An Open Letter to the Agents and Editors Who “Found the Premise Intriguing and the Writing Strong, but. . . "

I never set out to be anybody’s Messiah, all I wanted to do was tell a story. A story borne from the real world, where people got left behind. I wanted to lift the abandoned to a sunnier realm, like putting them in an elevator express to the rooftop garden, where they could look down and see a better place, where women sat around a fire and spun yarns from the makings of birds’ nests and fantasy. 

So I paid heed to the voices of the characters in my head. They told me their names and spoke in a language I transcribed, even when I had to create the symbology. I carved a glossary out of ether and gave it dimension. It took up only as much space as reams of paper and an entire imagined universe ought to. 

Who is to say, if you stack all the seed packets and silver coins and library books, guitar straps in the lost& found and worn out bowling shoes and half-packs of Lifesavers against the weight of a bedtime tale, will the scales balance? What weighs on my heart is a question: Do I really want to start this again? The first story burned so bright, it flared like Polaris in my night sky, charting the course ahead. No matter how many times I honed it—shortened it, retold it, started in the middle or left out the beginning or shifted the point of view or omitted the sexy bits, I couldn’t make it any different, because here’s why: I was simply the scribe. The stenographer with a voice hoarse from shouting, “Listen! People were fucking drowning and I saved them from the floodwaters.” So the deluge is heartless society; so the boat is an ever-loving book— so mote it be. I was not about to leave anyone stranded or let them sink. If that makes me the poor bleeding heart, running around like a lighthouse looking for souls to save, I’ll play the sap. I’ll draw my bard’s bow across the violin of wild mercy and stir my pot of metaphors like alphabet soup.

Besides, omit the sexy bits?? As if. I could never. To make art is to make love with the sacred. I needed my characters the way they needed each other. I needed them more than I needed the world to need them. I needed them all to fall all over each other, the women for the women and the men for the men, bodies for bodies, in love in pain in search of redemption. The village is built one Other at a time. In the building, emigrant women searching for belonging use their ancient pain and their inner desires to transform a small town into a place of welcome for everyone along the journey, a journey which begins and ends in love. And that’s how I’ll always tell it, hook, line and sinker, done and dusted, Verse, chapter book testament Amen. You know me. I’d be dishonest if I said I never lied and you would be a damn fool to believe me. 

In the story of the women and the loving and the language and the bowling and the dog and the village and the birds and all our dead who turn into birds, there are threads and yarns, a yearning and a lyric prose that wraps you up in grown-up story hour, lush and fantastical and wrong and right in all the wrong and right places. You can taste the music of the story like minor chords underwater and minor disasters chapter after chapter and it’s really so goddamned important but I can’t make you listen anymore than you can stop my pen from writing more and more and I will keep spinning these yarns until my fingers run out of ink.