When I gave my mom her copy of The Lilies, I didn’t expect her to be the first advance reader to finish it. She generally prefers an audio book over a hardcopy and has been known to blast through twenty hours of narration in seven hours or less—the speed adjusted so high that it sounds like Minnie Mouse is reading Tolstoy.
Imagine my surprise when she called me just a couple of days after receiving her copy of the novel to tell me she’d finished it and loved it. (She’s my mom. She has to say she loved it. But I am told by people who are NOT my mom that The Lilies is quite good. Pre-order your copy here!)
“I just have one question,” she said.
I braced myself.
“How did you do this? When did you have the time and the brain space for all of this?”
“I don’t know. I just did it. Leave me alone,” I said. And I said it like that because the real answer is sad.
The truth is that I sit in my little room and I close the door and I talk to my imaginary friends. Some of these friends are real people, but they don’t know me. And some of them are fake people that speak through my fingers, their words appearing inside quotation marks on blank word documents.
The real people offer me solace and encouragement. They get my hands on the keyboard so I can hear what the fake people have to say. Some of the real people are living and some of them are dead, but all of them have written things that I have gone back to again and again when I’m feeling deflated and in need of encouragement.
I’ve gotten some mileage out of Walter Moseley’s down-to-earth, no frills approach to the writing process. When I hear his voice in my head, he says, “just sit down and do it. It doesn’t have to be complicated.” When I can’t take the bluntness of this advice, I turn to Julia Cameron’s books, specifically, The Artist’s Way, Walking in this World, and Finding Water. Having read them all sequentially multiple times, I like to use them as reference texts these days. They’re dowsing rods for tapping back into my writing brain. When I need some gentle nudges, I’ll grab one of the chewed-up volumes and flip to a random page. “Gently, now,” Julia whispers. “Invite the ideas in. Stay open to that good orderly direction.”
Reading Julia Cameron
primed me for Rachel Pollack. Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self Awareness has become my most frequently used reference book. It’s a tarot guide, not a writing book, but I find it useful for writing, as it explores cultural archetypes, human behavior, and the nature of creative energy.
On an average day, I’ll pull a card, turn to the index of Seventy-Eight Degrees, and see what my imaginary friend, Rachel, has to say about where I am in my writing process. “We’ve been here before,” Rachel says to me. “And we’ll be here again.”
I first read Seventy-Eight Degrees shortly after I started my initial draft of The Lilies. Early on in the writing process, I remember pulling the Death card. Pollack writes that “Death signifies a time of change. Often it indicates a fear of change…it shows a clearing away of old habits and rigidness to allow a new life to emerge.” Sure enough, in the months that followed the symbol of Death would become central in my life AND in the novel. I made space to write this story at a time when things were turning upside down and inside out.
“How did you do this?” my mom asked me. “When did you have the time and the brain space for all of this?”
My best answer: encouragement from imaginary friends.
The Lilies comes out April 30th! I recommend pre-ordering your copy from Massive Bookshop, an anti-profit, abolitionist, online bookstore based in western Massachusetts.
If you’re in New York City, New Haven, or upstate NY, join me for these upcoming events:
May 1 - B&N Atlantic Avenue - Brooklyn, NY - 6:30 PM
May 2 - B&N Colonie Center - Albany, NY - 6:00 PM
May 3 - Possible Futures - New Haven, CT - 6:30 PM
May 14 - Magic City Books - Tulsa, OK - Start time TBD
More details soon!