My Blog:

January 2010

A year ago I bought giant plastic storage bins, and we cleared out the bookcases in our old house. By “clear out” I mean that when we were finished there weren’t books stacked on top of books stacked on top of books stacked on top of books. The books left behind, mint condition hardbacks only, were single file on the shelf, and they reminded me of rigid soldiers—at attention and saluting prospective buyers. The poor paperbacks were shoved in a dark storage unit a few miles away.

Normally, I’m all for clearing out and organizing. My name is Suzanne, and I’m a neat freak. The pillows on my bed are lined up a certain way, and they get that HGTV karate chop down the middle. The surface of my desk is dust and clutter free. The kitchen counters get wiped down at least twice a day, and rugs are vacuumed regularly (I also comb the fringe). In my book James Dyson has rock star status, which brings me back to my original topic: Books.

Yes, with most things I like neatness and order, but when it comes to my books, I want messy and piled up all over the place—on my bedside table, on the coffee table, in the passenger’s seat of my car, on my children’s bedside tables, and in the bookshelves. I need to be surrounded by books, but I don’t want them organized in any logical way. When I must find a particular book, I want the thrill of the hunt: climbing on ledges and eating a little dust and rifling through stacks of other beloved but forgotten books before I find the one I’m looking for.

I confess I have different copies of the same book. For example, there is my tattered copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. It’s been dog-eared and highlighted and I’ve written comments in the margins, and there’s the brand new copy of Bird by Bird that hasn’t been touched. There’s my hardback of Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery, a book I really, really hope goes to paperback so that I CAN dog-ear pages and highlight passages (it just feels wrong to do this kind of thing to a sleek hardback). There’s my collection of every Lee Smith book ever written, my stack of Anne Tylers and Barbara Kingsolvers and Thomas Hardys (I realize he doesn’t quite fit into this other category, but I am a book lover, not a PhD), and there are my beautiful, beautiful YA novels—Sarah Dessens and John Greens and Lauren Myracles and Laurie Halse Andersons and so many others, the books I go to over and over again when I feel a craving for the teenage perspective.

But there is a dilemma in my new house. We have two very nice built-in bookcases, but they are way too small. Once again the hardbacks are standing tall, but my paperbacks and all the YA titles and most of my good grammar/teaching books are still packed, and I NEED these books. I’ve lived without them long enough. The question is where will they go? More built-ins? Pretty but expensive. New bookcases? Prone to sagging when overloaded (and they will be overloaded).

This year I’ve given myself one New Year’s resolution, and it is to resolve the where-do-I-put-my-books problem. For some people this might seem a very mundane decision, but (Warning: there’s a cliché coming) these books are my friends. I love they way they look and feel. I love the way the ink smells on the pages. I love the way characters, when well drawn and fully three-dimensional, come into my life and return again and again. I love the way great last lines resonate years later—“And so we beat on, boats against the current…” or “It’s no real pleasure in life,” or “Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”

Books comfort me in a way nothing else can. They keep me company when I’m lonely. They entertain when I’m bored. They take me places that family and work and finances prohibit in real life. I wake up with a book (usually the Bible or some devotional thing), and I go to bed with one (currently Olive Kitteridge). I give books as presents and enjoy getting them in return. I even love the way the word BOOK sounds. Say the word BOOK aloud. Your mouth moves the same way it does when you kiss someone’s cheek. And, besides, BOOK sounds so solid and dependable and straightforward. B-O-O-K. And even B-O-O-K says Be o-o-kay!

You’d think I was raised in a house filled with books; I wasn’t. But somewhere along the way, probably when life proved disappointing or overwhelming or just plain sad, I discovered that words on a page offered a kind of wisdom and inspiration and guidance I couldn’t get on my own.

Yes, this is the month to get ALL my books out of boxes. Now that I think about it, the kind of shelf doesn’t matter. Whatever I decide it’ll be-o-o-kay.

Happy New Year!

December 2009

As I write this, the sun is just coming up. There is frost on the grass. And my family is still asleep upstairs. I can no longer sleep late. Truthfully, I look forward to those first few minutes of the day when I am alone with my Diet Coke, my carb of choice (muffins lately rather than toast), and my mind. This time of the day always feels like the calm before the storm.

Mornings around our house usually go something like this: “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days…” I sing this to my children to get them up, and it works every time, mostly because I can’t sing. There is groaning. There is protesting—from my children, that is. The dogs actually seem to like my singing; Maddie and Iris pop up, yawn, stretch, and give me their always-happy dog smiles. “Be dressed in five minutes,” I say and head to the kitchen. Clean dishes are waiting in the dishwasher, and while unloading them, I toast things—waffles, bagels. I flick on lights, pour juice, and start calling, “Breakfast is ready!” Breakfast is not ready, mind you, but by the time everyone drags downstairs, not only will it be ready, it’ll be cold. Next, I’ll retoast the waffles and bagels, and sit down with my children for a minute. They are bleary-eyed, grumpy. They scold one another for making eye contact and chewing too loudly. I cajole them into eating just enough to get them through the morning, then nudge them upstairs where they’ll brush their teeth, and I’ll pull out the heavy artillery: a tea tree oil concoction I spray on their hair to stave off head lice. There have been numerous cases at their school this fall, and I do NOT want this experience. Backpacks are loaded and waiting by the door. After thirty minutes in the car, we arrive at school. As hectic as the mornings are, I feel this slight twinge of sadness as I watch them go. “Bye,” Flannery says and gives me a wary smile. Elsbeth leans across the console and kisses me. “Have a good day,” I say at least three times. “Learn something,” I add. They unload backpacks that only linebackers should be lifting and take off up the sidewalk. There are multiple cars behind me, filled with other mothers and fathers who have packed lunches and poured juice and perhaps sprayed tea tree oil concoctions into their children’s hair. I hesitate, though, because I want to watch my girls walk toward the building.

The sun is fully up now. Even though it’s Sunday, there’s a tile guy coming to work on the new basement bathroom. Besides that, we have a play at our church. Elsbeth is baby Moses. She is eight, so I’m assuming the cast pickings were slim. The afternoon will be filled with grocery shopping and laundry and some cleaning since I was away at a conference yesterday. If I’m lucky I’ll get to eat popcorn tonight, maybe coerce my husband into watching Desperate Housewives with me. The older I get the more I realize it’s the little things that make a happy life—the turkey sandwiches minus the mayo, the clean clothes in a basket, the encouraging things we say to our kids when they slide out of the car or step onto that school bus.

In this season of giving and receiving and returning or regifting, I am going to do my best to focus on the little things (and people).

November 2009

We moved. Oh. My. Lord. Not fun. Not fun a-tall. For starters, we miss our home. Yes, it was old and cranky and needed lots of attention (sounds a bit like me, actually), but it had charm and character, and we had important memories there—newlywed days and new babies and first Christmases. I hate to admit this next thing, but we also had youth there.

Don’t get me wrong, the new house is pretty, and it’s not 125-years-old. So far the septic system is just fine, and all the windows are airtight. The toilets flush—no need to jiggle the handle. The bedrooms and bathrooms actually have locks, and said locks are on the right side of the doors. To explain, our old bathroom had a lock on the door, but it was on the outside of the door, not the inside. We didn’t install this lock, by the way. More importantly, we never had the old lock fixed. For years, we just amused ourselves with all the reasons the previous owners might’ve wanted a lock on the outside of the bathroom door.

The new house is still a work-in-progress. Most of the main living quarters are finished, but as I write this, head-banger music is cranked in the basement and hammers are pounding (we’re in the drywalling stage). Lately, I’m noticing the differences between carpenters and drywallers and duct guys and plumbers and electricians, and I could see this somehow ending up in a novel one day. The drywallers alternate music choices: one day it’s Carrie Underwood on the boom box; the next it’s Twisted Sister.

At the end of this, we will have a finished basement, something I have never had, and I’ll have an office of my very own. An office with an actual door. A place not in the middle of the house, but tucked away and private. I can have real file cabinets and a bulletin board and bookshelves just for my teacher/writer books. It sounds dreamy and maybe a little too grownup somehow.

As hard as the move has been on my children and my husband and myself, it’s been hardest on our dogs. Iris is packing on the pounds, and Maddie is often too afraid to jump off the porch. Mind you, we’re talking fearless, active, crazy Jack Russells here, little dogs who definitely don’t cower on the porch. This is what an invisible electric fence and nail guns have done to them.

This morning my husband left late for work. Instead of his usual racing out the door and leaving a cell phone and brown bag lunch behind, he made another pot of coffee, and we hung out for a while. We discussed all the ways we feel displaced, in limbo, floating just above our lives instead of inside them. Technically, we’re living in the new house, but because of all the workers, it doesn’t feel like it belongs to us yet. Besides all that, it takes time to make memories. Other than the dogs getting into a bag of contraband Hershey’s kisses they found in Flannery’s room and barfing up chocolate and tin foil all over the new slipcover, we don’t have real memories here yet.

But we will, I keep reminding myself. The chaos will die down. I’ll hang some curtains and make too many decorating mistakes to count. There will be scratches on the wood floors and scuff marks on fresh paint, and this place will feel like home for a couple in medias res.

For now I am going to ignore the sound of a buzz saw, pretend Judas Priest isn’t screeching Hot Rockin’ in my soon-to-be-finished office and try to get some work done at my make-shift desk in the kitchen. Somehow I have a feeling this new story will involve a life still under construction or at the very least a character who yells, “Fire in the hole!” when he pops a nail gun.

October 2009

As I write this, I am packing, leaving a house where I have lived for eleven years. My husband and I dated here. He carried me over the threshold here. We brought our girls home from the hospital here. We laughed, grieved, loved, disagreed, and celebrated here. For so many years, this 1880s farmhouse has been our home, and we have enjoyed it. I love the creak in the wooden steps. I love watching the flowers we’ve planted bloom. I love the fact my best bud lives right next door, and I can hear her dog barking when he wants back in—appropriately enough, his name is Boomer. But, like all good things, our time in this house must come to an end.

Usually, I’m a sentimental girl, and perhaps I will be when that giant truck pulls up in front of our house, but tonight, with all my life in boxes, I feel ready for something different, excited that we have fresh adventures awaiting us. The girls will have to adjust. There’s a crawl space in Elsbeth’s room that is already completely freaking her out, but I have promised that its future use will be as a Webkinz clubhouse. She smiled at that idea, a start, I suppose. Flannery will miss her friend down the hill. Cassie just shakes her head, and I sense that she’s wondering if our new house will ever feel like home to her.

More than anything, I will miss my kitchen window. At heart, I guess I’m a nosey neighbor because I love washing dishes and staring out that window—observing the comings and goings of everyday neighborhood life. I know who leaves early for work and who comes home late. I know who the sloggy joggers are and the dog walkers who don’t bother with pooper scoopers. I know the bus routes and the best running paths. It sounds mundane, but I think there is great beauty in routine things—in people who go to work and come home again, in joggers and dog walkers and big yellow school busses. I like being a part of all that, but I also like to stand back and observe. Maybe this is why I’m a writer.

In our front yard there’s a magnolia tree that was given to me by two very special friends when my mother passed away. It’s a giant thing now, and I’ve gone back and forth about whether to leave it for the new owners or take it with me. It’s possible to move large trees, I know (expensive, too). There is a big part of me that wants to drag it along, but in these past few years, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to let go. Maybe next spring I’ll go pick out a new tree—a pink dogwood or a Yoshina cherry perhaps.

September 2009

Lately, I’ve tried to imagine myself as an old woman, not fifty or sixty, but eighty, ninety. Frail and forgetful or vibrant and with-it. I’m not sure which category I’ll fall into, although we all hope to be vibrant and with-it, I think. Right? This started because one afternoon, I pulled out some old photo albums (this is SO unlike me). My two youngest daughters were still home for summer vacation, and we were a little bored. Besides that, I’d been working much too hard on line edits, and I knew the kids needed some mom time. So, I took out the albums and sat down on the sofa with Flannery on one side and Elseth on the other (Cassie was already back at college by this point).

“Elsbeth, you look just like Mommy!” Flannie said when she found my second grade school picture. In it, I’m missing my two front teeth. Elsbeth studied the photo, and I could tell it made her feel better to know that my front teeth took forever to come in, too. There were baby pictures and high school pictures, old photos of my mom, some of them taken when she was much younger than I am now. The albums weren’t perfectly organized. In fact, some of the pictures were missing or lost, with just the faded captions left behind in my mother’s handwriting. I’m so negligent when it comes to photo albums, but she really tried to document my life.

What struck me most was the way I felt looking back at the much younger me. No wrinkles. No sun damage. No need for a monthly trip to the hairdresser. I was just young and smooth and filled with a kind of energy that I no longer have—boundless energy. Not that I’m decrepit, mind you, but I am no longer that same girl. And I sat there on the sofa with my children, and I thought, I am SO GLAD not to be her! I don’t care that she has no age spots even though she bakes in the sun. I don’t care that her hair is such a pretty color. Naturally. I don’t care that her eyes aren’t crinkly.

It was strange because I could instantly remember all the silly things (and people) that mattered so much to me then, all the ways I wanted to please and be important. The irony is that none of the things I remember thinking were so important turned out to actually BE important, at least not most of them. And in a way, I felt sorry for that girl in the pictures, wished I could somehow go back as the me I am now and give her some guidance and comfort, things I so needed at the time. And like any writer, I began to entertain this idea: What would I tell the nineteen-year-old me if I could?

For starters, I would tell her not to be so hard on herself (or on other people). I would tell her that in time she would lose that college fifteen (twenty in my case). I would tell her that parties are NOT all they’re cracked up to be and that actually going to class and working really hard are totally worth it in the long run (she’d learn that later, thankfully). I would tell her to put boys on the back burner. Turns out, there’s lots of time for dating. I would tell her to take a close look at the people she calls friends. Good friends show up when life is really happy and when it’s really sad. I would tell her that the time she spent with her family was time well spent. I would tell her to get a job as a waitress. Waiting tables is probably the best way to learn about human nature. I would tell her that even nineteen-year-olds need God. I would tell her that exercise isn’t as bad as she thinks and that she should try it, not just sometimes, but all the time. I would tell her to trust her gut more, listen to the voice inside her head because she’s smarter than she realizes. I would tell her that everybody doesn’t have to like her. I would tell her she wears way too much eyeliner. Seriously, what is UP with that? I would tell her not to cut her hair really short. That style just doesn’t look good on her. I would tell her to take care of herself because I hope she’s around to get old.

Of course, my thinking on this topic didn’t end at bedtime. It never does. My mind gets wound up even tighter when it’s time for sleep. Lying there in the darkness, I began to wonder what the eighty year old me would say to the now me? What a concept, you know? If you could go through your entire life with this much older, wiser you always at your side? So, I tried to picture myself as this old lady, heavily lined (not with eyeliner, thankfully) and a little frail, more forgetful than I am now (scary). Once I had a picture in my head, I let her start talking and I did my now-sleepy best to listen. Here’s what I think she said: Enjoy the body you have—it will only get older and more wrinkly; perfection is a trap, so don’t go there; be thankful for every run and every workout because you CAN still do those things; don’t be so hard on people, including yourself; cherish every second you have with your family, for families are born and they die; if given the choice to scrub the bathtub or sit down and read to your children, read to your children; enjoy your job(s)—one day you won’t be able to work, and you will miss it. Don’t fret when people drift out of your life; just appreciate the ones who stick around. Always, always say thank you. Remember to be grateful. Take care of yourself because I really hope you’re around to get old.

August 2009

I awoke at 4:15 AM and could not go back to sleep. For starters, my husband has way too many mothballs in his closet (no, this is not a hidden metaphor for anything else—it really is just about mothballs), and when the door is left slightly ajar, the smell makes me allergic. My theory is that you only need a few mothballs to prevent holes in your sweaters or suits, but he seems to think an entire box of naphthalene is completely necessary.

So, while I lay there thinking about how much I detest the smell of mothballs and how much I would pay someone to quietly close the closet door for me, my mind wandered to the topic of revisions. Yes, that’s right, I can go from naphthalene and holey sweaters to manuscripts in an instant. I began to obsess about the changes I want to make to a brand new project I’m working on, then I moved on to the line edits for next summer’s book, Somebody Everybody Listens To. Soon I was thinking about a group of writers I met in Orlando back in June, wondering if the workshop my editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, and I did on the topic of revisions had helped them with their own manuscripts (I really hope it did, btw).

Basically, it worked like this: attendees were allowed to view Artichoke’s Heart in its original form (the way it looked when it was submitted to Julie back in 2006), then make comments and observations on their own. On day two of the workshop, they read Julie’s editorial notes so they could compare her expert thoughts to their own natural instincts. There were also writing exercises and lots and lots of questions and discussions, etc., but the main objective was to give writers a chance to see how the editorial process really works, all that back-and-forth and give-and-take that most readers never see.

All this obsessing over manuscripts and conferences and writers U-turned back to mothballs and revisions again, mainly because I still hadn’t gotten up to shut the closet door. At this point, I crept out of bed and went downstairs to make cinnamon raisin toast. I pushed the lever and waited for the small kitchen appliance to startle me with its eruption, chalked my weird thought patterns up to sleep-deprivation and crazy writer quirkiness. But as I sat down at my desk and ate the buttery toast and browsed Facebook status updates, it struck me that no matter how hard we try, in life or in writing, we will have to revise, revise, revise, and maybe this is really what defines us. Not what we do wrong, but how hard we try to make it right. Over and over and over.

In my case, I’m lucky to have an editor like Julie, someone smart and kind who will guide me, show me ways to make my wobbly story better and stronger. And I’m fortunate to have my husband, because those sweaters aren’t the only things he’s vigilant about protecting (hmmm…I guess there’s something metaphorical about that mothball trait, after all).

JUNE 2009

It’s June, people! June 2009! How did this happen? Time went by, and I turned around, like, twice, and now it’s summer (almost) again. My roses and foxgloves are blooming. My kids will be out of school as of tomorrow. We have two vacations planned, plus numerous sailing trips on the Chesapeake Bay to look forward to. And besides all that, I’m in the mood to be lazy. So are my kids. We’re listening to “Multiply With Power” with far less interest on the way to school each morning. I find myself NOT checking their homework quite so thoroughly (if at all), and I feel like every day should be some sort of mini celebration—summer is a reasonable excuse for too much ice cream or impromptu salsa and chips or hanging out by the pool well past six o’clock and just winging dinner.

Maybe it’s the Southern girl in me, but I like to sweat. I love it when the temperature soars and everyone around me is whining about it. Secretly, I am thinking YA-HOO, let it be hot. Next thing you know we’ll all be complaining about snow! Give me bare feet and T-shirts and no makeup any day. Put me in a garden, and I’ll pick weeds happily. Slice up a tomato and boil a few ears of corn, and that’s my idea of bliss. Plus, summer is the time when stories come. At least this is how it works for me. Maybe it’s all those hours spent outdoors or listening to my girls pretend or the opportunity to sit at the beach and watch people behind the cover of sunglasses. If you’re a writer, summer is a fertile time because the best stories show up when you’re running up that big hill or half-asleep by the pool or staring at what you think are weeds but could actually be those zinnias you planted weeks ago.

When my brother and I were little, my mother would begin each summer vacation by saying, “Before y’all know it school will be starting again.” I hated it when she said that, but she was right. Now here I am SO many summers later, yet I’m still just as excited, eager to monitor the hummingbird feeder or to jump on the trampoline with my girls. Or better yet, to lie on said trampoline and look up at the big ol’ summer sky. Because you know what, school WILL be starting again before we know it.

Happy almost summer, y’all.