seems like a useful trait in a mail carrier—no one would get the wrong mail and I wouldn’t let the bills get rained on. And—and this is a big AND—I would have a salary and benefits and killer quads.

I know I talk a big game about persistence, about never giving up on writing, but sometimes—some weeks—I do want to give up. I want to turn my back on words. I want a "real" job. I don't make much money, and what I do make goes to child care. I’m actually starting to feel irresponsible about it. (How will we pay for the girls’ college? How will we ever retire?)

One of my wonderful former teachers said to me recently that when he sold his first book, more than elation, he felt justified. All the time he had spent writing was paying off. See, I am a writer. I sold a book. This is important. (And of course he went on to become a wildly successful and respected author.)

I need a little justification right about now. I need to know that all my years of hard work—those thousands of hours I’ve spent at the coffee shop, at my computer, worrying in the middle of the night—haven’t been a complete waste of time. Oh, I believe in what I’m doing here on this blog. I believe in teaching. I believe in helping other mother writers find the most effective way to tell the stories they need to tell. I believe in that. But is that enough?

Winter in Minnesota is clearly hard on my positive attitude. And I know that when spring comes—months from now—and the sun is shining and I can go for long runs and take the girls to the park and rake the leaves from the garden—things will feel a little easier. And maybe then I won’t feel the need for justification. I will find my way back to words. I will find my way inside them again. At least I hope so.

on friday

Zoë woke at 1:30 am with a fever. She’d had a cold for a week, but this was the first sign of a fever. She was inconsolable, so I brought her into our bed. “Cuddle me, mama,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck. We had a fitful night of sleep, and in the morning her temperature was 101.3.

I usually get very irritated when my kids are sick on preschool days. (This sounds horrible, I know.) But on Friday, I didn’t feel that way. I had a lot on my plate, a handful of things that needed to be checked off my to-do list, but it didn’t matter. I wanted Zoë home with me. We spent the morning cuddling, wiping her nose, and watching her favorite baby songs video (a classic—circa 1982).

She napped a little, and when she woke up she felt hot. I made some soup and was letting it cool on the stove while I held her in my arms. But all of the sudden, she sat up with a start, cried out in pain, then began to shake, her body going rigid in my arms. I knew immediately that she was having a seizure. I stood up slowly with her in my arms and walked to the phone. I dialed 911, and when I heard the woman answer, I said: “My daughter is having a seizure. She has a fever.”

Then I started to cry. Zoë was still rigid, her eyes rolled back. The receptionist got my address, my name, and connected me to a paramedic. All I could do is hold my daughter and cry. I knew that febrile seizures weren’t uncommon. My good friend’s daughter had one about a year ago. Still, there is nothing like watching your child go rigid, unresponsive, in your arms. The skin around her mouth turned purple. What if she stays like this? Her backed was arched. What if she doesn’t get better? The paramedic on the line asked whether she was breathing.

“No. Yes. She’s drooling, frothing at the mouth.”

“Let’s count her breaths. Tell me every time she breathes.”

Zoë made a sputtering sound and took a ragged breath. “Breath,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“Breath,” I said. And again, “Breath.”

“Good,” he said. “She’s breathing. I won’t leave you alone. I’ll stay on the line until the paramedics arrive. Is your door open?”

I looked down at Zoë. Her eyes still staring off, unfocused. I carried her onto the porch, unlocked the door. “I hear the sirens,” I said.

“Tell me when you see them.”

I looked down at Zoë, whose eyes were now closed. And then I saw the fire truck in front of our house. “I see them.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to let you go.”

“Thank you. Thank you,” I said, but I’m sure I wasn’t able to convey my gratitude that this man was there with me, waiting with me, talking to me.

I have seen someone have a seizure only once. It was almost ten years ago, when D and I lived with Mimi, and I had taken her to Byerly’s, the upscale grocery store where she always shopped. I was pushing my cart along the meat aisle when I saw a man holding onto one of the frozen food containers. I walked past and glanced at him because he was standing there frozen himself, and that’s when I noticed he was jerking slightly and staring off in that dazed way. What I should have done is gone to the meat counter and told the butcher to call 911. (I didn’t have a cell phone back then so I couldn’t do it myself.) But I didn’t go talk to the butcher. I wasn’t sure the man was having a seizure. I moved on a little, and then thought, no, something wasn’t right with him. I went back and said, “Excuse me,” and of course he didn’t respond. He was standing right in front of his cart, so I moved it to the other side of the aisle so he wouldn’t fall on it if he fell. Then I turned to the meat counter to have someone call 911, and that’s when he hit the ground. He fell hard, like a felled tree. I heard it. When I turned, he was flat on the floor. The paramedics were there in a few minutes, and when the man started to come out of it, they asked him whether this was his first seizure. “Yes,” he said. I continued to hover around, feeling guilty that I hadn’t acted more quickly, that I was too worried about minding my own business to get the paramedics there sooner. It wouldn’t have made a difference, but still. I was shaken for the rest of the weekend, and I think about this man still, wonder what happened, what caused his seizure.

I know as seizures go, a febrile seizure is the best possible kind. I kept thinking this. This is the best kind. This is the best kind. And I thought about those of you whose children had and have seizure disorders. I thought of how powerless it must make you feel, every day.

The paramedics tromped into out house, dwarfing it with their huge bodies, their gigantic boots and jackets. I kept apologizing for the mess, worrying in a completely illogical way that they would think that the Little People and crushed Cheerios all over the floor reflected bad mothering and that somehow this untidiness led to my daughter’s seizure. Crazy, I know. “I usually pick up,” I said.

They waved away my worrying, crouched down, and checked Zoë, who couldn’t keep her eyes open. They told me she would be fine. They told me about their own children. They told me I did just the right thing. They were fabulous.

A neighbor popped in his head to see if I needed help, and I shook my head.

The paramedics said they could take us to the ER, but that it probably wasn’t necessary.

I thought about the ambulance. Stella would be off the bus in a half hour and there was no one there to wait for her. I also thought, shit, we can’t afford an ambulance. I hate that I thought that, and if they had said, we should take her, I would have gone, of course.

They gave Zoë some Tylenol and were on their way. I called our clinic, and the nurse said I should bring her into the ER to be checked anyway. So I called my sister to see if she could come over and spend the afternoon with Stella. Then I tracked down D, who was in a workshop. He met me in the ER and Zoë, poor Zoë, underwent a slew of tests. But they were all reassuring. She just had a virus and a fever.

When we got home later, my dad brought us take-out and my sister and her husband and son came over for dinner. Zoë wanted me, only me. She was feverish all night—next to me in bed, saying, “Cuddle me, mama.” D and I were up and down, alternating Motrin and Tylenol every three hours.

In the morning I was so tired my face hurt, but I had an interview for a grant I’d applied for, so I showered, grabbed some coffee, and tried not to sound like an idiot in the interview. Afterwards, I rushed back home to find Zoë asleep in D’s arms on the couch.

Her fever finally broke early Sunday morning. That phrase—her fever broke—always reminds me of the historical romance novels I read as a teenager (and I’ll admit into adulthood). I can see the hero pacing a long hallway in his Hessian boots as he waits for word on his young bride, who contracted a terrible fever during childbirth. Or I think of the heroine, dabbing the forehead of her lover after he was wounded in a duel, defending her honor. I assure you, I was no less relieved than my heroes and heroines when I reached over and felt Zoë’s forehead in the middle of the night and it wasn’t burning.

The fever was back Sunday afternoon, and then gone yesterday. I have my fingers crossed that it stays away, and that this is the only seizure she will ever have. That’s what I’m doing. I'm crossing my fingers.

a difference

Sometimes as a teacher, it’s difficult to know whether I’m making a difference. It’s certainly easier now that I teach adults because adults—and especially mothers—are more vocal in their appreciation than, say, a bunch of 18-year-olds. But even now, I sometimes wonder whether what I do matters.

Needless to say, it made my day the other day to get the following e-mail from a former student (from my first year teaching as a first-year MFA student at the University of Minnesota):

“It was a kick to see your story today at Brevity’s website. I thought, “Is that the same Kate Hopper who taught me first year creative writing at the U?” And sure enough, I believe you are! Gosh, that was almost 10 years ago when you were a TA for Maria-somebody. Anyway, I wanted to say hello, to tell you that I enjoyed your Brevity essay, and that I think of you often. I’m finishing up my MFA now in California, but you were my first creative writing teacher, the very first person who said, “Hey, these stories are pretty good. You can do this.” Since then, I’ve published several short pieces and am working on my first book.”

I sat at my computer beaming as I read that. I know I can’t take credit for Teri’s wonderful writing or the fact she’s finishing her MFA, but maybe my words of encouragement helped set her on the writing path? Perhaps. It feels like enough to me.

And her message offers me the encouragement I need as I gear up for my two spring classes and start pulling together exercises and a schedule for the first Mother Words writing retreat. I have one spot left in my online Mother Words class, which begins on February 10th. There are also a few spots still available for the retreat (and Faith’s Lodge decided to institute a sliding scale—$300 to $500—to make it more accessible.) So if any of you have a hankering to write more this spring, sign up.

the possibility of everything

There is nothing better than reading a book that transports you somewhere steamy and lush when outside your window the temperature has been hovering just below zero for a week. I was thrilled to be able to curl up with Hope Edelman’s new book, The Possibility of Everything, during our ridiculous cold snap a few weeks back. Edelman has written a number of narrative nonfiction books, including the New York Times best-selling Motherless Daughters, but The Possibility of Everything is her first memoir.

It begins like this:

A ragged dirt road twists through six miles of rain forest in western Belize, linking the villages of Cristo Rey and San Antonio. If you make this drive the day after a heavy December rain, as my husband, Uzi, and I do, the road will still be gluey and ripe. Its surface will be the color and consistency of mango pudding…

I tighten my right arm around my daughter Maya’s waist. Everything’s fine, I tell myself. She’s going to be fine. I press my left hand against the window and watch the landscape stream by between my fingertips. The jungle grows flush against both side of the road, tangled and pristine. The bulldozers of American expatriates chewing up the Caribbean coast haven’t found their way back here yet. Fat, squat cohune palms burst up from ground level like Las Vegas fountains spraying out of the forest floor.

In The Possibility of Everything, Edelman is living in Southern California with her husband, Uzi, who works 80 hours a week, and their three-year-old daughter, Maya. Edelman is juggling motherhood and writing and seems to have created a tense balance in her life until Maya becomes aggressive and withdrawn after developing a relationship with Dodo, a sinister imaginary friend. Then Edelman is at a loss for what to do. The answer for Maya, and it turns out the whole family, lies in Belize.

The Possibility of Everything is a story of trusting in the unknown and of letting go of fear. The main narrative line has to do with how Edelman and her husband end up dealing with Maya’s disturbing imaginary friend, but there are a number of other really compelling threads that also move this book forward: Edelman’s struggle with feeling equal as a parent and partner, her struggle with faith, and the great sense of loss she still feels about the early death of her mother. The narrative thread that I find most compelling is this last one. Edelman’s mother died when Edelman was a teenager, and she’s written about this experience in her other books, but I love the way she’s woven it into this larger story, as well.

Writing yourself takes a great deal of courage, and writing all parts of yourself, even when they are less than flattering, is really brave. At the beginning of the book, Edelman is very hard on herself and her husband, but as the narrative progresses and the landscape changes from Southern California to the tropics of Belize, we see her slowly begin to uncoil, to open herself up to possibility.

I love this moment in the book, when Edelman is watching her husband and daughter on a swing:

Whatever I need—what we need—is right here on this swing. Sitting. Playing. Now. And I realize, in this moment, that this is how a family grows. Now by the addition of more children or through the race to endlessly accumulate more or from my constant attempts to guard against loss, but in ordinary moments like this one. Deceptively simple moments that manage to be worth everything while appearing to be worth nothing at all.

Hope Edelman was gracious enough to take the time to answer a few questions about The Possibility of Everything and her writing process. So without further ado, I welcome Hope to Mother Words:

KH: You are the author of a number of very successful narrative nonfiction books, but this is your first memoir. Can you talk a little about how writing The Possibility of Everything was different and/or the same as writing your other books?

HE: In a very practical way, this was the first book I wrote that didn’t rely on a massive amount of research and interviews, so I didn’t have to be chained to the bookshelf and filing cabinet as I wrote. I was able to write large portions of the book in cafes, and at the kitchen island late at night after my kids went to sleep. That was such a relief, I cannot emphasize it enough. Being able to write in cafes gave me the illusion of human contact that I missed terribly while holed up in a single office writing my other books, and definitely gave me a renewed appreciation for Starbucks and my local cafes.

From a more literary perspective, although I’ve been writing personal essays and short memoir for many years this was the first book where I had to shape myself into a narrative character. And that was a lot more challenging than I’d anticipated. The story in the book took place in 2000 and I chose to write it in the present tense, which meant going back and inhabiting the voice and persona of who I was back then: a very anxious new mom and not a particularly grateful wife. Although my friends back then might not agree, I think I was in some ways not a very nice person nine years ago, and it pained me to come face to face with that while telling my story. I made the choice to depict myself honestly rather than trying to sugarcoat some of my less-flattering moments because I wanted to be fair and accurate to readers, but boy, it was really hard to avoid passing judgment on myself. Ultimately I had to come to a place of compassion for the lost, struggling, imperfect woman, mother, and wife I was back then. Not that I’m perfect now, by anyone’s standard!! But I am different, largely because of the experiences we had in Belize.

KH: Along that same line: One of the most important narrative threads in this book, for me, has to do with the loss of your mother when you were sixteen and the intense fear of loss that this engendered in you. I know you wrote extensively about your mother’s death in your previous books, but I’m wondering whether it felt/was different to approach this subject in a memoir.

HE: My first four books were about mother-daughter relationships and/or mother loss, and they all had the word “mother” somewhere in their titles. When I started writing the memoir, I said to my editor, “Please, please don’t ask me to put ‘mother’ in the title of this book!” And I said to myself, Thank god I’m finally writing a book that’s not about my mother. Because I just didn’t think the world needed another book about my story of mother loss. And then about halfway into the writing, I called my editor and said, “Oh, shit. Guess who’s showing up in the book?” And she said, “Your mother. Of course. I was wondering how long it would take you to figure that out.” Because it really is impossible for a motherless woman to write about being a mother without reflecting on how the loss of her own mother has affected the choices she’s made. I think any motherless mother would tell you the same.

At the same time, I was very conscious that my story of mother loss had already been told in great detail in Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers and I didn’t want to be redundant in this book. So I tried to write my mother into the book in a way that would make sense to new readers who had no idea I’d lost my mother and also repeat readers who’d read both of my prior books and were already familiar with my childhood story. I’m happy with the way it turned out, although I did read one online review of my book in which the reader said he thought I’d stuck the sections about my mother in just so I could capitalize on the audience of my earlier books. And I thought, Mister, you have no idea.

KH: Was there anything—either in terms of what emerged or the process of writing this memoir—that surprised you?

HE: I had a big a-ha! moment just before I finished the book. We were at a condo in Lake Tahoe for what was supposed to be a family ski vacation to celebrate the end of my book, except I hadn’t finished it by the time we left. So I was inside writing while everyone else was out on the slopes. A big theme of the book is my relationship (or non-relationship) with faith, and how after my mother died I became a hardened, jaded cynic who didn’t believe in anything larger than myself any more. Because who can believe in a benevolent spiritual world after such a terrible thing happens to a mother? I was in the midst of the book’s final chapter when literally out of nowhere I had a Dorothy-and-the-ruby-slippers moment. In the middle of a sentence, I realized that if I didn’t have any faith at all left after my mother died, I never would have agreed to make the trip to Belize. Because talk about a leap of faith, that trip was. And I realized that I must have been afraid to admit I had any faith left, even to myself, and how broken and scared I must have been to have responded that way. It was an incredibly emotional moment for me. I was sitting alone at this dining room table in a rented condo with the snow coming down and these huge evergreens outside the window, just sobbing. I always cry when I uncover a nugget of truth about myself, so that’s how I know it was real.

KH: You’ve incorporated sections of history/research about the Maya and healing into the narrative. One of the things I wondered while I was reading was: when did you learn this information? From other interviews I know you did some of this research after your initial trip to Belize. I think this issue of how to weave into a present-tense narrative research and information that you learned after the time period of the narrative is really tricky. (I struggle with this in my own memoir.) I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how you approached this issue as a writer.

HE: Some of the information I already knew when we made the trip, such as the Maya calendar details presented at the end of Chapter Four. I’d heard most of that on the radio not long before we left. But I didn’t learn about the majority of information about healing and cosmology until 2008, when I went back to Belize for a workshop in Maya healing with Dr. Rosita. When I got back, I spent several months reading about Maya history, astronomy, mythology, and cosmology. I hadn’t originally planned to include all that in the book, but after that 2008 trip to Belize I felt very strongly that I wanted to ground the story in something larger than myself, because I understood that what happened to us happened because of the ancient Maya’s relationship to nature, the stars, and the land. By that point, I’d already written half of the narrative in the present tense, so I then faced the challenge of weaving in the research so it wouldn’t feel interruptive. On some pages I’d rely on a turn of sentence or phrase to indicate when I was stepping out of story time—like in Chapter Seven, when I talk about the World Tree—and at other moments I inserted the history in isolated paragraphs so the readers could tell it was separate from the action that was unfolding. For me, the key was to integrate these passages so they would read with the same consciousness I’d had in 2000, even though I discovered and synthesized much of the material years later.

KH: All memoirists must decide how to approach writing about family, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about what it was like to write and publish writing about your husband and daughter. Did you get their approval before you went to print? How do you balance your need to create as a writer with your family’s need for privacy (if they do, in fact, feel they need privacy)?

HE: My husband gets full veto power over anything I write about him or us. He has a stellar reputation in his industry and in our community, and I would never want to damage that by putting my point of view about his actions or behaviors on public display. That said, he was enormously generous with this book, and hardly asked me to remove anything at all, even when it was potentially unflattering to him. He felt that the book’s overall message was more important than his ego, and I so admire him for that.

My daughter was a little more complicated, because I started the book when she was five and finished it when she was eleven. As a five-year-old she thought it was really, really cool that her name would be in a book. At eleven, though, she had a much more developed sense of privacy and didn’t want her childhood to be written about, so we negotiated and horse traded on some of the details. I wound up changing some that didn’t affect the story at all, but helped her feel as if I weren’t actually writing about her. Since then, she’s made me promise not to write my next book about her. As a nonfiction author who writes about family, I’m not sure where that leaves me. I’m thinking seriously about trying a novel next.

KH: I think you did a really nice job of creating a sense of urgency in the book by beginning it where you do, on the muddy road in Belize. Was this always where the book began or did this become the introduction later in the writing/editing process?

HE: Good question! No, the book didn’t always begin with that scene. I began it as a novel in 2002, soon after my second daughter was born and about a year after the initial trip to Belize. I started it as a novel because I didn’t think anyone would believe it was a true story, and I began with the back story of a couple with a troubled child who eventually chose to take her to healers in Belize. Even after I chose to write the story as memoir, I was structuring it in a linear fashion, starting in California and moving forward in chronological sequence. I was in a writing group at the time (I still am, but a different one now) and one of the women in the group, a novelist, read the scene on the muddy road and said, “What if you started the book here?” I realized that would give me a very classic memoir structure, insofar that the book would begin right before a climactic moment and then back up to the very beginning of the story, before catching up to the opening scene right around the halfway point. I tried this structure and it seemed to work, so it stuck.

KH: Can you talk a little bit about how you began writing this book? How did it change and grow over the years of writing it?

HE: I tried it as fiction for about a year before switching to memoir, which is how I think the story really wanted to be told, because it wasn’t working as a novel at all. I puttered around with it for about another year, and then decided to write Motherless Mothers so it went on the shelf for a couple of years. I took it back down in early 2007, and by October had about 100 pages ready to show to editors. I finished it on New Year’s Day 2009. So I guess you could say it took me five years to write the first 100 pages, and fourteen months to write the rest.

KH: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

HE: Finding time to immerse myself in it while in the midst of life. My kids are young, so I have to write around their schedules—mainly when they’re in school, and after they go to sleep. On several occasions my husband would watch them for a weekend and I’d check into an inexpensive hotel up the coast for a night or two and write nonstop, emerging from the room only to eat, and sometimes not even then. I’d get an enormous amount of work done that way, but then I’d come home and have to dive back into to lunchboxes at 7 a.m. again. Not that I’m complaining about lunchboxes!! They’re a form of creativity all their own.

KH: Now that The Possibility of Everything is out in the world, how does it feel to see this part of your life in print and have people react to your experiences? What are some of the responses you are getting?

HE: Having written several books that were largely beloved by readers, it was a big shock at first to discover I’d written one that inspired controversy and even sparked some Mommy Wars online. I’d been prepared for readers thinking I was a whack job because of my spiritual views, but oddly that never really came to pass. Instead, a small but vocal minority of readers have really taken me to task for my parenting style and choices, introducing me to the tyranny of the blogosphere. But a much larger group of readers have contacted me personally to thank me for writing the book, and to tell me how much they appreciated my honesty and my willingness to portray myself as an imperfect mother because it gave them license to embrace their own imperfections. I recently got a letter from a 70-year-old male M.D. who thanked me for writing a book about “cracking molds and obliterating the ordinary crap we all have to deal with and…expressing how you felt and thought without apology and rationalization.” That email was worth a dozen angry Amazon reviews. I’d frame it if I could.


Thank you, Hope, for taking the time to talk about your lovely memoir here at Mother Words. I look forward to reading more of your wonderful writing! You can learn more about Hope's books on her website.