Getting to YES

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about the big NO I received from my agent whom I’d hoped would find a publisher for Captive, my historical novel about Margaret Haskin, the remarkable eighteen century woman who not only survived four years as the adopted daughter of a band of Shawnee in the Ohio Country but shows us, today, how we can—and must!—learn to understand the people we call enemies.

For several weeks, I reacted to that NO with anger and hurt feelings, feeling that my way had been blocked by lack of understanding; Margaret’s story is hardly the story of a “privileged white woman.” There were few, if any, privileged white women on the western frontier in the eighteenth century. Life was very hard, even before Margaret was picked up by a band of Shawnee, and the endurance she developed when she lived in her mother’s cabin, hauling water, digging potatoes, learning hunger on a daily basis helped her to live through the hardships of her captivity, including giving birth alone in the wilderness.

Now as I move—because of many blessings—beyond anger and hurt feelings, I’m slowly restoring my own faith in my manuscript. This is a necessary task, on many levels, for all of us, from the disappointment our friends and families may express from time to time in the limits of our ability to take care of them—now we often call that codependency—to the limits of our power to affect the international disasters we read about every day. Few of us have the means or the courage to fly to Poland and drive a rented car into Ukraine to help escaping people cross the border, as a real estate agent here has recently done. We need to hear his account of the help Russian border guards gave to him, recognizing a shared human need to relieve suffering.

Now I’m able to give thanks for the many people—editors, agent, publishers—who over the years have helped me turn thirteen (or is it fourteen?) manuscripts into books, beginning with Ann Barrett at Houghton-Mifflin who saw promise in a twenty-year-old writer’s first attempt at a novel, and the patience and discernment to wait for my next manuscript while kindly rejecting the first as not yet quite ready.

Along the way I’ve had the great pleasure and satisfaction of presenting my work to many audiences. On April 7th, God willing, I will present The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke in the great gilded ballroom of her house, Rough Point, in Newport, Rhode Island. Because of the pandemic, this is only my second presentation of my biography.

And then, here at home in Santa Fe on May 17, I’ll have the privilege of reading from my memoir, Little Brother, to be published in May by Sarabande Books, at my beloved local bookstore, Garcia Street Books. The women there, headed by their strong leader, Jean Devine, have supported all my recent books with well-attended readings and good sales. Again, a blessing and a miracle, for which I will always be grateful.

Another unexpected gift has been the suggestion, from one of you after reading “NO,” that I submit my manuscript to a small publisher in Lexington, Kentucky. The editor there will read it at the end of next month.

I couldn’t survive as a writer, nor could many others, without the support and encouragement of many small presses. They never receive the support from donors or foundations they deserve and yet they continue, year after year, to publish worthy books that would otherwise be ignored.

So out of the sour ground of NO spring many hopeful sprigs, especially the generous responses to so many of my posts from you. On this day of five inches of new snow here in the southern Rockies, I find myself nourished by that as our parched high desert is nourished by this melting bounty.

May we all find a way out of NO.

In Writing Little Brother: A Memoir Taken by the Shawnee The Silver Swan