Late Summer Update

On My Book, Other Books, and Belifting One Another

In Florida, the children say summer is over the second week of August, when school starts back up down here. But the traditionalists say summer isn’t over until after Labor Day. The naturalists argue that summer really isn’t over until the autumnal equinox, Sept 22nd this year. But I have long held that summer isn’t over until it feels like summer is over; that is, until the temperatures reflect that autumn has arrived and my clothing attire can reflect the same. As of today, I am still wearing my shorts and sandals and short-sleeved tees. I’ve yet to don a sweater outside, much less socks. The grands are still swimming in my pool. But rumor has it that our first cold front is coming this weekend, where the lows will dip into the 60’s and the high’s won’t climb out of the 70’s. So I’m hoping to get this summer update written under the wire, before we say goodbye to summer.

I had intended to write this newsletter the last week of August, but then I received my developmental edit back from my editor earlier than I thought, and I plunged into revisions on the manuscript of my second book The Things that Saved Me. It was a deep dive that took up the whole of September.

I am pleased to say the revisions are done (yippee yay!!), and the manuscript is, once again, back with my editor for the rest of her editing. We are still on track for it to be released early next spring.

It’s a book about looking back over my life at the way my younger selves brought me through some hard things. I often felt like my life was full of hard things. But in the process of writing this book, I uncovered so many layers of beauty and goodness.

I also discovered that some of the stories I’d been telling myself weren’t the only way to tell them. “I’m not talking about facts,” writes Lydia Yuknavitch, in her memoir, Reading the Waves. “I’m talking about what we do with the events in our lives. We story them and try to live with them. Anything that can be put to story can be storied differently,” she says.

I was fascinated when I read her words because I felt like that had been some of my experience in writing this book.

Lydia asks, “What if we could stand in different relation to our experiences? Could the stories we carry about our experiences. . . loosen? Fall away and become sediment? Rearrange themselves?”

Here I was, revisiting stories I had told myself about experiences that had happened decades earlier. I had never questioned the stories all these years; had carried them with me and felt their weight. But then, looking back through the lens of time and wisdom, I began to understand some of my stories differently. The events, the experiences, were the same. But my perspective on my story had changed. What had once been a denigration became a liberation. And it’s made all the difference.

I can’t wait for you to read The Things that Saved Me: Breathing New Life into Our Stories.

In addition to working on my revisions and reading Lydia’s book, I’ve also been reading a few other books over the last month or so.

I thoroughly enjoyed David Nicholls’ novel, You are Here, set in the UK. Almost the entire book takes place while hiking through the countryside, coast to coast. For those of you who are writers (or aspiring to be), Maggie Smith’s, Dear Writer, is chock full of wisdom and wit for the creative life. My go-to book for my morning meditation time lately has been Little Life Words by Jenny Gehman, who is a friend of mine. She has such a gentle, hospitable spirit that really shines through her work. And lastly, I was delighted to meet a fellow author, Eleanor Seigler, at a recent book event I did at our local bookshop, Fern & Fable Books. The next week we met for coffee and she gifted me with her book, Too Much Beauty. Like the title, it is full of gorgeous reflections, vignettes, and observations. It is a book that I am savoring, reading slowly and letting it soak into my bones. My favorite saying so far is “I wonder how things might shift if each time someone were belittled they were instead belifted.”

Wow. I wonder.

I wonder, in the midst of all the hard things that are going on in our world right now, how things might shift if we could remember this, if we could imprint it upon our hearts, if we could practice it with every person we encounter each and every day.

May we be the ones known as the belifters. May it be so.

Here’s to the journey,

Melynne