on writing...

I’ve always been a keeper of stories.  When I was six, I wrote my first family history, sitting down at my mom’s typewriter to pick out the letters: “I have a new cousin.  His name is Caleb.  I got to hold him.”  I rolled the paper out of the typewriter, put it in a file in my new desk, and held onto it for years.

I’ve been an observer, someone who likes to try to make sense of things, to create structure, to solve mysteries, to find meaning in the smallest bits of lives long past.

I was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and lived my first almost-seven years in a little yellow house on a dead-end dirt road seven miles north of town.  We didn’t have a TV.  My mom, who has her master’s in English, tended a massive garden and put up nearly 80 quarts of pickles every year, until I entered kindergarten and she went back to teaching.  My dad worked at the community college, teaching and directing plays.  I learned to cross-country ski on a pair of six-inch wide red plastic skis, to ice skate, to weed a garden, to identify wildflowers, to carry and stack wood for the stove that kept our house heated.  Mostly, though, I spent my time with my older brother, inventing worlds and stories.  In the summer, we built towns outdoors populated with characters of our own creation who drove around in Matchbox cars and survived unending dramas.  In the winter, we created similar villages indoors using Legos.  Inspired by our visits to my dad’s theater, we also staged plays.  Our most elaborate was our musical production of “Man of La Mancha”; we charged my parents each a dime to attend the performance.      

Love of books was passed on through the generations as surely as nearsightedness and curly hair.  Trips to the library were weekly occurrences.  I still remember the children’s section at the Grand Rapids public library at that time, a deliciously private room in the basement (kids only!) with a big red carpeted “stage” that filled the center of it, to climb on and sit and page through books.  (I would get annoyed when some kids thought it was for climbing only – they would make noise and distract me.) 

My family moved to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, when I was almost seven and going into first grade.  We got to know the library there right away, too.  Over the next couple of years, I discovered chapter fiction, including the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, plus my favorites, Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume.  I especially loved to read before I went to sleep at night, and whenever my mom would tell me it was time to turn out the light, I would always plead, “Just let me finish my chapter!”  And though I was basically a rule-abiding kid, when Nancy Drew was in the middle of solving a case, I usually got in at least one more chapter after that. 

Around this time, my mom, who taught college-level composition, would occasionally give me a spare red Papermate pen.  I thought there was no better gift.  I loved the feel of them gliding across paper, especially after I learned to write in cursive.  One magical day, she brought me a blue one.  With that blue pen, I wrote my first short story, about a dog named Ludwig whose owner, a struggling composer named Van Beethoven, was one day delighted to discover that Ludwig snored in musical notes.  Through the transcription of his dog’s brilliant snorts and snuffles, Mr. Beethoven found success.  As I recall it, my piano teacher was unimpressed with the tale.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved to a small farming town in northern Illinois, near Rockford.  Writing and reading continued to be my greatest passions.  In eighth grade, I read John Jakes’ North and South trilogy and fell in love with historical fiction. 

Then, on my first day of high school, when I was 13, my mom’s sister was walking down a street in Chicago when a man knocked her to the ground for the $4 in her purse.  The back of her head struck the pavement.  She never regained consciousness; two days later, she was dead.  From then on, in my family, every day was lived in delicate denial of our collective grief, and in careful avoidance of my mom’s intense mourning.  Perhaps seeking escape, I began writing my first historical novel, a romantic tale of a young girl in Chicago who elopes to Wisconsin with a handsome older man.  My cousin Amanda, two years younger than me, was my biggest fan.  My mom would photocopy my handwritten pages, and I’d mail them off to Amanda.  She would read them right away and write back immediately: “SEND MORE!!!!  I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!!!!”  I wrote 48 chapters before the project finally gave up the ghost. 

When I was fifteen, we moved again, this time to Brookings, South Dakota, in time for my junior year.  Caught up in the dramas of high school, I came to believe that writing fiction was a childish phase I had outgrown.  But then, in the middle of my senior year, my dad took me to meet the writer Frederick Manfred at his home called Roundwind on the prairie near Luverne, Minnesota.  I got to see the tower in which Fred did his writing, and the rows and rows of books that lined the shelves throughout his home and office.  He even showed me one of his typed manuscripts, boxed up and ready to send off to his editor.  And he told me that if I sent him some of my writing, he would read it.  Back home, I typed up some pages from my old novel, the one I’d written my freshman year.  A week later, the phone rang – it was early on a Saturday morning, and I was getting dressed in my Hardee’s uniform to go to work shoveling French fries – and it was Fred Manfred, calling to say that he had read my work.  He said I was a good writer, and that, if I kept at it, I would be published by the time I was thirty.  Thirty?  I’m going to live to be thirty? I thought. 

But the experience must have inspired me.  A few months later, just after I graduated from high school, I started writing another novel.  By the summer after my junior year of college, I had a finished book, a long tale of life in a small town in Minnesota in 1905, from the perspectives of several members of the community. 

That novel was never published, and neither was the next one I wrote – the story of a family called the Mickelsons who had lost a son in World War I.  It was 1919, and they’d come to their summer home in “Stone Harbor, Wisconsin” for the first summer after the war and tried to pretend nothing had happened.   But I learned a lot from writing them, and, ultimately, the Mickelsons became the center of the next book I wrote, KEEPING THE HOUSE.

Writing stories -- keeping them -- has been the constant in my life, the thing I do because I can't not do it.  I would do it if I had never been published; I will do it until I die.  But, if asked what it takes to succeed, I'd have to quote a former co-worker of mine, who, whenever things got challenging, would laugh helplessly and say: "Press on, regardless."  I love that line.  It's really the only thing to do.  Sit down every day at your work and press on, regardless of what discouraging things you've been told, regardless of the doubts you have (and we all have them), and regardless of whatever else in your life is painful or challenging or standing in your way.  Just press on.