Mar 25, 2016
Dear Readers and Friends:
A quick update, and a preview of the Prologue.
We are well on our way to the November 15 publishing date.
I have just turned in my review of the developmental edit. It was hard to relinquish my book this time. I’ve worked on it for six years, it was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts degree, and has been my companion. It helped me get over the sorrow of leaving Miriam’s House. And now I’m sending it out into the world.
I know, I sound like a mother sending her first-born off to college. We writers are weird that way.
In honor of my memoir leaving the nest, I’m giving you a preview of the Prologue for "Nowhere Else I Want to Be."
Best wishes.
PROLOGUE for NOWHERE ELSE I WANT TO BE
It seemed inevitable, falling from a slated sky as though no other weather were possible while I grieved leaving Miriam’s House. I watched the snow come down for hours, rocking in my glider chair, and it covered tree branches and roofs visible from the second-story sun room in the house we’d rented. Under the influence of that blanketed world, grief finally began loosening its grip on me. I let the memories in.
Of all the things I could have remembered about Miriam’s House—Claudia’s dream or Gina dancing in the dining room or Faye nearly being arrested or Alyssa dying—I don’t know why I thought first of Kimberly and the mess she embroiled me in a few days before Christmas 1996. But as I relaxed, it was Kimberly I saw. Kimberly watching horror movies. Kimberly insisting she was most certainly not smoking in her room. Kimberly scratching madly at a lottery ticket. Kimberly, drunk, calling my name from outside the house and sounding like a lost soul.
The life I’d participated in and witnessed at Miriam’s House had changed me in profound ways. I’d lived and worked there from 1996 to 2009, fourteen years of life at its richest, teaching me lessons I had yet to assimilate. And so, with memory as catalyst, I got up from my comfortable chair and left the sun room for the office and the computer I’d been avoiding for weeks. What impelled me, I think now, was the desire for catharsis, to process my grief and those transformative years by telling myself my stories. It was the desire not to forget, and more important still, not to let the women be forgotten. I began to make good on a silent wish of some years, and that was to let the world see what I had seen: the astounding, courageous humanity of women beset by the worst of societal and physical ills. But in that moment, these thoughts were yet to be formulated. I simply sat down at the keyboard and took dictation from my heart.
This is what I remember most vividly about Kimberly…