I won the 2024 Gina Berriault Work-in-Progress Award for my novel-in-progress, The River’s Bend Sessions!

 

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Here’s the deal:

“The Gina Berriault Award was inaugurated by Peter Orner in conjunction with Fourteen Hills Press to pay homage to the eponymous writer, a former SFSU professor and PEN/Faulkner award-winning fiction writer, whose work embodied a strong sense of selflessness and compassion. Selected by an external judge, the award is given annually to an emerging prose writer with a similar spirit, one who has shown a love of storytelling and commitment to the larger writing community.”

When I got the good news in May, I remembered that my friend Paige Kaptuch had sent me the contest information and then nudged me to make sure I submitted. (Paige and I became friends in 2001 during our MFA program and started meeting again regularly about our fiction a few years ago. She’s been an endless source of encouragement and inspiration, but that’s a whole other blog post. For now: Thank you, Paigie!)

I looked back at my submission, which I’d sent in January and then promptly put out of my mind, because as any writer knows, it’s the only way to survive. Writers were invited to submit between 50 and 150 pages to the contest, and evidently I’d sent 127!

When I realized this, I was bowled over that more than one stranger had read and liked that many pages  I do want to publish this book, which of course means that with any luck, strangers will eventually read it when I’m not aware they’re reading it, but this was disorienting. People had been reading and talking about my work while I’d been going about my business!

 

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I wanted to learn more about Gina Berriault, who died in 1999. I ​​found this short NPR interview from 1997, when she was in her 70s and had just begun to receive wider recognition for her work. This spoke to me:

“It’s a strange situation for me because I’ve spent most of my life alone at my table many hours of the day and into the night … but I’ll tell you: in a way,  it’s done me good. Because when I go to readings now — when I read, and I never did before — I meet people who have copies of my books that they’ve been keeping for years, and then I realize that I’m writing for them, too. Writing becomes more of a responsibility to others, for whom my work means something, because I’ve always struggled against a belittling of what I’m doing, even a belittling of being a writer. Because there’s something about being a writer that, even though you’re venturing out into the world with your imagination, you’re not — how shall I say it — you haven’t become a computer expert. You haven’t become a scientist. I think there’s a tendency for a writer to feel a little bit odd, like he’s doing something that perhaps he or she shouldn’t be doing. And that might be why writers all over the world are persecuted, prosecuted, assassinated, perhaps because you’re venturing too far into the human psyche, into what it means to be human.”

I relate mostly to the belittling and feeling odd part. Any persecution is self-persecution. These feelings have something to do with the how long I’ve been at this project, which I started in 2014. That’s part of why it’s taken me some time to write about this news, and here’s the place I’ve gotten to: It’s okay. Life has a lot of unexpected turns and difficulties, and still I keep returning to this story and these characters, because I want to. It’s turning out to be a very different book than it would have been if I’d finished it in a handful of years, as I hear some writers manage to do. A lot has happened in the world and in my life while I’ve been writing, and I know the story is richer for it.

Precisely twelve days before I received the happy email, I’d printed out everything I had on three-hole-punched paper, snapped the pages into a thick binder, and started reading. I scribbled notes in the margins and swapped chunks around. I tried to figure out where and how it would all end, and I scribbled down ideas to try. Now I’m writing forward again. I want so much for my protagonist and for myself. This award — both the financial support and the vote of confidence — will help me keep moving forward.

April 26, 2024

I’ve had good things happen with shorter excerpts of the novel. It’s set in two time periods — 1992 and 2021. I’ve known for a while that people like the 1992 sections, but I’ve never been sure if I can bring people along to 2021 (including myself). It’s a lot to ask. So it was affirming to know that those readers had come along with me, and with my protagonist, who is 15 for 70 or so pages and then — kablam! — 45. (And yes, this is pretty much how getting from 15 to 45 felt for me in real life, too. Where and when am I?!)

After learning of the award, I read The Son, a short novel by Gina Berriault, published in 1966. It’s about a woman’s life, and it spans decades. Berriault dwells in the interior and the everyday, which is exactly what I like best. She has enviable restraint, depicting the forces at work in the protagonist’s life and the damage she inflicts without comment. To borrow her words, she ventures (some would say too far) into the human psyche, into what it means to be human.

I was briefly sorry I hadn’t encountered her work sooner, but that quickly gave way to the conviction that I’d found it at exactly the right time. I wanted more, and it was all ahead of me. A copy of Women in Their Beds: 35 Stories, is waiting for me at The Book Rack when I get back from a summer road trip with my family. Gosh, I love that title.

I’m grateful to the novelist Vanessa Hua, who selected The River’s Bend Sessions for the award, and to the editorial staff of Fourteen Hills (writers, all of them!). An excerpt will be published in the spring 2025 issue, which will be the first time any words of The River’s Bend Sessions have appeared in print outside of my giant orange binder.

Cafe glamour shot thanks to a birthday gift certificate from Paige. She really is the best.

I spent more time reading in 2021 than I have in years (I think. I don’t know. This was the first year I’ve ever tracked my reading and I was going to write a few sentences about that here, but that writing got me thinking about something bigger that I hope to articulate and post separately if I can figure it out.) Let’s keep this post simple. Reading helps me. Here are eleven books I feel richer for having read in 2021, categorized and unranked. They range widely, but if I have to pick one word to describe them all, I’ll go with “unflinching.” Yes, even (and maybe especially) the YA graphic memoir.  

Five Novels

Landslide, Susan Conley, 2021
Finished on March 30
Provenance: Special ordered from The Book Rack

A family story set in a struggling Maine fishing village. The portrayal of mothering teenage boys and loving taciturn Mainers broke my heart. I found the narrative voice to be funny and self aware, which might not be clear from the rest of this description.

Damnation Spring, Ash Davidson, 2021
Finished on May 10
Provenance: Galley sent to me by the author! But I bought a hardcover later… from the Book Rack

A novel set in California logging country in the year of my birth (coincidence). The protagonist cuts down redwoods, and yet somehow I’m rooting for him to be allowed to keep going. The details of logging are fascinating, but I was in it for the family at the center of the story. Davidson has an unflinching eye and a sly wit. And yes, the rumors are true! She was my student in Fiction 210 at the University of Arizona nearly twenty years ago. Her stories blew me away then, and she got even better.

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
Finished on June 18
Provenance: Picked up a used copy at the Book Rack and then it languished on my shelf for a few years

I was slow to start this one because I knew it would be a demanding read. And it was, but I found the narrative voice — which comes in the form of a confession — irresistible. I’m generally drawn to quiet realism, and this is more like a combination of existentialism and satire, but the voice is bristling with intelligence and pathos and there is a great deal of plot. The form and style feel perfect for the story. It’s not clear whether the narrator’s sacrifices in having lived a double life have made much difference for the cause. I like that.

Transcription, Kate Atkinson, 2018
Finished on September 27
Provenance: Fox Library

A slippery, atmospheric novel that gives proper attention to the bureaucracy and absurdity of spying, told with mordant wit. Set in London during World War II and in 1950. It’s thematically similar to The Sympathizer, and equally ambiguous, but the style is masquerading as quiet realism.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850
Finished on December 9
Provenance: Inherited from my Uncle Chuck (more on Chuck and his books in “My Uncle’s Books,” an essay I wrote for the Ploughshares blog)

Reading this book was one of the highlights of my year. I read Chuck’s Modern Library copy, with burgundy cloth cover, gold details (which I scuffed), ribbon bookmark, original illustrations, and Bible paper pages. It felt right. I love how if you read through the chapter titles, you can surmise the whole plot of the book. No one can paint a character as efficiently or as cuttingly as Dickens. I was afraid this book would take me forever to read, and it did take a while, but mostly because I slowed myself down so I had the comfort of returning to good, cosy company. I haven’t read much Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities is up next.

Two Memoirs

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon, 2019
Finished May 31
Provenance: Robbins Library request

This memoir of growing up Black in Mississippi is arresting in its honesty. I felt I was getting the truth of Laymon’s experience in every sentence, and as I read, I found myself pausing more than once to reflect on what a generous and rare act that is. The book is written as a letter to his complicated mother, and Laymon sent me to read James Baldwin’s essay “Faulkner and Desegregation,” published in 1956, which led me to read more Baldwin essays — some for the first time and others again. This was a good idea, of course, and it came with the bonus of allowing me to pull another one of my uncle’s books off the shelf.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May, 2020
Finished October 25
Provenance: Fox Library

I have the good fortune to live a few blocks from a little branch library. This title called to me from the speed read shelf while I was in the middle of reading David Copperfield. Much of the book takes place in Dickens’ part of England, so the landscape was familiar, and I paused to devour it in a couple of days. The title flirts with self help, and the book is very much about May helping herself, but it’s really an honest, searching memoir of a difficult year, brimming with acts of careful attention. It’s not the book she set out to write, which only makes it better. I immediately procured a copy of her earlier memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and read it next. I’ve recommended Wintering to a lot of people, and I bought my own copy after I surrendered it to the library because I knew I would return to it, and I have. Here’s something to return to as we find ourselves in the middle of another winter:

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

A Reread

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920
Finished February 4
Provenance: Inherited from my uncle Chuck

This was my only reread of the year, and what a reread it was! So little is spoken and yet so much is understood. House of Mirth is still my favorite, and one of my most frequently reread books, but this one is a pleasure and a page turner, too. Edith Wharton gets it!

A Shared Read

Guts, Raina Telgemeier, 2019
Finished October 15
Provenance: School Book Fair, 2019

My son has been dealing with Irritable Bowel Syndrome for the past year. One morning, after a string of absences and early dismissals due to stomach symptoms, we snuggled on the couch and read this book straight through together. He’d read it many times, but I hadn’t. We read silently, turning the pages when it was time for both of us to move along. I asked him questions and he used the narrator’s experience to help me understand his experiences. It was a hard morning, and it was the best thing we could have done. I’m happy to report that he’s been improving steadily during the past couple of months.

A Book About Writing

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, Brenda Ueland, 1938
Finished November 19
Provenance: Gift from my Mom, at least twenty years ago

My mom has always been a great supporter of my writing, and she’s given me many writing books over the years. This one has been on my shelf for a long time and has survived several moves without ever having been read. It was always in danger when I culled books, but I remember, more than once, opening it ready to admit I was never going to read it, and then reading a few pages and realizing I should give it a chance. I reached for it during a dry spell in my writing life, and it was that feeling of finding just the friend you need when you need a friend very badly. I wish I could have been in Brenda’s class at the Minneapolis YMCA in the 1930s. She’s astute, she’s funny, and most of all, she’s encouraging. A few ideas I’ve taken aboard from her: microscopic truthfulness, moodling, and this:

“Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.”

It’s amazing how much space anxious vanity and fear of failure can take up, but I’m trying to move them to smaller containers and store them in the way back of a cabinet — behind the things I actually need.

A Book I’m In the Middle of Reading

The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay
Provenance: Book Rack special order

I started this right before Thanksgiving, and I’ve been reluctant to finish it. These brief essays are mostly about savoring something small, and in that spirit, I want to savor them, too, and to let them form a bridge from 2021 to 2022 for me. Although the pieces are about finding delight, they also contain difficult truths. Gay talks about the book as being about “the virtues and the labor of delight.” Here’s a short video of him reading a story about flying with a tomato seedling. Guaranteed smiles.

My friend gave me a prayer plant last January.

She’d propagated it from a cutting, and I was touched. It was adorable, just a few inches high, with four healthy leaves. I walked the few blocks home, hopeful but nervous, because I am not good with plants. Explain it to me like I don’t even know what a plant is, I said. She did. I placed it in what I thought was the right light. My family admired its diurnal movements. Each morning, it lowered its leaves. Each night, it raised them.

Within days, the leaves began to turn yellow and wither. I moved my new plant all over the place and texted my friend photos, frantically seeking advice. Pick a spot and leave it there, she said. Keep the soil moist. I think it will be okay. This happens sometimes. New growth pushed its way up the middle, a leaf furled so tightly it resembled a blade of grass. As it grew, one of the yellow leaves gave up the ghost, turning brown and drying to a husk. I clipped it off, worried.

The new leaf opened, looking considerably less hearty than its predecessor. I watched as this zero-sum game played out three more times. The pace was excruciating, each episode taking a couple of months. I removed the dead leaves and tracked the progress closely, letting up only when I trusted that the new leaves were holding their own.I kept the soil moist and enjoyed the plant’s presence in my living room, but I can’t say exactly when it broke even, growing a fifth leaf without sacrificing an earlier one.

Now it also has a shoot pushing up from the middle, the tallest of any yet. It could spend a month on the unfurling, in that languorous way it has. The older leaves have developed their colors, a deep green set against a paler shade, with swooping lines of magenta. The younger leaves are bright, with darker splotches emerging in awkward shapes that strike me as adolescent.

Throughout this tortuous year, I’ve regularly updated my friend about the plant’s progress, sending her photos, joking about my urge to make it a metaphor, admitting that I’ve imbued it with way too much meaning. I’ve never felt this way about plant. I think it might be love, with a dash of idolatry.

I thought it would be fun to celebrate the plantiversary with my friend, so I scrolled through our texting chain of the past year, which forms a hilarious (to us), wide ranging, and fragmented record of some things about 2020. I loaded at least a dozen pages before I found the date she entrusted the plant to me: January 20, 2020. Today is January 20, 2021. I am nervous but hopeful.

“If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice, which is what makes it perfect, right?”

Every day these days I seem to need a new set of words to live by, and today they come from Katie, this morning’s stationary cycling instructor on my audio-only fitness app. Imagine them spoken above the opening strains of Toto’s “Africa,” because they were. Of course they were.

I’m a fiction writer who often writes essays about literature. If I’d ever imagined myself living through a global pandemic, the vision would have featured me combing through Grace Paley’s short stories or turning to Tolstoy, looking for guidance and comfort and maybe turning that experience into essays that would bring other people guidance and comfort. Instead, I find myself in the process of retraining myself to read fiction, mainly by turning off my news alerts and hiding my phone and computer and shutting the door on my kids. I am much better at watching TV right now.

I’ve gotten myself on my spin bike two mornings in a row, because I’ve recognized that it’s helpful to everyone who lives in this house if I receive a daily dose of endorphins. Still, there is often a vast sea between knowing what I should do and the act of doing it, so I am pleased I boarded the boat — the imaginary boat that crosses an imaginary sea to the actual bike that goes nowhere.

Fitness instructors on apps or video tend to follow certain norms. Like the reader of a novel, the exerciser suspends disbelief and surrenders to the world of the story. The instructor pretends she can see the lone exerciser. She awards copious high-fives verbally. She believes in “you.” If she acknowledges the artifice, it’s usually in a sidelong way. Just before Katie uttered her words to live by, she said, “That was the perfect first choice. How do I know it was perfect? Because you did it for you.” How convenient that, in English, the singular “you” can be indistinguishable from the plural “you.”

Katie is a real person, but these are recordings, and so she is frozen in time. I don’t know when they were made, but most of the workouts I’m doing were probably recorded before pandemic times, an idea that inspires competing emotions. Canned Katie has no idea, the poor sweet ignorant girl. Or canned Katie must be some kind of diviner, to know so exactly what I (yes, I!) would need.

For twenty to thirty minutes a day, Katie tells me what to do, and I make choices within narrow parameters. Do I want to increase resistance a quarter turn or a half turn? Do I want to stay in the saddle or stand up for this last set? I show up for her instructions and I stay for her encouragements, which are nuggets like, “I’m so proud of you.” And “Thank you so much for taking this time and giving it to yourself.”

The same words would have played if I hadn’t tried my best. But it does me more good here to suspend disbelief than to cling to it. Without Katie’s words to prompt me, I wouldn’t have taken a moment to feel proud that I’d managed to do this one thing. I would have moved on to the next part of my day without accepting her framing of time as something I should be thanked for giving to myself — not as something I’d sneaked or taken from my family.

Even for a fitness instructor, Katie is notably peppy and positive. I voluntarily spend a lot of my time wrestling with the written expression of complex and often dark emotions, so it is tempting for me to dismiss Katie’s brand of positivity as shallow and unhelpful. But it helps me.

It helps me partly because it’s easy to joke about. When my friend texted me that her order of 50 pounds of flour and 24 pounds of yeast had just arrived and wondered if she’d lost her mind, I texted her back, “You made the right choice for where you are right now.” She knew it was a safe place because I’d just received my delivery of 50 pounds of flour a couple of days earlier. I told her I was going to follow the guidance of the spin instructor on my app all day long.

I told her, “Katie says, ‘If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice.’”

I said, “She is talking about how much the unseen exerciser turned up the knob in the previous set, but I’m sure nothing could go wrong if we applied it to everything today.”

She agreed that Katie is a genius. We both know that if we applied Katie’s axiom to everything, plenty could go wrong. It could be used to justify any number of self-destructive or deeply selfish acts. Maybe our bulk food buying is a selfish act. But it’s also probably not great that I had to go to three stores the last time I went out shopping in order to find one bag of flour. I will give any neighbor a cup of flour right now (from a safe distance), and within hours of its arrival, my friend had given away more than half of her yeast on a Facebook group, delighting local bakers and probably causing several failed sourdough starters to be pitched in the garbage at last.

Katie’s axiom is flawless when applied to the question of whether to turn up the knob on the bike, but it’s also useful for people who notice what they aren’t doing well more easily than they notice what they are doing well. There are a lot of us, especially right now.

My husband and I are tired and often anxious, but we do sometimes find ways to tell each other we’re doing a good job. We might say, “You were patient with the kids,” or “This bread is so good!” (That flour has to go somewhere.) When we have the energy to receive an honest answer, and sometimes when we don’t, we ask questions like, “Are you okay?” and “How are you doing?” In response, we say things like, “This is really hard, but I think we’re going to be okay, basically, at some point. Right?”

We don’t say things like, “You can do it!”, or “I’m so proud of you for showing up!” We spend a lot of time and energy encouraging our kids in these discouraging times, and those expressions are a little off-brand for both of us. Even (especially) our nine-year-old would roll his eyes. But Katie’s encouragement is recorded. She only had to say it once. It’s real because she genuinely means it and it’s fake because she’s pretending it’s personal, but I agreed to dream that dream when I downloaded the app, way back when.

There is a special drama in the final “hill” of a cycling workout. It’s the stationary cyclist’s last chance to turn up the dial, to Go. For. It. Today (my today — not Katie’s), before the final set, Katie asked, “Are you at your edge? Are you at the top of hard?”

It’s a strain to see around the metaphor to the literal. I’m at my edge, but I’m pretty sure I’m not at the top of hard. I think we’re all just starting to realize the top of hard might not even be in view yet. I honored where I was. I disobeyed Katie’s order to empty the tank.

“Give yourself a hand,” she said. “That was awesome.”