Do You Have a Desire to Write a Book?

At first I didn't.

When I was a girl, I ate books like chocolate.

Books were a way to get lost. I wasn’t always trying to escape something bad—my childhood was filled to the brim with good things. Southern food. Place. Really colorful language. Fascinating characters. The keen intellect of people around me, especially my dad. The realization that the world was full of knowledge and wisdom and that I wanted all of it.

Books gave me the knowing world. They were the key to it, actually. Especially those days.

Then when something bad did happen, when my dad slipped into mania, for example, or I got shamed for my poverty or weird religion or the fact that some of my relatives would go manic and run naked through the grocery store, books were a secret door. I’d open one and bam! I’d be falling down a tunnel whoosh! and I’d come out in some faraway and flowery bend of the universe.

(See what I just did there? Consonance!)

Hours later I’d look around at my mom, my sister, my two brothers, and I’d think, “Who are these people?” Then, “Where’s my dad?”

Why Didn’t I Identify With Writers?

• Although I was smitten by books, and

• although I started writing when I was eight years old, and

• although I wrote my way through high school and college, and even got an undergrad degree in creative writing,

I never thought about writing a book until I got to Bill Kittredge’s classroom at the University of Montana.

I mean NEVER.

Other people wrote books.

River

In fact, the books they wrote were a river, and that river swept me up as soon as my sister began reading books to me. The work of writers throughout recorded history made up that river, and they made it for me, but that didn’t mean I was going to be part of that grand, flooding, rising sweep of story.

I think I was 33 when I got to Montana. This means that in 33 years nobody said to me, Why don’t you write a book? More importantly, I never asked myself. Hey, girlfriend, why don’t you write a book?

Thank god Bill asked it.

And so I wrote one. Then another and another. More.

I Learned How

Every time I wrote a book I learned something new about the craft. Something I wanted to tell other people, so they didn’t have to plow fields at night in total darkness with a broken moldboard.

Because they didn’t know.

Because nobody ever told them.

Because they didn’t know to ask the question.

Craft & Current

About 10 years ago I started putting together a book on the craft of writing.

Then I realized you need something more than craft to be a good writer (and I have a definition of “good” if you want it.)

That something is one foot in an invisible current. In mystery. One ear on the world you’re living in, the other tuned to the singing of the universe.

In a few months I will be releasing this book.

The book won’t be for everybody. Not everybody works night and day to write one. good. line. Not everybody lucked into that childhood experience I had with literature, that it was a powerful river and I could swim around in it and always survive. Not everybody’s writing for the world, to change the world, to change their world.

But I think you are.

I think we’re in that river. And I think the book’s for you. You can’t order it yet. You can’t even preorder it. I just wanted you to know that I’m working on a hellabook about writing.

I hope your own work is going well. And thank you for being here.

Red Earth Farm, Altamaha, Georgia, sky toward the north.