The Miracle of Story

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Albert Einstein: “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”

I would much rather live the second way, but it's not always easy, is it? Like most people, I need constant reminders that I have a choice in the way to look at life. I need stories that offer a variety of perspectives, where I can both agree and yes, disagree. I need stories to help me think and I need to write stories to discover what I think.

Stories are like eggs, waiting to hatch. They may be ugly or they may be beautiful,  but most likely they are somewhere in between, a combination of both ends of the spectrum. 



Today I am gorging myself on stories by the teen writers of Girls Write Now and their mentors as I dive into the final stages of Anthology edits. Tomorrow I will go to headquarters to sit down with my co-editor, writer Kirthana Ramisetti, where we will shape it into a book, and then hand it off to the copy editor before it goes to publication.

Some of us have just celebrated Easter, the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Others of us have celebrated Passover,  the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the desert. Some have also celebrated the return of Persephone from underground, the return of the sun, making the earth fecund again.   

We have all certainly made note of the springtime with the rains and budding leaves. (Our family celebrates with all of these stories and more - the requisite scavenger hunt for candy filled eggs.)

Stories tell us who we are. And that's why we write, don't we?


Stories and faith are talked about in the same way: it's like driving at night - our headlights only show us the way a little bit at a time. We have to trust in doing the next right thing. We may get lost, but we can always find our way back to our story, our center. 


Sometimes I get anxious when watching a movie with the husband because I don't know what the story is about. He laughs at me (gently) and reminds me to enjoy the ride.


Are you enjoying the ride in your writing, your reading, and/or your faith?

Why I Wrote EDGES, take 1

This is WAY too long for an Author's Statement, but I thought I would share with you my first draft. The problem is, I've cut so much already! And I will have to keep cutting. "Less is more," I keep hearing my editor say . . . but in the interest of sharing my journey, here goes . . .

EDGES was borne out of spending a year in Moab, Utah. I had never heard of Moab before I went out west from New York City on vacation with a friend, staying at the Lazy Lizard Youth hostel where I met a cast of characters, including the man who would ultimately become my husband.

The landscape called me to change my life, pushing me to lobby hard to find a job so that I could move from the Upper West Side of New York City to this surreal place of barren earth and red rocks. It was meant to be: Four Corners Community Mental Health Center needed someone to help start up an intensive out-patient program for teens.

To get on my feet, I stayed at the youth hostel where I had made some friends. Besides my future husband, there was a charismatic 16- year-old boy who had pitched a tent in the back and was ostensibly "living" there. Nobody knew his real story, and one day after a long hike, I found out that the boy had left. I’ve wondered about him ever since.

My work that year with the teens was all-consuming. I remember being naively shocked when I had a 14 year-old charge come into see me for shooting crystal meth. She wound up in the hospital and an in-patient program. Most of the teens I worked with were court-ordered; it was all intervention and no prevention. My faith in love and the universe was sorely tested treating these young men and women who were only seeking a way to transcend a hum-drum existence: drugs and alcohol replacing a Higher Power.

I was constantly asking myself questions. Aren’t we all seekers of some sort? Isn’t that what I was doing in Moab? Why is addiction so pervasive, and allowed to go unchecked? What road map can we offer kids who are lost, to help them find their way? Books have always been a kind of map for me, but I couldn’t find any fiction about the process of recovery. We all need some kind of guide, but our society trains us to use people, places and things in an addictive way, leaving us no room for faith in ourselves, let alone a Higher Power.

Years later, back in New York City, after more work with teens and taking care of the first two of my three children, the boy from the youth hostel figuratively tapped me on the shoulder and whispered the first scene of EDGES. I wrote furiously as if taking dictation. I called my protagonist Luke, and he was running away from his mother’s death and father’s alcoholism in New York City to a youth hostel in Moab, Utah.

The first draft spilled out in three months, but then I had to work on my craft and keep revising until I got it right. At first I was obsessed with the crystal meth problem. I found a lot of books with graphic depictions of addiction, but nothing about the journey beyond drug/alcohol induced behavior. It became more interesting to ask questions: what happens when you take away the substance? Or, if like Luke, you just run away? What does it take to be authentic, maintaining a sense of who we are when our perceptions of the world are constantly challenged?

We write to understand the world, at least I do, and EDGES came out of a need to find hope in a sometimes bleak world, hope in a time where it's so easy to go over the edge, and somehow more difficult to find your own personal edge - stretching yourself and your mind beyond what you thought possible.

I am glad that EDGES will find it’s way to a teen and adult audience. It is my hope that it will make people think about their relationships to addiction and transcendence, that it will serve as one of many road maps along the way to adulthood, and comfort to ones who are already there.