That first phone call came on a busy day at work. I was preparing 700 stuffed cherry tomatoes for a catering job that night and here was a publisher on the phone asking if I would consider authoring a book. It would be based on my cooking school, which had just been written up in USA Today. Of course I said yes—who wouldn’t? I didn’t tell the publisher I knew nothing about organizing a book manuscript.

That was the early 1980s, when authors worked under the careful counsel of editors at publishing houses. Back then, we were coached, and lucky to be so. Times changed in the 1990s, houses shrank their staffs, and I was still authoring books. But I suddenly found myself completely at sea: my first contract for a memoir in hand, and no help with how to structure it.

Back then, writing classes didn’t teach structuring or organizing a book manuscript. I searched for any guidance on how such books were put together. What did you leave in? What did you leave out? And most important, how did you combine the organic flow of writing with the necessary scaffolding that made a book coherent?

Outlining had served me well in nonfiction. But with this new book—in the newly popular genre of memoir—even chapter 1 seemed impossible to write.

It embarrassed me, a published author, to give up, to renege on my book contract. Before I finally made that phone call, a friend rescued me by lending me her well-worn copy of Kenneth Atchity’s A Writer’s Time.

I’d never heard of Atchity. I was already good at time management. I needed book management.

“It’s not about time management,” my friend told me. “Read.”

Former director of the UCLA writing program, Atchity was one of the first to detail a two-part process of book creation. Natalie Goldberg delivered the first step in her “freewriting” exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Atchity took it further. He proposed that books demand two sides of the creative self, both the random and the linear. Freewriting lets us craft random “islands” of writing. Then when we’ve created sufficient “islands,” we form them into continents using a storyboard.

I somehow knew this was correct. It was an organic approach for the writing process with an organization technique—storyboards—for the structure. I knew storyboarding from my work as a hired consultant at publishing companies. Storyboards were routinely used by small presses to plan work-for-hire manuscripts that would be produced in-house. Could a storyboard really organize the unwieldy mess that was my memoir?

I devoured the first five chapters of A Writer’s Time, then using what I’d learned, drafted the complete memoir in 45 days. Thanks to my storyboard, chapter 1 flowed together beautifully—a profound relief. That first memoir was published in 1991 and is still in print.

Storyboarding became the glue that held my manuscripts together as I wrote more books in more genres. I liked its organization, simplicity, and logic. But I still wondered how to craft a storyboard to show versus tell. Most storyboards were event trackers, and they did not reveal the emotional arc of a book.

As I transitioned into the genres of memoir and fiction, which demand an emotional arc, I was noticing that strong events weren’t enough. And sending my characters into their heads to ruminate the meaning of those events was not effective. I needed to show emotion, not talk about it. But how could I take my beloved organization tool to the next level?

Another friend to the rescue: a screenwriting buddy shared her discovery of the three-act structure. A method born in Aristotle’s time, the three acts delivered something called rising and falling action. These movements in story are primarily outer events, but they can also reveal the inner story—the emotion or transformation beneath an outer event that gives that event its meaning. Vivian Gornick’s dense little book The Situation and the Story gives marvelous examples of this phenomenon in memoir. Gornick excerpts passages from well-known writers, including Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed,” about that writer’s persistent migraines, which taught me new ways to “search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it,” as Gornick writes.

Combining storyboarding with the three-act structure, referring to Gornick’s prompts on how to reveal deeper meaning, my book-writing approach slowly evolved. If you’re curious to see for yourself, here’s a short video you can watch. It shares the method I use to organize a manuscript, the same one I teach in my book-writing classes at the Loft.

Mary teaches storyboarding: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMhLvMJ_r0Y

In the end, books are all about organization, not just about sitting down and letting it flow. Good organization rescues us when we’re sinking into confusion about how to delve for meaning, it brings us ideas on how to infuse our manuscripts with emotion, and it gives us ways to structure outer events into a logical sequence that a reader can track.

That’s why storyboards work. They are an essential tool I wish I’d known about back in the 1980s (and I’m glad I know about now).

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on March 7, 2011.

Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 13 published books in three genres, including the PEN/Faulkner Award–nominated novel Qualities of Light and the 2011 release Your Book Starts Here: How to Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book. 

When was the last time you received a rejection note from an editor? If you’ve been routinely getting editorial turndowns during the past few years, consider yourself lucky—not because you’ve been rejected, but because you were informed of those rejections.

It’s been my recent experience that many editors no longer notify writers that a submission didn’t pass muster, and I’m left wondering whether my manuscripts were lost in transit or, if submitted electronically, went missing in cyberspace.

I’ve made more than 50 submissions in the last three years and have been fortunate enough to place most of my writings eventually. But during this period I assume I’ve often also been rejected, since I’ve never heard about some of those submissions.

To be fair, a number of publications state on their websites that they only respond when interested in a submission. Others add that a piece should be considered rejected if the author hasn’t received a reply within a specified time period—usually two weeks to six or more months. Other editors announce they’ll respond to queries and manuscripts, but many fail to do so.

About ten years ago a friend who had completed a literary biography received a letter of interest from a major university press. The editors stated that the manuscript would be considered only if they were granted exclusive refusal. My friend acquiesced, but the press took more than a year before returning his manuscript, albeit with an apology claiming their outside evaluators had dallied in reviewing the text. Not a legitimate excuse.

Discouraged, the man abandoned the project for several years before finding a receptive editor at another publisher, where the book won an award for biography. The lesson here is not to guarantee an exclusive unless the editor agrees to respond within a specified time that seems fair to the author.

Because many editors either don’t acknowledge or hold manuscripts for months, I almost always make multiple submissions. And yes, on a few occasions I’ve received more than one acceptance. One book received three offers to publish within a week. I chose the best financial arrangement.

A few years back I made multiple submissions of a short story, sending one copy to a long-established literary quarterly. The story also was read by more than a dozen other magazines over the next 14 months before a small journal agreed to publish it. The next day the previously cited quarterly also accepted the story and offered a $250 payment. I obviously chose the $250 offer, but that magazine had held the manuscript for 14 months before making a decision. Since this editor had not responded to an inquiry regarding the status of the story months earlier, I assumed he had passed on it without informing me.

Even editors who have previously published my work sometimes have not gotten back to me when my submissions have been declined. It seems that for every dozen stories or essays I send out, I’ll only see three or four rejections, when in fact, all the pieces have been nixed.

There was one exception of sorts that maybe set a record. Late last year I opened a handwritten note in which the editor apologized for the “inordinate delay” in returning my story. Although this one hadn’t worked out, he hoped I’d send him others in the future. I had forgotten that I’d mailed him the story six years earlier, but it had been published two years after that by a different magazine.

I suppose I should cut him some slack because he at least responded.

So what are we to make of editors who fail to advise of a rejection even with a form notice?

For me the multiple submission is a partial solution, and I’ll make them unless I have a prior publishing relationship with an editor. I’ll do this even when a publication may insist on exclusives, especially if editors also indicate they may hold the manuscript for six or more months.

I allow that editors may be overworked; literary quarterlies or annuals may be operated by one or two persons. But how difficult can it be to slide a rejection slip into a self-addressed stamped envelope, or type “No thanks” and hit return on an e-mailed submission?

Having gotten this off my chest, I recently received a 180-degree turn on the form rejection—a form acceptance. While not a delight per se, it certainly beats its sister notification of “Thanks but no thanks,” and is clearly better than the implied rejection of an article or a story by an editor who doesn’t inform the author at all.

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on November 8, 2010.

Michael Fedo‘s eighth book, A Sawdust Heart: My Vaudeville Life in Medicine and Tent Shows, by Henry Wood as told to Michael Fedo was published in May, 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.

by Karin B. Miller

If the ladies would only realize that they are the torch-bearers of civilization, which, as the great philosopher Confucius has said, is the art of being civil, the world would be a more pleasant place to live in. (Book of Etiquette, 1923)

I can’t remember which volume in my large collection of turn-of-the-century etiquette guides first got me hooked. I only know that its unintended humor—not to mention sexism and classism—compelled me to search for more.

One hundred years ago, etiquette books proliferated—most filled with words of wisdom for young women. Subjects included what to wear (“Dress for comfort, not fashion”), what to say (“Never take a man to task about anything”), how to act (“Never laugh or talk loudly in public”), where to go (“Never visit unfavorable cabarets”), and much more.

Here’s a great definition from the Book of Etiquette (1923): “Etiquette will make you dignified. It will make your actions and speech refined, polished, impressive. It will make you a leader instead of a follower, a participant instead of a looker-on. It will open the doors of the highest society to you, make you immune to all embarrassment, enable you to conduct yourself with ease and confidence at all times, under all circumstances.” Phew. What young woman wouldn’t want to master etiquette?

Above all, the guides taught conformity, propriety, and rules for living—how to write letters, properly visit neighbors, and leave calling cards (the number of rules regarding calling cards alone is mind-boggling); which books to read (and to avoid); which household skills to learn; how to make conversation, behave at a dance, and meet, date, and wed young men. It was enough to make a girl’s head spin. 

A few bold voices of the era stood out, aiming not to keep women in their place but to help them recognize their own smarts and savvy. Take this example: “As a rule, women are better conversationalists than men, being endowed with a readier talent for repartee, a quicker wit, and a keener intuition of the fitness of things.” That’s a quote from 1891 in the Jenness Miller Monthly, a popular women’s magazine.

And this one from Tokology (1897) by Alice Bunker Stockham, a Chicago obstetrician and gynecologist: “The nation not only needs strong men but strong women, strong in physical as well as mental development. This strength is required for prosecuting a persistent warfare against prevailing and existing wrongs, as well as for transmitting health and vigor to the coming generation.”

But these writers were rare. Most etiquette books held up an idealized young woman—sweet, quiet, content, hardworking, and virtuous. And some etiquette books—like Beautiful Girlhood, published by the Gospel Trumpet Company, and The Mirror of True Womanhood by the Rt. Rev. Monsignor Bernard O’Reilly—were girded by religiosity. O’Reilly was a rare male etiquette writer; and no wonder: while men were required to know how to bow properly and ask a woman to dance, it was women who had thousands of such rules to live by.

Today, a good deal of the advice in these books would be considered dated and often offensive. But most books offered some advice that still holds true. For his part, O’Reilly warned mothers of both daughters and sons against “giving their boys . . . so large a place in the house that their daughters either seem in the way or are obliged to devote themselves to the pleasure and caprice of their brothers.” Unfortunately, it was also O’Reilly who advised mothers to “impart to every one of your girls a deep horror of the licentious and romantic literature of the day” and “to turn [your daughter’s] eyes and her whole mind away from an indecent engraving or painting or sculpture, as she would withdraw her hand or arm from the contact of red-hot iron.”

Into this mix of myriad etiquette guides came Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home (1922) by Emily Post, a journalist, fiction writer, and high-society gal—really a society insider who was willing to share the secrets of etiquette with everyone. She was also a divorcée—not that that hurt her sales: in 1923 her book topped Publishers Weekly’s sales list for nonfiction.

Unlike other etiquette books’ often-uninspired content, covering such scintillating topics as shaking hands and using a napkin, Post infused her copy with lively characters and gave them tongue-in-cheek names such as the Richan Vulgars, the Toploftys, and the Kindharts.

In addition, Post suggested in her introduction that anyone could be a gentleman or a lady simply by following proper etiquette: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” What welcome words these must have been for newly arrived immigrants, society’s up-and-comers, the increasing numbers of young people moving to cities, and many more.

Still, rules were rules, and as I continued to find more etiquette volumes, I wanted to know how people, especially women, followed them back in the day. I started delving into turn-of-the-century newspapers to learn more about the time, and what I found were stories not about etiquette- and law-abiding girls and women but about the rule breakers.

One hundred years ago, women made headlines when they did the unexpected: suffragists led New York City police on a chase, working women protested unsafe working conditions, a teenage debutante worked to improve the lives of poor immigrants, female entrepreneurs built million-dollar businesses, and so forth.

I found the juxtaposition of what was expected of girls and women and how they actually acted in their everyday lives fascinating. That’s when I knew I had to start writing about all of this—both the rules and rule breakers of the day. 

A year ago, I launched a blog titled AttaGirl, circa 1900, with the tagline: “Not a good-old-day salute, AttaGirl, circa 1900, is more of a cheer for how far we’ve come.” Since then, I’ve written roughly 30 main entries—covering topics from turn-of-the-century interracial dating to corset controversies, plus lots of brief items, like recipes for homemade beauty concoctions, fashions of the day (i.e., shorter skirts to accommodate bicycle-riding girls), and quizzes to see if a modern understanding of etiquette would suffice back in 1900.

Over the year, the blog has experienced more than 8,000 page views, belying my small but loyal group of followers. Of course, you have to ignore a few hundred of those views as a whole bunch of Russian men (blogspot keeps track of reader geography) seemed to gravitate to my entry titled “Swimsuits and high heels.” It was not at all what they thought they’d find.

Americans still seek etiquette advice. The Emily Post Institute has obliged by publishing the 18th edition of Emily’s guide in October 2011, blogging, tweeting, and more. And just as at the turn of the century, the advice reflects the times. These days, however, the content offers not so much a listing of rules as “courteous behaviors and gracious actions.” Something that’s good for everyone.

You can find AttaGirl, circa 1900 at attagirl1900.blogspot.com. Karin B. Miller is also the editor of The Cancer Poetry Project, a Minnesota Book Award winner for best anthology. She is currently accepting submissions through December 31, 2011, for the second volume at www.cancerpoetryproject.com.

by Martin Cozza

People think a lot about getting an MFA in creative writing. Then sometimes they take the plunge and quit the job, accept the austere living, do what it takes to set aside two or three years, and enter an MFA program. Then they go through the program: reading, writing, reading, writing, critiquing and being critiqued, basking in the praise and stinging from the anti-praise, hoping for that faculty member or visiting writer to slip them the name of an agent, trying not to be too disappointed when they don’t. Then, it’s over. The diploma comes in the mail, maybe (like mine) in a cardboard tube. Open it. Unroll it. Ta-da!

For the large majority of MFA-holders who don’t get that quick book contract and teaching job, what comes next is a little like floating in the silence and darkness of outer space after a dramatic, explosive, exhilarating, long-awaited blastoff. All those spectators drop away to nothing. Now it’s just you and your instruments: pen, paper, laptop, coffee cup, whatever. You float. You work. Then you discover there are planets out here, and their gravity pulls you toward them, out of that first trajectory. There are marvelous planets, full of nourishment and surprises. Planet Love. Planet Kids. Planet House and Home. There are not-so-marvelous planets, but their gravity is strong. Planet Boring Job. Planet Car, or, worse, Planet Minivan. Planet Broken-down Minivan. Planet Health-Insurance-Out-of-Pocket Maximum. Planet Gas Bill.

I’m writing to you now from Planet Gas Bill, with the following report. I have sent out my missives in a little unmanned craft, off to that original destination in the distance. (What was it again? Literary stardom? Something? What was I thinking?) They disappear into the black, and much, much later they come back: Thank you for sending us your work. It does not meet our current editorial needs. Yours was one of many fine submissions. Again and again. Then rarely, shockingly, alien life forms appear: We love the piece and would like to publish it in our spring issue if it is still available. Please sign and return the enclosed contract. Please accept two issues of the journal as payment for your contribution.

I do! I do accept two issues of the journal as payment! The piece is published, and then . . . the quiet returns.

The post-MFA quiet is a little quieter than the pre-MFA quiet. You no longer have that arrow in your quiver: I’ll just get my MFA, and that will propel me to superstardom! No, now you’re on your own. Of course, we all know that the end of an MFA program isn’t the end of all support for your writing short of a book contract. There are grants, and writing contests, and great writers’ colonies and conferences, but all of these are either fiercely competitive, short-lived, or cost money you may not have. The post-MFA writing life is a fragmented life. Progress is slow and comes in bits often separated by months or even years. But I’ve learned that each bit counts—each publication, whether it’s online at a friend’s webzine or over the transom at a print journal, each grant that might buy you a month of writing time, each meeting of your writers’ group, each contact collected at a conference or in a class. Each one reestablishes your legitimacy, if only to yourself. Each one could lead to another. It happens.

About three years after I finished my MFA, I called the director of my former program, the late Frank Conroy, to ask a question. Frank was notoriously tough in workshop and notoriously hard to get to know, but he cared about us, it turned out, and wanted us to succeed, and he honored the writing life and craft and recognized the absurd difficulty of doing it well—indeed, of doing it at all. One of his key lessons in workshop had to do with self-discipline, with the importance of an almost religious dedication to work. “Three hours a day,” he’d say, admonishing us to have a strict writing schedule, even if we felt we had nothing to say. Three hours a day becomes impossible when you have kids and have to make money and feel the need to sleep, and we were talking about this. He revised his mantra a bit: “It’s all about time management.” Duly noted.

His last words to me in that conversation—his last words to me ever, it turned out—were, “Keep up the faith, man.” I loved that: Keep up the faith. Not just “keep the faith,” which is passive in its way, an act of possessing something, but “keep up the faith,” more of an action. It suggests an act you have to do over and over, something that takes work and focus, like keeping a balloon up in the air. So there you have it. Keep up the faith.

Martin Cozza’s fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Columbia, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best American Fantasy. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held a residency at Yaddo and several Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and children. Martin is a participant in the Loft Mentor Series this year, a great cure for his post-MFA isolation.

by Karlyn Coleman

The Zamboni slides around the curves in the rink. The smell of propane lingers in the air. The gate opens. Skate blades scratch against the ice. I watch my son skate around the rink, crossing one foot over the other, so effortlessly. Gliding. Flying. Long legs pushing him forward. A blur of blue and orange. Number 14. I wave to him behind the glass, and just as the game begins, I head out of the arena doors.

Out in the lobby, I find a table by the confession stand. I can’t help but call it anything else. When my son was six, the year he first started playing hockey, he came off the ice thirsty and asked if he could have a dollar for the confession stand. I laughed and gave him two. Bring me back some absolution, I said. A dollar’s worth of grace. He bought a blue Gatorade instead.

Now it’s my turn to confess, seven years and eight pairs of skates later: I’ve never liked watching his games. I’m a bad hockey mom. Three-day tournaments terrify me. Instead of cheering in the stands, I join the rink rats out in the lobby and read or write until the horn sounds and the Zamboni comes back out to make the ice all shiny and new.

“Go after the puck. Go. Go. Go. Shoot. Score!” the good hockey moms shout and cheer. It is as if they are behind the wheel of their SUVs, driving their kids to skate harder, move faster, score. They make things happen. They manage and coordinate and organize banquets and hotel rooms. They wear buttons with photographs of their hockey player pinned to their fleece-lined team jackets. They watch the puck drop, scream during a breakaway, and monitor the line change. They know the score.

I, on the other hand, have been known to peek in and cheer for the wrong kid, the wrong team. I don’t have a button on my jacket, because I forgot to fill out the form on picture day. I don’t drive an SUV. I’ve gotten stuck on a snow-covered hill, my wheels spinning, the hockey arena at the top, and watched my kid trudge through the ice and slush, his big black bag on his back, so he’d make it to his game on time. Good hockey moms, I’ve learned, have four-wheel drive.

I want to be a supportive-rah-rah-hockey mom, for my kid’s sake, I do. But I can’t. I’m a writer. My imagination is naturally dark and pessimistically tuned. Instead of cheering, I imagine broken necks and pucks to the head. I wonder if the air is toxic, if the Zamboni fumes aren’t slowly killing everyone in the arena. I’m happiest when my kid is off the ice, sitting quietly at home, a book in his hands.

Wouldn’t it be amazing, I once said to a bunch of parents huddling together after hockey practice one day, if our kids spent 90 minutes, five days a week, doing extracurricular math, or writing, or reading, or science?      

A few of them laughed. Most of them just looked away.    

I’ve signed my son up for tennis and chess, baseball and math masters, but my kid loves hockey, so I’ve tried to embrace the sport the only way an English teacher can—I went to the library and checked out books. Gretzky’s Tears, Warriors of Winter, The Year of the Penguins. I watched Miracle on Ice, but I still couldn’t understand the game, or my son’s passion for something that is so competitive and brutal and insane, but perhaps that’s why I really dislike the sport so much—it’s too much like the real world. I can’t control my son out there. I can’t protect him. I can’t make him win. There’s nothing I can do but watch and worry in the stands. It’s his game, not mine.    

A part of me knows that hockey is preparing my son for the adult world, the world I fear. All that practice has given him stamina. He’s learned dedication and focus. He’s learned how to balance and stand strong. Most important, he’s learned how to get back up on his feet, and how to do it quickly. 

Maybe I’m the one who needs to take up the sport. There’s a mom hockey league. They play Thursday nights. Perhaps if I played hockey, I’d learn to balance, learn how to skate on the edge of things, learn to love the game, but for right now I’ll write to the sound of popcorn popping in the confession stand, and say a little prayer that my kid comes off the ice unscathed.

Karlyn Coleman is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a winner of the 2009–2010 Loft’s Mentor Series Program in fiction. Her stories have been published in McSweeney’s, Canvas, and The Novelette; she has a new piece, titled “Writer’s Porn (Your Fantasy Critique),” coming out in Paper Darts soon. She lives in south Minneapolis with her husband, two boys, and a dog named Happy.

by Sarah Tieck

Confession time. I’m writing to you about organization, but there are dishes in the sink, waiting to go into the dishwasher. There’s a pizza box on the counter. Clothes are folded, but not put away. I’ve got miscellaneous papers in a basket, needing to be put … well, somewhere, and not too long ago, I misplaced a contract and a check. I’m not a hoarder or a slob. I’m a creative person in the thick of several deadlines.

There is no such thing as getting organized once and for all. Instead, learn to manage the flow of your creative life by harvesting the abundance of ideas, words, and other types of inspiration. This supports you in using your creative gifts and sharing your voice with the world—and, as with nature, provides the seeds and nourishment for your next project.

Savoring Abundance

People often think of harvest as an ending, the prelude to winter. But really harvest is about abundance and fruits, gathering what you’ve produced and making use of that wealth to nourish your present and future. Harvest is a time of transition, when new growth is waning and making way for something a little deeper, a little more introspective.

The harvest process is really quite simple: gather, clean, and prepare for the future by sowing seeds, nourishing your crop, and tending the land.

Harvest creates order in a way that acknowledges continuous growth and cycles. And taking time for this process is as important as sunshine and water. As you work in the garden, snipping off dead leaves, collecting ripe tomatoes, and gathering green beans off plants, you teach the plants where to focus their growth energy and you make space for that growth. When you look very closely, you will see seeds for the future. 

Just Do Something

During harvest season, the abundance is astounding. Tomatoes, green beans, and zucchini seem to come in so fast, you either start sharing or learn to can or freeze. I like to turn tomatoes into chili and tomato sauce. We made the basil into pesto and the zucchini into jam.

Unfortunately some of our green beans dried out in the fridge and there’s a pile of jalapeños languishing on the counter. Problem is, I don’t know what to do with them and I’ve not had the time, energy, or interest to search out a recipe. There are two strategies: (a) share with others (yes, I’ve been bringing bulging garden bags to friends), and (b) just choose something and try it. I’m guilty of waiting to figure out the “perfect” thing to do with them. And then they go bad. Knowing this, I may plant less next year.

Creating something from your harvest is a matter of processing and refining and isn’t necessarily something you can instruct someone to do. Yes, there are recipes and directions and maps for getting where you want to go. But with nature—and with writing—the best tool you have for knowing the next step is your awareness of what you want to create and what experience you want to have. Your vision and goals determine what has value, what to keep and what to let go. In garden terms, you know what ingredients you need to gather. In writing terms, your vision will dictate what items belong in your office, what ideas and notes to keep in your files, and what events and meetings belong in your schedule.

Think of it as editing on a grand scale. My husband teases me that I’m editing our plants when I head outside with the scissors. So why not edit the piles on the desk? Let go of that which is no longer needed—or stop stockpiling words for that perfect, someday creation. Use them or let them go. Sometimes what you gather is a “fruit” and sometimes it is compost. Both are essential to nourish the future.

Give yourself permission to purge. You’ve had creative thoughts before; you will have them again! Thinning the stockpile might be very freeing. It is much easier to let go of unneeded or rotten plants; you might think of some of your words the same way. Experiment.

Allow for Rest

Have you noticed the dancing gold, orange, and red leaves shimmying across sidewalks? When the trees drop their leaves, they are shifting out of growth mode. They are harboring their strength for winter, a time of rest and internal work.

Nature sends signals to make it clear when that golden zucchini is ready to be pulled off the plant and when the time is not right. It tells the trees it is time to drop their leaves, too. So how do you know it is time to clean out a file or send off an essay?

You get quiet. As a creative person, I’m guilty of not stopping between projects to pause and rest. I’m guilty of ignoring the need to pluck dead stuff from my “garden.” I’m guilty of letting stuff ripen until it has rotted and of picking fruit that isn’t ready. The key skill here is taking time to pause, taking a moment to look around to decide what you need next.

The Creative Connection

You—and your creative space—are much like a garden. You need nourishment: food, water, and creative inspiration. There are seasons and cycles. If you are feeling disorganized, it doesn’t mean you are a broken, hopeless slob. It means you aren’t tending to the part of you that needs to be healthy in order to create. It means you are ignoring the “garden.”

So take time to pick the weeds, throw out the dead stuff, and harvest the fruits. Otherwise, you will soon find that your “garden” is too overgrown and unhealthy to produce much of anything (note: overgrown gardens are salvageable with a bit of TLC!). Now that another deadline is met, I’m going to clean my office and file those papers—not so Martha Stewart or my mom will be impressed, but because I am nourishing my creative dreams.

Right now, Sarah Tieck is savoring the harvest season and prepping for Essential Elements, Powerful Essays, a new offering this fall. Contact her at her website, sarahtieck.com

by Ben Obler

Writing a novel is a ridiculous task. If we can stop and recognize that fact every once in a while, we can ease our burden. Yes, nose to the grindstone for much of the time, scouring for the profound, the heartening, the heart-rending, the enlightening. But this effort is taxing on the constitution. We have to stop from time to time, set the keyboard on end, and take a deep breath. In these moments (in the colossal time frame of novel writing, moments may be weeks), we step back and try to assume the attitude that Buddhist writer Pema Chodron calls “no big deal.” Easier said than done.

I stepped back recently after several months of making revisions to a novel manuscript. After hitting 135,000 words, I’d stopped writing. The work was getting too long. The more you write, the more there is to muscle through with the editorial weed whacker. I wanted some feedback on how things were working, in hopes that I could lop off a few story limbs and not worry about pruning them, fostering their growth. The writer is the last one who can judge what’s the sturdiest and most fruitful; I wanted an outside opinion on where to direct my attention when I continued. So while I sought out a reader, I set about rereading what I had. I’d refresh my memory, try to simulate a new reader’s perspective, and also clean up the manuscript. I’d already done this once, when I had 70,000 words, and probably a few times when I had less than that. I call it a “pass,” as one makes with a comb.

The pass turned into a full-fledged revision. Crossing out bum phrases, rearranging clauses, slashing paragraphs, tweaking dialogue, noting pleasing scenes, recasting illogical events, reshaping characters. Finally finished, all the changes entered in the 40-chapter Word document, I held the stack of paper. It was an untidy bundle, with many pages warped from beverage spills, crumpled from being toted here and there. What now? I could hardly remember where I was with the thing. It was like I’d emerged from a season-long hibernation (a sense aided by one of the most grueling Minnesota winters on record). The absurdity of it all hit me. I was overwhelmed. I knew in time I’d get the helpful—nay, essential—insight of a willing beta-reader, but for now everything was a muddle. To keep from going mad, the only sane choice was to embrace the chaos, to cultivate my sense of “no big deal,” and have a good laugh.

I felt like a lot of time had elapsed during revision, with me in a red-pen trance. Indeed, the dates on my documents confirmed that a few months had passed. I wanted to recapture time, or at least comprehend my seeming suspension. That’s when I got the idea for a time-lapse video. Well, something of the sort. I made a stop-motion video—over 200 single-spaced pages passing before the camera in under four minutes. All my scribbles, scratching, and scrutiny blipping by with comic inconsequence. It was a fun project, providing much needed relief from the monotony of revision. With the catchy tune I used as a soundtrack still in my head, I once again fire up the grindstone. No big deal.

Watch Ben’s video.

Ben Obler lives and writes in Saint Paul and will present at the Loft’s Novel-Writing Conference.       

by William Reichard

When I was 17 years old I discovered the film Cabaret while flipping through channels on late-night TV. Seven years after its premiere, I hadn’t heard of the movie.  Something about the film’s style and mood drew me in and held me. Although I usually didn’t enjoy musicals, I kept watching. Michael York’s character seemed so familiar, but I couldn’t articulate why, at first. A gay teenager in rural Minnesota in 1980, I was as clueless as Sally Bowles, and lacked her bravado. As the film came to the scene where Michael York’s and Liza Minnelli’s characters discover they’ve been sleeping with the same man, I experienced the revelation just as Sally did, in real time, and I was just as shocked. For me, however, the experience was also one of unmitigated joy, as this was the first time I’d seen a gay man portrayed on television, in the movies, anywhere. For a closeted and fearful teenager, the experience was profound. I’d never seen myself reflected in anything I’d watched or read before, and I was a voracious reader, an avid watcher. Or if I had, I wasn’t ready until that moment to recognize it. I was hungry for any kind of affirmation, any sense that I wasn’t alone in the world, and there was Cabaret, broadcast right into my living room by ABC late on a Friday night.

 As the film ended, I grabbed a pen and paper and planted myself close to the screen, determined to find out who had written the film script and whether or not he had written anything else. As the credits scrolled by, I found that Cabaret was based on Goodbye to Berlin, a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood. I wrote down his name and hid the note in my desk. I was leaving for my freshman year at the University of Minnesota soon and already knew what I was going to do once I settled into my dorm and found the campus library. By the end of my first term, I’d read all of Isherwood’s stories and novels, and through his work, I found other writers, artists, filmmakers, a world full of queer people. The chain of association was endless. I was still a shy country kid, but I knew I wasn’t alone.

Finding Isherwood’s work was a liberating experience. It was the first time I recognized, in a conscious way, the immense transformative power of literature. I went from feeling isolated to feeling a deep kinship with a writer who had started publishing decades before I was born. No matter that Ishwerwood’s milieu of Weimar Germanywas as far removed from my circumstances as possible. What mattered was the essence of his characters, their self-confidence and sense of belonging in the world. For anyone who has never experienced, through social, cultural, or economic forms of oppression, what it feels like to be on the outside, excluded, or discriminated against, it might be hard to imagine finally finding yourself reflected in the world when you’ve lived without such positive reflection for so long. Most people bumble through life and see themselves reflected everywhere, in movies, in popular music, in the papers, on TV, or at least, they think they do. If nothing compels you to look any deeper, why rock the boat? For many, status quo is just fine. But what about the rest of us?

Creative writing, at heart, is issue-based. When was the last time you read a novel or a short story or a poem in which everyone was happy and nothing bad happened and no characters were challenged in any way? That would make for some very dull reading. From the start, we’re shaped by the stories we’re told and the books we read. Fairy tales and children’s stories are all about learning and growing, and adversity is usually the engine that propels characters forward toward some kind of positive change. Raised on such work, we acquire a taste for it, we seek it in the literature we read and write as adults. Whatever else compels anyone to read creative literature, I suspect the desire to know oneself better, to learn and grow, to understand others, and to follow E. M. Forster’s dictate to “only connect,” is at the root. Good literature entertains—no small feat—but it also nourishes, oftentimes in sly, subtle ways, forcing our souls to grow. We like our lessons served with some wit, some heart, and a great deal of intelligence. Most invested readers don’t respond well to pedantic work, and we know it when we see it. When creative literature works, it changes readers by teaching us something new, providing a fresh lens through which to see the world and our role in it. Literature challenges us to see things as they are, not necessarily as we’d like them to be, and to work for change and justice if we don’t like what we see.

Over the years, as a writer, teacher, and student, I’ve encountered transformative writing at every turn. The Introduction to Literature anthology required for my freshman English course introduced me to authors whose work I still read and teach today. Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, in the time of these plays’ creation, was part of a complex religious ceremony. They told stories that resonated with the ancient Greeks because they spoke of characters trapped in a powerful game being played by the gods, characters who could only do what fate had dictated from birth. Reading and teaching these plays now, 2,500 years after they were composed, we explore the ways that every citizen is faced, at one time or another, with a crisis of allegiance, whether to follow the dictates of one’s heart, the pull of family ties, or to follow the law of the land, even when it contradicts what we know in our hearts to be true. In Antigone, the title character chooses to defy law and bury her dead brother, thus forfeiting her life rather than following a royal dictate that’s issued in order to preserve civil peace. She’s driven to this choice because she’s self-reflective, someone who must weigh all her options and allegiances before she decides what is right. A great deal has changed, politically speaking, since Sophocles lived, but human nature, and our deep-seated need to understand it, hasn’t really changed at all.

My freshman literature anthology also contained a powerful short story, “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, about the slow disintegration of a marriage, one partner hanging on to a past that is no longer possible, while the other seeks out a future that will, inevitably, pull her away from her husband and the world she’s always known. As the first in my family to attend college, the first to choose a life outside of the factories and farms that employed most of my family, this story was utterly transformative. Barely 18 years old, raised in working-class poverty, and now sitting in a classroom at one of the largest research universities in the country, I saw in “Shiloh” the power of personal choices, changes I knew I would undergo. Literature helped me glimpse the future, the unavoidable fact that my experiences would take me away from the world I’d always known, and in this sense, pull me away from my family roots.

As a child, writing had saved me because it had provided a way to understand the world and thus shape and control my life. I knew firsthand the immense power of creative work. Mark Doty writes in Firebird, his honest and searing memoir about his early years, about the power and absolute necessity of telling one’s own story: “We live the stories we tell; the stories we don’t tell live us. What you don’t allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever’s held to the light ‘can be changed’—not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow; that’s the nature of being a daughter or a son, as our parents are also. What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.”

My early encounters with literature and its profound power to inform and transform are part of what led me, three years ago, to undertake an anthology project of my own. For several years I’d been teaching City Arts, a semester-long, college-level, off-campus study program that explores the role of arts and artists in working for social justice and social change, with the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). This interdisciplinary work inspired me to develop a new course that focused on the study of literature and the craft of creative writing.

With the support of my colleagues at HECUA, I designed and launched a new semester-long seminar, Writing for Social Change. With the same pedagogical goals as City Arts, this new course focuses on the role of creative literature and individual authors in the struggle for social justice. Part creative writing workshop, part literary study course, the seminar invites students to engage in the life of the local literary community, to write and workshop their own work, critically and analytically read the work of others, and complete an in-depth internship with a local literary arts nonprofit organization. The seminar is an experiential learning opportunity, a chance for students to study ideas and theories, and test them in “real world” scenarios outside the traditional classroom.

After I designed Writing for Social Change, I went in search of an anthology that would be useful for the course. My search wasn’t completely successful. I found one, Upton Sinclair’s seminal 1915 anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Great Social Protest Literature of All Time. It was a wonderful collection of classic social justice literature, but much of the work felt dated (even though most of the issues explored remain unresolved). I also found Ishmael Reed’s wonderful From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002, but it contained only poetry, and I needed a collection that also included fiction and creative nonfiction. I wanted a collection of new work, focused on issues that would be of vital importance to my students. I found a variety of other excellent anthologies that focused on one issue or one identity-based aspect of each author included, but none that moved beyond these monolithic structures. I realized that I would need to create my own anthology. This is how American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice was born.

While in graduate school, I was often assigned to teach sections of a course titled The Literature of American Minorities. I enjoyed introducing students to authors whose names weren’t familiar because they hadn’t yet migrated into the canon. I made full use of the myriad anthologies available. I made photocopied packets of work that wasn’t anthologized, some that had only seen print in small journals and magazines. The course was good for what it was good for: exposing students to “minority” writers, teaching them, through the voices of those who knew best, what it meant to be essentially different in the United States. Still, this didn’t seem to take things far enough. While such classes provided a venue through which underappreciated and relatively unknown authors could speak, they still kept these writers from being understood within the full context of what it means to be an American writer. They created, in one sense, a literary ghetto where such authors were relegated, thus protecting the traditional canon from infiltration. Although they were a step in the right direction, these classes also had the potential to be literary and cultural dead ends, a place where any writer who didn’t fit the narrow confines of what had defined writers of “quality” literature could be safely contained, very separate and not very equal.

It’s been many years since I believed in such simplified categorization. I still have the books I used in those courses, and I take them out when I’m looking for a particular story or poem or essay that’s exquisitely written and addresses issues related to social justice. I want to know who wrote them, and when, and where. Literary criticism itself has come a long way since the New Critics—historical and social contexts have become accepted for interpretation of the “canon.” I apply this standard to new writing as well. I strive to read new works, and teach with them, within the full context of their making. I want to know who wrote them, and when, and where. To ignore this aspect of any work is to engage in a form of injustice, because it strips the work of its full context, and reduces the richness and complexity each work possesses. I teach my students to look for the whole story, the bigger picture, and help them realize that art and literature don’t exist in a bubble.

The silos we’ve constructed to discreetly contain each part of our society, our culture, our educational system, are not real. All educational disciplines are related. Science and math can inform our understanding of art and literature; literature can give a more subtle and complex understanding of the raw statistical data gathered in the social sciences. Theater and its history are inextricably linked to religious studies, to the grand scale of the development of contemporary religious rites. All cultural work carries encoded within it the specific contexts of its maker, and thus provides a focused picture of one moment in time, yet this same work also exists and functions within the culture as a whole. Successful work provides any reader a mirror into her own life, a life that might be very different from that of the author, but one linked by the emotions and narratives and constructs of the piece.

American Tensions is based on the long-standing tradition of using literature as a tool for societal critique, as a means of calling for civic change and justice, and as a tool for cultural transformation. Using fiction, essays, and poetry to delve deeply into social justice issues, American Tensions puts a human face on what otherwise can become an abstract set of statistics, names, and historical facts. The anthology’s title grew out of my search for the perfect word to describe what I wanted to bring together in this volume, and why it makes sense to do so at this time. A friend suggested I look up the word tensegrity. It’s an architectural term, coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, that captures the same quality I wanted in this anthology: “The word ‘tensegrity’ is an invention: a contraction of ‘tensional integrity.’ Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder.”

“The world is a harmony of tensions,” wrote Heraclites of Ephesus, and he might have been describing one of the primary energies that holds the United States together. There are so many competing interests, economic and social philosophies, that constitute our nation. Although he was naming the mood of the world’s first industrial nation, England, William Butler Yeats’s famous line from “The Second Coming” often seems to apply to the United States: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Yet, our center does hold. The basic structure of the nation is dynamic and strong. Of course, things are not perfect. I undertook my anthology project because they are not, and because I believe that literature can teach us about some of the causes of the injustice that is endemic in our society. A good book can do a lot of things. It can help an isolated boy better understand himself. It can simultaneously entertain and teach. It can challenge and provoke. Reading isn’t a passive act, and literature isn’t a passive art. A change of perspective can move anyone to action. If a poem or story or essay or play can change one reader at a time, then it can change the world.

William Reichard is a writer, editor, and educator. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Sin Eater (Mid-List Press, 2010) and This Brightness (Mid-List Press, 2007). His anthology, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice, was published in April 2011 by New Village Press. Reichard directs the Writing for Social Change and City Arts seminars for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

by Mark Herwig

I have purchased hundreds of articles, photos, and illustrations for the three outdoor magazines I’ve edited the past 13 years out of White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I’ve also sold quite a few freelance articles, including this one, so I know the game from both sides.

The writers I consistently buy from always have good ideas. People can be good writers, but if the ideas they shoot me don’t work, that’s the end of it. If I like an idea, but the writer is new to me, I ask for the story on “spec” (speculation); that is, I only agree to buy it if I like it.

If someone is a known entity or has done good work for me on several occasions, and if I’ve given the assignment or accepted the query, I’m paying for the article, period. I make one exception: if I get a great, unique idea from a rookie writer, I’ll let him or her write the article knowing I’ll end up doing a lot of editing to make it usable. I like helping new writers, and they are so grateful.

If a new writer sends me a poorly written story on spec or after an assignment, I sometimes work with him or her to get it right. But I’m just as likely to drop it and never use the person again. Why? It’s much more work to make good writing out of bad and I don’t have time for a lot of on-the-job training. Lastly, there are many good writers out there I can use. Why bother with the bad ones?

Another mistake that will get a writer off my list in a hurry: missing deadlines by more than a few days without a good excuse. I have a deadline from my printer and if I miss it, the magazines won’t get printed. If a writer stiffs me, I have to scurry to fill the hole. Not good.        

Get to Know the Editor

A few years ago, a company we work with invited a bunch of outdoor writers to a seminar near St. Louis, Missouri. There, I met several writers, two of whom I use to this day. We got to know each other on both a professional and a personal level. The upshot: if you have the chance, get to know an editor face-to-face. Again, these guys are good writers, but had I not met them, I doubt I would have struck up a business relationship. Neither of these gentlemen had queried me before.

Here are some more tips:

• Before writing a spec story or querying, study your target publication and its audience.

• Focus your idea, outline, and story like a laser beam.

• Get the publication’s freelance guidelines, if it has them, and proceed according to the rules.

Speaking of rules, here are a few unwritten ones:

Editors are busy and get lots of material from many sources, including freelancers, so don’t send someone an idea that just ran in the last issue. This is really a bad way to start. Assume an editor is there because he or she really loves the publication and is dedicated to it. Sending a query on a subject that ran in a recent issue tells an editor you are just out to make a sale and don’t care enough to do some basic research about the publication. Querying a publication is like a job mini-interview: you must show enthusiastic interest in a job beyond just getting a paycheck.

I’m much more likely to buy a story if I also receive good photos that tell the story. It is a lot more work for me to hustle photos from someone else to fit your story. If you’re not a shooter, team up with a photographer who can fill the bill.

I don’t mind getting completed stories, although I may not read them for a while—even a year or more—because I get lots of material and may not have time to drop everything and read your story now.

Once I buy good stories and photos from someone two or three times, and see that the work arrives on time without my babysitting, I am much more likely to consider his or her work in the future. I have many regulars I buy from all the time. They just shoot me an idea and I tell them to do it. I have confidence they’ll deliver.

It’s okay to send a quick e-mail to an editor or call to check on a submitted story. Editors get a lot of material and an e-mail or call will help get your story renewed attention. I’d suggest waiting, though, for a few months or so. It takes awhile to plug an unplanned story into a future issue. Most editors have the next one or two issues already mapped out.

Leave the ego at the door. Most stories can be improved with editing, so do so cheerfully when your editor asks you to. Don’t nag an editor over changes to your story unless they are inaccurate. High-maintenance prima donnas usually don’t get a second assignment.

Send a story or two to a publication you’ve never queried before or once your work has been used in that particular publication, but don’t send more than that. Most pubs use a variety of writers to keep from becoming any single writer’s “journal.”

Always get a contract detailing what the story should include, deadline, and pay scale—or an e-mail spelling out the same.

Lastly, write what you are knowledgeable about and what you enjoy. Your expertise and passion will come through in your story and make it richer and more appealing to a wide audience.

Mark Herwig edits Pheasants Forever Journal, a membership magazine with a national circulation of 110,000; Quail Forever Journal, 8,500 circulation; and Upland Tales, a 20,000 circulation national magazine for teens of mostly PF and QF members. “The outdoors inspires me and I know when it does a freelance writer by how he or she writes . . . you can feel it when it’s real,” Herwig says.

by Pat Dennis

I first became aware of the waif-like woman with the warm, big eyes at Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore. Theresa Weir was one of 50 or so authors scheduled for the annual Write of Spring daylong book signing. When I shook her hand, she introduced herself as “Anne Frasier.” Embarrassed, I mumbled that I hadn’t read any of her novels. Her subsequent laughter made me feel so welcomed.  I immediately purchased one of her books. After reading her thriller Hush, I decided to read all of this author’s work—a daunting task because Anne Frasier’s real name is Theresa Weir.

Theresa Weir/Anne Frasier is the best-selling author of 19 books in multiple genres, including suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, and paranormal. Theresa was born into a blue-collar family and when divorce hit she grew up in poverty. After high school, she worked as a waitress, then at the Levi Strauss factory and ended up tending bar in rural Illinois. There she met an apple farmer and three months later, they were married. After moving to the farm, Theresa, a natural-born storyteller, decided to write a novel. At the time, she was so unaware of the writing process she didn’t know if a manuscript should be single- or double-spaced, or what she should do with the book once she finished it. A year later she mailed her manuscript to the address of a publisher she’d found inside a book. As happens with most novice writers, her manuscript was sent back with a rejection notice. She sat down, rewrote the story, and mailed it off again and again. Three years later, the cult phenomenon Amazon Lily was published.

Here was a high school graduate who rose to literary stardom while writing as a young bride in a freshly painted Illinois farm kitchen.

Recently I read Theresa’s riveting, brutally honest, and mesmerizing memoir. The Orchard contains the elements of life that so many of us deal with—desperation, dark secrets, the cruelty not only of strangers but of family, forces of nature, the destruction of the environment, and finally love, death, life, and hope.

You have had phenomenal success in writing both award-winning romance novels and best-selling suspense thrillers. Why did you decide to write a memoir?

It’s something I always thought I would do; it was just a matter of when and how. Fiction writing was my only means of support, so I had to figure out a way to live while writing a memoir. My strategy was to sell my house in Saint Paul and live off the proceeds of that sale while I wrote. That’s what I did.

I found The Orchard to be amazingly revealing and painfully intimate. Did you experience any trepidation in exposing your life to the world?

I couldn’t think about that when I was writing the book. It was just a matter of writing what happened, but I guess more than that, it was about examining the emotional truths in that life. I think all writers are searching for the truth no matter what they’re writing—fiction or nonfiction.

I’ve heard your book described as a cross between Eat, Pray, Love and Silent Spring. Now that I’ve read The Orchard, I totally agree. How do you feel about the comparison?

I have to confess I haven’t read or seen Eat, Pray, Love, so I can’t comment on that, but I do love that people are comparing my book to Silent Spring. In 1975, I was a naive hippie, and when I married I really expected to be living this back-to-nature, granola kind of existence, but instead found myself swimming in pesticides and feeling helpless to do anything about it. People didn’t want to hear what I had to say back then, so I’m glad The Orchard is being embraced as an environmental book.

When you are dealing with such painful memories, from both your childhood and your adult life on the farm, how do you manage to keep your writing objective?

I had to think of the main character as someone else. That’s how I did it. And she was someone else. I’m no longer that person, so that helped too. The childhood material was easier because of the time and distance. That was like two lives back. The hardest thing was spending a couple of years in a world I’d left behind—returning there and living there every waking hour. I really started to think I’d lost my mind, immersing myself in a past I’d worked very hard to put behind me. That does seem like a crazy, self-destructive thing to do.

At the beginning of The Orchard, I kept hoping you would come to your senses and divorce Adrian. By the end of the book, it reads like a love story. Do you think writing the memoir gave you a greater insight into your difficult marriage?

Definitely, although Adrian will remain quite a bit of a mystery to me. I have theories, but that’s all they are. It’s odd when I think back, because I do have questions. And as I wrote, I often found myself wondering why he and I didn’t discuss certain things, but we didn’t. I included some of my childhood so readers who wonder why I stayed might come to understand that I wasn’t used to being treated well by anybody, so at the time I simply accepted my marriage.

Adrian died in 1996. Did you ever feel your husband’s presence while you were writing the story?

I can’t say that I ever felt his presence, but it’s a very strange thing to think about how he lived his entire life, birth to death, within a radius of a few miles. I always thought he would do something big, have some kind of impact. He had that quality about him. He was an environmentalist in a place where environmentalism was unacceptable. With The Orchard he’s finally getting off the farm, and that’s gratifying.

You grew up in either small towns or suburbia, moving from one place to another. Was it your experience as a farm wife that gave you such a deep connection to the land?

I think it’s always been there, but it definitely blossomed on the farm. Until then, I’d loved the outdoors but had no idea how the land was being misused.

When your husband was diagnosed with cancer, was your immediate thought pesticides?

Yes, that was definitely our immediate reaction. Just the other day I came across some of my husband’s journals, and he was talking about the pathologist telling him to stay away from pesticides. This would have been after his initial diagnosis. It came up in almost every conversation we had with the doctors. I was frustrated, because there were no studies being conducted about the connection between esophageal cancer and pesticides, yet we knew many farmers who had this rare form of cancer.

Are you hoping The Orchard will motivate people to take some sort of action to protect our lands and water from pesticides and agricultural mismanagement?

I didn’t set out to lecture or preach. That was one thing I knew I didn’t want to do, but I certainly hope it makes people think. And even though my story took place some time ago, the apple has just been named the most pesticide-laden fruit in the country, so things haven’t really changed.

I know that you feel like you scored big with landing Marly Rusoff as an agent. I can easily understand why Marly would want to represent you, but why did you want Marly to represent you?

As you know, my agent of 20 years turned down The Orchard once it was finished. I knew nothing about agents, and I knew very few agents. So I went on a quest but couldn’t find an agent interested in reading the manuscript. I put it away for a long time, then did an online search in one final attempt to at least find someone to read it. Just one agent. Agents were interested until they realized I’d written a nonfiction book and not an Anne Frasier suspense. “I’m not interested in reading a memoir, but what else do you have?” That’s what I kept hearing. They all wanted suspense from me. Two years passed before I found someone to read the manuscript, and that was Marly Rusoff. She’d never heard of me, so she had no preconceived idea of what I should be writing. And I had never heard of her. That’s because I wasn’t moving in the literary world, and I’d had no reason to pay attention to agents. So it was just a magical thing that happened. And the moment I heard back from her in response to my query e-mail, I had this feeling. Even before she read the manuscript I just knew this was right, that she would understand what I was doing and that I could trust her in every way. And when she read the manuscript, she said it was a brave and important book. I think I probably cried, in part because the journey had been so long, not only my life story but also that initial rejection of the memoir that set me back two years because I put the material away. I came so close to never pulling it out again because at that point it represented failure on a massive scale. It almost wasn’t published.

Coincidently, Marly is not only a legend among publishers and editors in New York City, she’s our own Minnesota treasure, the person who started the Loft years ago above her bookstore in Dinkytown.

What is the best piece of writing advice you’d like to share with yet unpublished authors?

The agent quest is demoralizing. One of the reasons it took me so long to find an agent for The Orchard is because I gave up very quickly. I believed what a few people told me: that no publisher would buy a memoir from me because I wasn’t a celebrity. Try not to let the search beat you down. This whole gatekeeper issue is one of the big things behind the self-publishing movement. People don’t want their souls crushed over and over, but this is a soul-crushing business. Sometimes I wonder if some of the best books are books we will never read, manuscripts that are put away and never pulled back out because it’s too painful. Just remember that I almost didn’t try one last time.

Is there anything you dislike about writing?

I hate that second draft. And I always have a hard time getting back into a story once I’ve put it away. But once I get going I’m fine.

Do you write daily? If so, do you write so many hours a day, or words a day?

I completely immerse myself in the story, every day, every waking moment until I simply have to take a break. It might be two weeks. It might be a month. I have a very set page count. Five pages a day for five days. Edit on the weekend, start over on Monday. I typically write a hundred pages a month with this method.

I know you participate in social media, such as Facebook  and Twitter. Do you find it beneficial to your career?

I don’t know about that. Years ago, an editor at Penguin Putnam suggested I start a blog, and I did. I became addicted to it, and it became more important than my writing. So I quit for a while, and now I don’t blog that often. Looking back, I do actually think blogging helped me develop my nonfiction voice. I grew comfortable talking about myself, so I think social networks can affect a person in ways that aren’t always so straightforward. Do people stumble across me online and then purchase my books? I don’t think that happens very much, at least not in my case. I’m a shy person and I think social media is a nice outlet for me.

If you were not Theresa Weir/Anne Frasier, best-selling author, what do you think you would like to do to earn a living?

I might be an organic farmer. Just a small bit of land. I’ve also toyed with the idea of starting my own organic cookie business. That might be more my speed. I’m an awful cook, but I’m a good baker.

The Orchard ends with you moving away from the farm. With two teenage children under your care, how difficult was it to pick up the pieces and form a new life?

It took a long time. I hid from the world for about four years. I wanted the world to leave me alone and go away. And it’s odd, but when you’re in the middle of that kind of grief, you don’t recognize it. You think you’re okay. I actually wrote during that period of time. I had book deadlines. I had one book half done when my husband died, and I somehow finished it a few months later. It was a lot shorter than it should have been! I think I basically just wrapped it up. That was a book called Cool Shade, and it went on to win a RITA for romantic suspense. I might have gotten a sympathy vote there.

As far as forming a new life, I don’t know if that will ever happen completely, but moving to Saint Paul was a good decision. That’s when my Anne Frasier career began and all my new friends called me Anne rather than Theresa. It was very much like starting over. I’ve met a lot of good people here, and I feel very lucky. The Twin Cities writing community is unbelievably wonderful.

Now that we’re at the end of the interview, what question do you wish I had asked?

“If your husband hadn’t died, how do you think this story would have ended?”

I firmly believe Adrian and I would never have left the farm. My daughter would still be there. I’m not as sure about my son, but he would certainly have some connection to the place if the rest of us were still there. I most likely would have bought a little house across the river in Iowa, a place we could have used as an escape. Something that would have belonged to us, but otherwise nothing would have changed. His death redefined the trajectory of our lives in a powerful way.

Theresa Weir’s The Orchard has been released September 2011 by Grand Central Publishing.  www.annefrasier.com

Pat Dennis is the author of Hotdish to Dish For and Stand Up and Die. She is the contributing editor for Who Died in Here? and Hotdish Haiku. Her short stories have been published in Minnesota Monthly, Woman’s World, Resort to Murder, Silence of the Loons, and Once Upon a Crime Anthology. Her short story “Dead Line” will be featured in Anne Frasier’s Deadly Treats, a Halloween anthology from Nodin Press, released September 2011. Pat works as a corporate/special events entertainer. Visit her at www.patdennis.com.