All my life I’ve written, and written reasonably well. Notebooks were filled with work as I documented my world. The passionate shifts of a teenager, the confusion of living within a barely functional family, emotions and experience were all fair game. I painted with words. Then my world changed. My sister died, tragically (are there untragic deaths?), unexpectedly (do we ever really look for it?), young (there is no good age to die). A shock wave set in and

it

rocked

me 

hard.

It physiologically altered me, it psychologically altered me, and, worst, it sucked my words into a dark corner that I couldn’t reach. A fetid place opened up in me after my sister died. To even contemplate exploring it hurt. I stopped writing. I stopped seeking beauty, especially in words. I simply existed.

Time passed.

It always does.

Slowly I felt the pressure to write. The desire to put my voice to paper again grew, but my voice was no longer familiar. It was reshaped by the unkind quiet that settled over me after her death. And so I sought a structure in which to learn about who I now was as a writer, a structure that would help me explore the charred landscape inside me. I settled on Stanford’s Certificate Program in Creative Non-Fiction. Toward the end of the program I was assigned a mentor, a respected author who focused on a writer who focused on food.

Anne Zimmerman taught me how to nourish my writerly soul.

Writing the tens of thousands of words that were necessary to meet the requirement established by Stanford was not just a challenge, it was draining.  It forced me to return to the death of my sister, and to revisit the suicide of my father. I live in a world where fathers leave and sisters die.  I threw myself into examining and writing about how one event fed the other.  

Anne read outlines and rough drafts. She read character summaries and walked through timelines. With each successive version that was submitted for review, she found ways for me to wear away callouses that distanced me from the manuscript.

There were days when the words came in an emotional frenzy that left me shaking, prolific in my pain. And there were days when the thought of having to write this story down paralyzed me. Though she had no direct access to the type of loss I was articulating, Anne knew what it was to write from a place that meant something, from a place that was deeply personal. She allowed me to disappear and miss deadlines. To step away from the words and just breathe

She guided me in deeper, and closer to the pain.

She pushed for dialogue and asked for detail.

Anne accepted edits that we both knew were half-hearted and reminded me that even the smallest progress is progress. She taught me that to expose my emotions on a grand scale is not letting the text run away from me. She showed me that being vulnerable is not the equivalent of being weak. She helped me to see that crushingly painful moments can be rendered with grace and beauty.

She refused to allow me to allow myself to fail.

In the end, Anne was as much a midwife as a mother, and the journey she waited for me to complete has left me with a body of work that is an accomplishment bourn as much from my tears as it is from her encouragement. She gave me the space to become reacquainted with my voice. She urged me to shine light on dark places. She let me again imagine the page as a canvas and watched me paint the world with my own hard-earned expression.

Recommended Reading:

ANGELA GILES PATEL has had her work appear in The Healing Muse, The Nervous Breakdown and The Manifest-Station. She tweets as @domesticmuse, and when inspired updates her blog. She lives in Massachusetts where she conquers the world, one day at a time.

When “Santa Claus” handed me a present at my father’s annual office
Christmas party, I could tell it was a book. Though books lack a
certain holiday pizzazz, I wasn’t disappointed because I spent most of
my free time with printed copy way too close to my eyes. It was when I
slipped off the wrapping paper that the disappointment came.

The book was titled A Girl From Yamhill and much thicker than what I
was used to reading. Though it was by Beverly Cleary, one of my
favorite authors (I routinely camped out in the sublime corner of the
library where her catalogue and Judy Blume’s collided), it was
subtitledA Memoir. I spent the rest of the party trying to ignore
the book and its butter-yellow cover, framing a black-and-white photo
of a 6-year-old Cleary in an organza party dress. When I accidentally
sat on it, I gave it the stink-eye.

Non-fiction meant schoolwork, the drying out and curing of facts until
nothing remained but a jerky to be gummed and swallowed. A memoir
would surely be the same, with the added torture of recounting the
boring life of someone my great-grandmother’s age.

On the car ride home from the party, I cracked open Yamhill, mostly so
my parents would think I liked the gift.

It begins with Cleary’s oldest memories, snapshots really—her mother
packing her farmer father’s lunch in a tobacco tin, young Beverly
dipping her hands in ink and going “pat-a-pat” all over a white damask
tablecloth.

On the second page, Cleary describes a chilly morning:

Suddenly bells begin to ring, the bells of Yamhill’s three churches
and the fire bell. Mother seizes my hand and begins to run, out of the
house, down the steps, across the muddy barnyard toward the barn where
my father is working. My short legs cannot keep up. I trip, stumble,
and fall, tearing holes in the knees of my long brown cotton
stockings, skinning my knees.

‘You must never, never forget this day as long as you live,’ Mother
tells me as Father comes running out of the barn to meet us.

Years later I asked Mother what was so important about that day when
all the bells in Yamhill rang, the day I was never to forget. She
looked at me in astonishment and said, ‘Why, that was the end of the
First World War.’ I was two years old at the time.

With that, I realized non-fiction wasn’t what I’d thought. Someone’s
life could be interesting, even the mundane parts–after all, wasn’t
that what I was reading about in Blume and Cleary’s fiction ventures?
Drama that was not rooted in mythology and heroic sagas (though they
had a place on my library wishlist too) but in the universal feeling
of inevitable change, in first periods, in fights with one’s mother,
in new schools and old friends, in the dubious mixture of excitement
and apprehension with which children view the future?

From there it was a short leap to realizing my life could be
interesting, if I was willing to observe and faithfully recount and
wasn’t too afraid or too bashful to share pieces of myself. Yamhill
spurred me to start keeping journals, a venture that I remember
largely as revolving around remembering what I ate for breakfast and
recording it. Though the journals were no great success, my worldview
had fundamentally shifted. Sure, no one was going to care about my
preference for Lucky Charms, but someday, I was going to write about
other things that happened to me and someone was going to read my work
and recognize something of herself.

Later in Yamhill, Cleary describes how a poor grade on a lavishly
descriptive essay turned her off from writing description for years.
In a lesson I unknowingly internalized for a very long time, criticism
wounded her but she never let it stop her from writing. I can’t say
for sure what Cleary’s stripped-down, no-nonsense style owes to that
early failure, but I like to think she exhumed the kernel of truth in
that criticism and used it to develop her economy with language, which
she employs like a released arrow: sharp, streamlined and always
focused on a single point.

I never particularly aspired to write “plain” or “to the point”
stories and essays, but several readers have told me they appreciate
those qualities in my work. I will admit to bristling at these
compliments before I remember that “plain” is a code word for writing
like Cleary’s: writing that trusts its story to be big enough,
meaningful enough (no matter how personal or quotidian, as women’s
stories are often labeled) to hook an audience without a sideshow of
technical fireworks.

Despite our rough introduction, A Girl From Yamhill now sits, or
rather, slumps, on my bookshelf with a broken spine, dog-eared pages
and all the other markers of a book well-loved. I have re-read it
regularly over the past 18 years to get another taste of
Depression-era Oregon, to laugh at young Beverly’s exploits and to
read about another woman who knew she wanted to tell her stories and
never wavered in her pursuit of that goal, despite the obstacles. I
will be forever grateful to Beverly Cleary for giving one skeptical
little girl that gift.

Meghan Williams is a writer living in Austin. Her writing,
primarily personal essays, has been featured on The Toast,The Hairpin
andArchipelago.

Links are to my staff pick reviews on Avid Bookshop’s website

Thanks for tagging me, @wayfarers97! ( @the-forest-library, you’re up–favorite books of 2021!)

*

Fiction

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

In Other Landsby Sarah Rees Brennan

Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez

Take Me Home Tonight by Morgan Matson

Not Here to be Liked by Michelle Quach

Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert

Front Desk by Kelly Yang

The House with Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

Graphic Novels

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen (this might be my favorite book of the year, if I had to pick a #1)

It’s Not What You Thought it Would Be by Lizzy Stewart

The Postman From Space by Guillaume Perrault

The Accursed Vampire by Madeline McGrane 

Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, illus. by Lisa Sterle

Shirley and Jamila’s Big Fall by Gillian Goerz

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson

Lightfallby Tim Probert

Nonfiction

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane (but go check out Because Internetfirst!)

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Birds, Art, Life, Death by Kyo Maclear

Picture Books

Ten Little Dumplings by Larissa Fan, illus. by Cindy Wume

Hamsters Make Terrible Roommates by Cheryl Klein, illus. by Abhi Alwar

When You Look Up by Decur

Sato the Rabbit, a Sea of Tea by Yuki Ainoya

February ‘22: Storytelling is a Superpower

February ’22: Storytelling is a Superpower

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2022—Week 2:ONeMg

Write the Year 2022—Week 2:ONeMg

No prompt, really, except vaguely this one, I guess.

Chaotic, mostly stream of consciousness, but from where the heart should be.

Title: ONeMgWC: 750

I don’t know why it’s now that I’m losing time—that I realize that I have lost time, and I know, I know: Welcome to the club called the fucking rest of us. But it’s truly as though it’s just now hitting me. Two years gone. Two years.

I could…

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2021—Week 52: As Long as You and I Are Here

Write the Year 2021—Week 52: As Long as You and I Are Here

Manicure: One of the prompts from Writers Write last week.

Title: As Long as You and I Are HereWC: 700

It is the least I can do. It’s also the most I can do. I am not built for these palaces of femininity. I am not made for gossip and surrender to the will of someone who indubitably knows better than I do. The shiver-inducing delights of being worked on are completely alien to me. I have no…

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2022—Week 20: Byways

Write the Year 2022—Week 20: Byways

Sort of this prompt from Poets & Writers.

Title: BywaysWC: 600

Chicago, IL—May 10, 2022

I noticed the first a year ago, maybe two. Who knows how many times I’d walked past it before then—two houses in from the corner, a concrete cube right up against a chain-link fence looking out into the alley. The face jutting out at the bottom is what caught my attention all of a sudden—hinges for eyes and…

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2022—Week 18: Still, Life

Write the Year 2022—Week 18: Still, Life

Sort of, but not really, responding to the Reedsy theme for last week.

Title: Still, LifeWC: 500

There’s a picture of a turkey among the clutter on the shelf above the TV. It’s tiny. It’s in a cheap frame, no doubt from Walgreen’s. It sits at an angle and doesn’t quite fit. It’s a joke and a totem. If my aunt ever steps foot in my home, there’s a prize in it for me if the turkey is on…

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2022—Week 15: Wail

Write the Year 2022—Week 15: Wail

Just a dashed-off memory in response to this prompt

Title: WailWC: 900

I must have been fourteen. It was summer and I’d gotten what was supposed to be a regular babysitting gig. The kids were a girl my little brother’s age—not quite seven that summer—and a baby, eight or nine months old. Amy and Allison, respectively.

They were half-sisters. It was their mom who hired me, their mom who had…

View On WordPress

Write the Year 2022—Week 06: Podia

Write the Year 2022—Week 06: Podia

Just this prompt. Dumb.

Title: PodiaWC: 750

In the early days, it’s all feet. That’s my memory of snow.

My dad’s feet in the rubber overshoes he’d buckle on in the morning before he left out the back way to catch the bus downtown. It would be dark. He would hear us out front, seven, eight, nine neighbor kids hollering on the lawn, up to our thighs in snow heaped up, shovel by shovel. He’d hear…

View On WordPress

I am notorious for caring too much. I invest all of myself into  the people around me and my mistake is that I expect that investment back. In my short short years on this planet, I have learned more things than I would have cared to. I learned that I can change myself to fit someone else’s version of ‘cool’. I’ve learned that asking or accepting help is the most difficult thing one can face. I have learned that I will almost always love someone more.

After I gave up on Christianity, I took up the religion of love and compassion. It was all I needed. It would guide me. But just like any other crisis of faith, there are times of incredible doubt. There are times when my idyllic world views just don’t align with what’s happening.

When I say someone is my friend, I am saying that we support each other. That there is an equality that towers over and transcends tally marks and scores. I hold comfort my roommate as they deal with alcohol poisoning and they don’t hate me for having my bike in the middle of the living room for two days. I help them move and they leave me incredibly sweet notes when they know I’m anxious or depressed. No action is more or less than the other because every action is thoughtful and applicable to what is needed.

I choose friends in the same way I would choose my family, if I had the option. The part of my brain that allows me to feel close to someone - that allows me to let go of control around them, is incredibly underdeveloped. It takes a lot, so when that is betrayed or is revealed to be one sided, it devastates the system. 

My best friend has known me since we were five years old and I have only one memory of life before her. Even so, it wasn’t until we were 13 that I really relied on her. 

I always loved my dad more than he ever loved me. It’s a heartbreaking truth, but a truth nonetheless.

Back to love, though. When you really get down to it, take into account the love I feel for people and every ounce of their potential and ever moment of their rich, beautiful past, I would die for every single person I have ever seen and will ever see. 

I care that much for people who couldn’t pick me out of a line up. I can’t think of a way to measure how much I care for the people I consider my friends. 

With that thought in mind, there is no way I can participate in human relationships without experiencing immense pitfalls. We are all flawed. We don’t see eye to eye. As one of my favorites would say, we are all assholes to each other and ourselves. The solid truth is that I care way too much. I am way to loyal. And for these traits, I expect far more out of society and it’s individuals than I should, though I will not sacrifice my standards.

It’s been a rocky road (which, by the way, was my favorite ice cream as a kid), but I know some of the best people on this Earth because I didn’t settle for anything less than love and care.

Christmas means a hell of a lot to me. Our photo albums contain, mainly, play-by-plays of at least three of them - taken before my sister and I decided we were no longer comfortable with the camera on Christmas morning. The pictures are out of a time were my anxiety, while existent, was not nearly as prominent as it is now. Panic attacks manifested only once every two to three months, though back then I didn’t know that was what they were. 

Those pictures contained everyone I loved most. They were before my dad would lose my trust and my heart. Before my sister stopped relating to my mom. Before I accepted what I already knew to be the truth about Santa. Before my cracked family finally shattered and slid across hardwood floors in all different directions.

Mom and I held it together for one year after my sister left. I put up the tree as soon as I could and, as per our unspoken rule, it was kept lit every moment of the season. Christmas Day, mom and I sat alone in the living room opening the few gifts that had been sprinkled in the cavity underneath the tree. 

The truth is, when you get older, the holidays are not the same. You don’t always make it home and, and if you have a mom like mine, there won’t be decorations in the house if you’re not coming. A few years ago, my extended family had a dirty habit of forgetting to invite me until two days before. Now that my dad isn’t in jail, they he won’t let them forget, but that’s a whole different box of awkward.

My favorite older Christmas I ever had was at my Uncle Max’s house. He was this pot bellied man, either reaching for the peak or at the top of the hill already - I never really confirmed age with him. He had a little guest cabin of sorts on his parent’s property and he invited everyone over for a little get together. Instead of giving traditional gifts, he gave scratchers - a cheap, but exciting alternative.

When Mom, Apa, and I got there, we were late, as per usual. Apa, my step-father, Phillip, was in late stages of Avascular Necrosis even then. I’ll explain more about that later, but basically parts of the bone in his hips had the texture of the inside of a malt ball that had gotten a little wet.

I left them in the car to make the rounds and assure everyone that Apa was there, he just needed a minute. 

Uncle Max found me and asked if I’d picked a gift yet. He directed me to the window sill where there were still five tickets left and told me to pick whichever one felt lucky. 

I meditated on it for a moment and picked a green one. He handed me a quarter and said “That’s yours. Now go for it." 

He disappeared down the staircase and outside to the fire. My cousin Glenn sat on the couch behind me on his phone as I scratched, not knowing the rules for the ticket entirely. 

$3

$10,000

$20

One by one I scratched.

$10,000

$3,000

$1

On second thought, I should have grabbed the Bingo one. I liked the Bingo one.

$30

$2

$10,000

"Oh my god.”

“What?" 

I had forgotten Glenn was there.

"Oh my god.”

“What??”

“I don’t know the rules.”

“Sadie, what?”

“I think I won ten thousand dollars.”

“Come here.”

I turned from the sill and went to the couch. He grabbed the ticket from my hands and studied the game board very carefully for a few minutes.

“Holy shit." 

"Did I win?”

“I think you did.” He said, “I get half for helping.”

“No, Glenn, that’s paying for my college.”

I’m not even kidding. These words came out of my mouth. Repeatedly. “I’m going to college!”

Nerd.

Also, ten thousand dollars for college? I was incredibly naive at sixteen. 

I grabbed the ticket from his hands and ran downstairs to the fire screaming “I’m going to college!" 

Max grabbed me by the hand and took the ticket from me. "No. No way.”

“Yes!" 

"I bought this. This is mine.”

I snatched it back. “It was a gift, bitch. Where’s Phil?”

“Still in the truck.” I hear from the other side of the fire. 

I have to explain to you here that with anxiety and depression factored into my life, I consider this the single most happy moment of my life. Who wouldn’t? Money was a fraction of the factor it had been only moments before. I have always been poor. I don’t think for more than a blink of an eye my mom ever made ten grand a year and she was the manager of three separate departments at Kmart for a good couple of years. 

This was a concentration of a full year’s salary at my mom’s peak year. This moment was the stress release of the century.

“Mom!” I yelled, running to the truck. “Phillip?!" 

I reached the passenger door on the Chevy and yanked it open. 

"What’s up, kid?” Apa asked.

I didn’t even breath. “I won ten grand! I’m going to college!”

My mom: “What?”

Max: *singing*

Phillip: “Let me see.”

I handed him the small rectangle of paper and he studied the game. He flipped the card and read carefully for a moment before pausing.

“You didn’t win, kid.”

Max: *singing* “I got a golden ticket! I got a golden ticket!

"What do you mean I didn’t win?”

“Read the back.”

 He hands me the ticket as Max starts to walk over from the fire. 

Winning tickets of 10,000 or more must submit claim form by mail. Claim forms supplied by Santa Clause. All winning tickets must be validated by the Tooth Fairy and conform to her game rules. Winning prizes may NOT be claimed anywhere, so forget about it! All winners are losers and must have an excellent sense of humor.

You would have thought my heart would have been absolutely crushed, what with Max shouting “I’m going to college!” and laughing himself to the ground.

No. “I hate you.” I said, laughing myself. “I hate you so much." 

He never apologized, he had no need, but he did give me a big hug goodbye that night. 

I spent weeks searching for something to get him back with. That search ended with an aneurysm. Did you think this would end happily?

He walked around the bay for a full day with a runny nose and a headache. He didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t complain. Good natured to the end.

My last Christmas with Max is still regarded as one of my favorite Christmases. It held all of the disillusionment of adulthood without any of the anxiety or disappointment. 

We still miss you, Max. Merry Christmas.

I owe you something not sad. Look at those nerds.