Happy New Year! I hope. It’s already off to a rocky start, isn’t it? Here’s hoping we can hold things together and keep the wheels from falling off of—well, everything.
A couple pieces of housekeeping, to start things off:
- Did you get a Kindle, a Kobo, or a different e-reader for the holidays? Now would be a fantastic time to go check out any of my books. Head over here and see what piques your interest.
- Also, if you head over to my ko-fi page you can pick up a free e-book of stories (it’ll cost you a whopping 99 cents if you get it anywhere else).
- In other news: I got married.
Where are you from? Where are you going?
I don’t talk a lot about how I grew up, but I do think about it a lot. Not just how it still influences the way I live my life, but how it affects everything I write.
Whenever people ask me “where are you from?” my stock response is “do you want the short answer or the essay response?” The short answer is “all over.” The essay response involves being the child of a Marine Corps family and moving around a lot, followed by a list of places starting with my state of birth and five other states (one of them twice).
It didn’t occur to me until I was a teenager that most kids don’t grow up like that. When I was sixteen, my friend Kelly said she’d lived in the same house her whole life up to that point. I’d lived in three different houses just in the time I’d known her. In the moment, it left me feeling a little amazed and also, I guess, grateful.
Moving around a lot meant learning to adapt in specific ways that carried through to my adult life. After graduating from college and moving to St. Louis, I switched apartments every two years or so. A nicer apartment, a different neighborhood, a smaller place that had a better bathroom, a bigger place that had no central air but had hardwood floors and a great layout, a unit in a high-rise in my favorite neighborhood. Slowly, I started to accumulate more things, but in the back of my head I kept this commandment: be able to fit everything you absolutely must own in the back of your car.
Sometimes I left places for a better opportunity, but sometimes, I left it to avoid a particular situation: a bad landlord, a gunshot in the middle of the night, a crazy neighbor. A feeling of sadness that clung to the place I lived like paint on the wall.
After a while, it got hard to distinguish whether I was moving to grasp a better opportunity or running away from a problem I didn’t want to deal with. Eventually, I learned some problems can’t be solved and you do have to walk away, but you can’t run from every problem.
At one point I thought about writing a story, maybe a collection of them, about someone who grew up in a military family and dealing with those sorts of questions, but the prospect was daunting. I would have had to set it in the time period when I was growing up, which would require research that I didn’t feel very motivated to do. And I know by now that if something isn’t consuming my interest, it’s not going to take off on the page.
And as it happens, I didn’t need to, because it’s been a recurring theme in my writing anyway, starting with my first novel, continuing with the manuscript I wrote in grad school, and carrying through to the one I just finished revising (and which may never see the light of day, who knows?). I won’t be surprised if it comes up in future projects either.
What I’m reading
Even if you’re not a writer, Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing is not just a book of “advice” for writers. It’s also a memoir about how she became a writer and what keeps her going. For me it’s a stand-out among many other writing advice books that I’ve read recently because it doesn’t pretend that the advice is a one-size-fits-all prescription. As I’m fond of saying to my students, all writing advice is suspect—including my own.
That’s more than enough for this month. See you in February!
