In 1982, in honor of her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, Mom wrote an essay titled Emro Farm, named for the property that had been in her mother’s family for over 100 years, and which her parents had spent their working lives taking care of. She typed up the text on her electric typewriter, aligned horizontally and double-sided so it could be run off easily on a copier. Light blue cardstock adorned with a neighbor’s line drawing of the farm comprised the cover. A couple of other line drawings, one of the house, one of the local Quaker Meetinghouse, augmented the text. I have it in my head that she did all the copying herself, standing at the college library Xerox machine with a bagful of quarters; this isn’t entirely out of the realm of the possible; the only thing making it unlikely would be Mom’s unwillingness to monopolize the machine that long. When I look at the pamphlets now, I realize they’re too uniform to have been made by hand. I’m pretty sure the library was involved though; they probably had a machine for making small pamphlets like this. It probably cost a pittance to run off a few dozen copies; it’s even possible Dad would have had a faculty discount. The document was meant to be shared only with family members, maybe some of her parents’ close friends. Mom’s insistence on a shoestring budget just made sense when one considered the deep-seated frugality of both the creator and the intended audience. In 1991, following the deaths of both her parents, Mom revisited the document, adding essays and poems that examined their respective legacies, and their influence on her.
Mom had been writing for years at this point. Once all
three of her children were in school full time, she set up an office in a
corner of the master bedroom and five days a week, from 8 am until noon, she
would sit and compose on her typewriter. In 1985, with one child in grad
school, another in college, Mom turned the smallest bedroom in the house into
her office. At age 49, for the first time in her life, she had a room entirely
to herself.
She had some success with essays, short stories and
poems seeing publication. All her rejection letters ended up on a
lethal-looking spike that sat on her desk. From her I learned that even
rejection letters had a hierarchy. At the bottom was the form letter; next up
came the form letter with a handwritten signature. Up from that was the form
letter with a handwritten note at the bottom, and best of all, almost as good
as an acceptance letter, was the completely handwritten note, usually saying
something like ‘we can’t take this at this time, but please keep submitting.” This
perspective served me well as an actor. One is probably going to hear ‘no’ more
often than ‘yes,’ so one has to make one’s peace with that.
Her family members were enthusiastic in their support
of her writing, none more so than Dad. He
pushed Mom to treat her work as a legitimate business, insisting, for example,
that she file business taxes each year, even as the business consistently ran
at a loss. Mom hated receiving gifts, but in an attempt to throw her pleading
children some kind of bone, she would request postage stamps for her
submissions. She claimed to love getting stamps; “they make me feel rich,” This
drove Dad crazy; “that isn’t a gift,” he’d squawk, “that’s a business expense!”
We kids would try to strike a middle ground, getting Mom rolls of first-class
mail postage, but refusing to treat them as anything more than a stocking
stuffer at Christmas, and an afterthought on birthdays.
Mom loved mysteries, and ended up writing two of them;
these manuscripts landed her a fancy New York agent, Jean Naggar, but ultimately
Ms. Naggar’s clout and influence proved unable to land a publisher. Eventually
she and Mom parted ways, and Mom abandoned the manuscripts.
Over the years she had written several short stories
loosely based on the lives of ancestors, relatives, and her own childhood. A
handful of them were published in various magazines and journals. With the
death of both her parents, Mom told me she felt a sudden opening up in her
writing. A freedom she hadn’t even realized she was lacking now allowed her to
tell new stories. Partly as a result of this, all the fictionalized memoir and
family history was cobbled together into a single narrative which she titled Silent
Friends: a Quaker Quilt.
The title was, to some extent, Mom’s self-effacing
claim that the book wasn’t a novel, per se, but a loosely connected
series of short stories, the word ‘quilt’ suggesting the process of sewing
disparate pieces together. Having previously read all the short stories, I
probably approached the book with this expectation as well. Certainly, I was
sure there would be no surprises in it for me. But Mom sold herself short.
Somehow the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never
quite pinned down how she achieved this. Maybe it’s partly by making the farm
itself a character. Her disclaimer at the beginning reads, “The land is itself;
the characters are products of my imagination.” Maybe the effect comes from
making all the characters members of a single family. Whatever it is, the
effect was striking, and subsequent re-readings have been rewarding.
In 1992 the book was published by a small operation
based in Illinois called Stormline Press. Their masthead stated that they were
especially interested in stories of rural and small-town life. Mom was ‘paid’
in copies, and gave most of them away to friends, family members, and loved
ones, all with personal inscriptions. My copy says “To Patrick, who sees me
clearly, and loves me anyway.” In the copy she gave to my boyfriend at the
time, she wrote, “For Kevin, to help you understand your noisy friend Patrick.”
A quick Google search reminds me that The Midwest Book Review gave it a
short, but positive review. Mom received enthusiastic responses from many of
her readers, and word-of-mouth was largely positive. Her family members were
all ecstatic, none more so than Dad. There came a point where he began
campaigning for a second printing to be run. He mentioned several times that
Stormline should be contacted, and encouraged her to do so. Each time he brought it
up, however, Mom would shoot him down, often with some heat, and typically end
by firmly extracting a promise from him that he wouldn’t take any action
without her express permission. I was never clear on what was going on here,
nor where the heat was coming from exactly. I know Stormline wasn’t a vanity
press; Mom would have no more paid to have her book published than she would
have grown feathers. If her pride hadn’t stopped her, her self-described cheapskate
ways would have. Maybe she knew the Press hadn’t yet recouped its expenses. But it’s also just possible that Mom’s
lifelong struggle with depression, was at play here. She couldn’t put herself
forward like that; it had been hard enough to submit the book in the first
place; making demands of any kind was simply too agonizing to contemplate.
In 1998, Mom created a document similar to the Emro
Farm pamphlet—same layout, same dimensions, even the same blue cardstock
for the cover—though this time the text was a collection of her poems. She
titled it The Lamb’s War, words carefully stenciled onto the master; multiple
images of a lamb, created, if memory serves, by drawing around a cookie cutter,
gambol across the cover. The lamb directly under the title has been filled in
with dark ink. Mom often referred to herself as the black sheep of her family.
Dad had appreciated the handmade quality of Emro
Farm, understanding its goals were modest, but The Lamb’s War irked
him. He felt Mom was showing a lack of respect for her work. “Hell, the lamb
looks like it was done with a potato stamp!” In 2000 she would make yet another
pamphlet, this one a collection of her essays honoring a simple life, the
title—A Perfect Day—once again carefully stenciled by hand on the master,
the text once again created with her electric typewriter. The audience for
these pamphlets was a bit wider; Mom had several hundred printed up, and she
would give them away to anyone she thought might appreciate them. No money was
ever accepted for them.
I regularly reread favorite books. Sometimes it’s the
emotional equivalent of comfort food; the world is too much for me, and I need
soothing. But even when that is the goal, the story will often still surprise
me. New insights into the book, or my own thinking, will spring up. Sometimes
it feels like the insight is just a flowering of a seed planted by the book
previously, but just as often, the discovery feels like some bedrock aspect of
my personality, independent of the book, is now being revealed clearly by the
text for the first time. I have this experience regularly with books written by
people I’ve never met. Imagine how much more potent it is when it happens with
your mother’s writing.
I understand Dad’s objection, that these collections,
almost ostentatiously cheap in their appearance, suggested Mom was undervaluing
her own work. But I also think a case could be made that Mom was taking control
of her work, and its dissemination, in a way that gave her a greater sense of
autonomy. No longer content to wait for some journal or publishing house to
impart ‘legitimacy’ to her work, while still avoiding the stigma and subterfuge
of a vanity press, she simply made her own books. Fiercely Luddite when it came
to computers, she may have been finding her own way to do what the internet is
now allowing many writers to do: self-publish. There was no pretense, no
inflated claims. All the things Dad did, with the best of intentions, to
encourage Mom to treat her work as a legitimate business—file taxes, even if
they show a loss, ask the Press to run a second printing, treat stamps like an business
expense, not a gift—maybe all that activated Mom’s deep-seated imposter
syndrome. Even giving herself a room of her own had come with emotional
landmines. She felt guilty for depriving her eldest child of a home base during
breaks from grad school, and wondered (in an essay) if she’d been as willing to take the step
if the child had been a son rather than a daughter. All that insistence that
she treat herself like a real writer, maybe instead of conferring
legitimacy, it had paralyzed her. Perhaps after achieving what is so often
treated as the pinnacle of success for a writer, publication of a novel,
she found that nothing had really changed. She felt no magic transformation
into a real writer. If my analysis is right, then I wonder if these slim
pamphlets gave her a way of sidestepping the whole struggle. Here’s my work.
Read it if you want. It will cost you nothing but a little of your time. In
this light, these pamphlets were akin to her home repairs, done with bits and
pieces of things she found in the garage or basement. The results were often
clunky and inelegant, but they usually got the job done, at no cost.
In her later years, Mom stopped writing for the most part,
stopped putting in her office hours. I, and I suspect others, routinely urged
her to get back into the habit. When I fell in love with The Artist’s Way,
by Julia Cameron, I gave Mom a copy of the book. I hoped she’d appreciate the
practicality of the exercises, without being too put off by the New Age spirituality
(something I had more stomach for at the time, myself), but I don’t think it
worked. On one occasion when I took Mom to task for a comment she made
dismissing herself as a writer, she responded, “it took me 25 years to write
one, 108-page novel!” Even if this were true (as I mentioned, other pieces saw
publication through traditional channels), it was a heartbreaking way to view
the book.
Ultimately, I fear she felt dejected by the fact that
her professional life never turned a profit. She frequently referred to things
she would do ‘once my ship comes in.’ Replacing all the windows, reinsulating
the house, any number of tasks were mentioned as things that would happen once
her ‘ship came in.’ Sad how many of them seemed to be purely practical,
unromantic homeowning issues, things Dad would have seen no reason to put off, if it were only up to him. Sadder still was the way that she, a life-long
anti-materialist, nonetheless seemed to think money, or the lack of it, was a measure of her success. Whatever she thought that ‘ship’ would be, she never believed it arrived.
When used books became available online, Mom asked
Mary, Dad, and her friend Becky to buy up any copies they came across, as long
as they didn’t spend too much money (Mom still steadfastly refused to go online
herself). She had run through her author’s copies, and wanted to be able to
give books to interested parties again. Buying up used copies came with some
emotional risks; more than one of them showed up with one of Mom’s handwritten
inscriptions, clearly revealing which friend had chosen to sell or give away
the book, but this didn’t bother her as much as I would have expected (or as
much as it would have bothered me, perhaps). Maybe she was confident enough in
the books merits not to take it personally if someone, even a friend, had
decided to pass the book along.
The title essay of A Perfect Day describes a
day spent building bookshelves and making jam in and around her normal daily
activities of dog walking, cooking, reading and listening to NPR; writing isn’t
mentioned, though of course one has to recognize it’s implicit in the essay’s
existence. I derive a great deal of comfort from that. I fear her lifelong struggle with depression (mostly untreated because, she insisted, people of her generation 'just didn't do that') may have led her to dismiss her accomplishments. But her pamphlets give me some hope that maybe, at least some of the time, she was happy to forge her own path. Maybe she decided to stop pursuing traditional publication, or mainstream success, finding instead her own ways to tell her stories.
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