Where Hope Lives

When you live in past, there is no hope.

It’s safe there. I mean, if you tell the same story over and over again, there are no surprises, right?

Little kids love this because when they are read to, they anticipate their favorite parts. Then when they pick up those books to look at by themselves, they turn the pages and say the story as if they are reading it. This is a vital stage in pre-literacy, something I know just a little bit more about after taking a graduate-level class earlier this year.

This literacy pre-ramble might have nothing to do with hope. But it has everything to do with stories.

It’s one thing to read, watch, or (for my grown-up Zoomer kids) play a special story over and over again. For example, I always re-read The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey during my January hibernation because it’s a cold-weather tale and I love it. My family likes to re-watch the 10th Doctor Who (David Tennant/Russell T. Davies era) Christmas specials this time of year. The Zoomies still love Civilization, a video game they first played with their dad when they were small.

Stories like these live outside of us. They’re not the problem. It’s the ones that live inside that destroy hope.

At least, that’s what occurred to me yesterday morning as I dragged inside the house the hope chest from my youth that my father dropped off. It was previously in the storage unit he cleaned out over Thanksgiving.

I emptied the hope chest’s contents into a plastic tote weeks ago and stashed it in the basement with all the other boxes of my past lives. I’ll go through it someday. Or actually probably I won’t. (But I should.)

It was hard enough to go through the last 20 years of my writing to put together a manuscript this summer. An old professor and dear friend encouraged me to do this so I could get on with publishing a book and becoming an author.

But it was spending two-and-a half months preparing for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance’s Pitch event in September that pushed me into the archives of my written life to pull together something publishable from my old M.F.A. thesis, blogs I once kept, newspaper columns, and other material, some published but most not.

Pitch, I figured, was a great way to give myself a goal to produce a body of work. Being pressed up against a deadline works for me: The survival instinct kicks in and I write like hell to save myself from threats only a conspiracy of my imagination and inner critic could come up with.

This is a terrible way to work with the material of your life in writing, especially when so much of it was produced years – even decades -ago. As Joan Didion said, “I’ve already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

Re-reading, revising, and reworking my personal narratives of record took living in the past to a whole new level.

It meant reliving it. And it was hard enough the first time.

My manuscript was not finished when I went to Pitch. I thought about bailing out because I was assured by countless writing professionals, across just about every stage of publishing, that I shouldn’t pitch until my work was as polished as it could possibly be. But I was also assured by some of the same people that my manuscript didn’t have to be perfect.

I reframed the whole process of meeting an agent and pitching my book as an experience I would learn from no matter what happened, and I did. I am happy to share that the agent asked to read my book when it’s finished. That ALONE made the whole thing worth it.

As if I got a signed book deal and advance check that very day, I am still cloud walking over my Pitch experience. But the fairy tale ending of my book drafting journey was leaving Pitch knowing that another human wanted to read the whole thing when it’s done.

The problem is that I may never finish that manuscript. At least not as I originally imagined it.

I know how that story goes, and I am tired of telling it. Like a toddler who abandons one beloved bed time book just as you can say it by heart (er… phone it in), and adopts a new favorite (with a million more pages), I am ready for what’s next, too.

I can’t unlive the past, and I can’t change it either. The only hope for growth, healing, new possibilities, different outcomes, and all that moves us forward is right now and what comes from the choices we make (or don’t) in this moment.

So I am writing my whole manuscript again from the perspective of the life I am living in the present. I’m writing as the person I’ve become, who, it’s important to acknowledge, was made possible by all I wrote as the person I was then. It’s a quantum equation of creativity and about as much math as I can do.

“We are all stories in the end,” Doctor Who said. “Just make it a good one, eh?”