This morning I watched a news video about a pool cleaner saving a drowned squirrel. The squirrel was tiny, barely larger than a chipmunk. How long he’d been dead was anyone’s guess, but the pool man draped the little fellow over a rounded PVC pipe, nose down, and proceeded to perform compression CPR. Just when it appeared all was lost, the squirrel’s eyes fluttered open. He was woozy at first and unsteady on his feet, but within a few minutes he scampered off into the woods to begin life anew.
It’s a great story but a silly analogy for my life as an aspiring author. But I like squirrels, and I like tales with happy endings, so I’m going with it. My story — that of trying for six years to get an agent for my first book, then stopping for six years and writing a second book, then combining the two books at the request of an interested agent who turned out not to be interested, is full of squirrelly anxiety. There’s drowning at the core of my story, too, in a sea of revision, of crushing self-doubt.
But I’m incredibly lucky. Time and again I’ve been lifted out of my watery grave by that which has always saved me: some new flicker of hope from some new or old source. When neurologist and music therapy advocate Oliver Sachs injured his leg while climbing solo in Norway, there came to his aid (as he puts it) “…melody, rhythm and music…” He was, he says, “musicked along”; it’s what kept him from succumbing to his injuries.
What has come to my aid in the process of writing has been a whole constellation of helpmates: dinners with friends; writing mentors with better minds than mine; malted milk balls from Fresh Market (the huge ones, in the bins); great quotes from great folks. (“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” said Thomas Edison. “I wake up every day and thank God I’m not a writer,” says my husband.)
In these ways and more I have been “hoped” along, loved along, wised along, chocolated along. These small and large acts and words and comforts breathed life into my lungs just when I thought I couldn’t plunk out another word or submit my book to another agent.
Then two weeks ago I opened my email and there was a letter from a small independent publisher in New York, saying they wanted to publish my book. Like the squirrel pulled back from the brink of death, I sort of went dizzy for a while. And then there was (and is and will be always) an ocean of gratitude to everyone who threw me a lifeline along the way.
And then I took off into the thicket to begin a new-ish kind of existence, this one replete with fresh challenges, different worries, more insidious night sweats. I have, it seems, fallen — or dived — into a brand-new pool in which to do my drowning. Two hundred copies are headed to reviewers next month. What if the book is awful and I don’t know it? I try to take solace in my own publisher’s blogpost, which says: “Every book eventually finds its own way into the right hearts.”
And in her book “Still Writing,” memoirist Dani Shapiro asserts, “…everything we ever write will be flawed. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better.”
And, I would add, that that which hoped and helped us out of the pool to begin with will hope and help us along still. Dana’s memoir, “The Body Tourist,” will be released by Little Feather Books in October.
Contact Dana Shavin at Danalise@juno.com.