I had the privilege of introducing a friend at her book launch celebration in Flagstaff a few weeks ago. I admire her writing, and her. The essay she read that night is one that I teach in my class. Seeing the essay as part of a whole collection—a book that I could hold in my hands—delighted me. Many will now get to read her beautiful words and ideas.
A friend sidled up to me after the reading and asked, “when is your book coming out?” I never know how to answer this question. The lack of a published book by me is not for lack of trying. I write constantly but am never able to stick to a particular notion or theme which editors tell me make for a successful book. I wish I had saved every lovely rejection letter from every journal that stated something like, “needs different organization. But please submit again; we love your writing.”
Organization? Organization.
My brain is not a tidy place. It is a fat bumble bee, stumbling from flower to flower gathering so many ideas to pollinate that I just can’t propagate one lovely plant. Perhaps my brain is an overgrown cottage garden with weeds so persistent and tall that you might think they are cultivated flowers.
But that’s okay. In the gardening forums I follow, between illustrations of pre-planned pollinator gardens, people argue constantly about what a weed is. I have no answer other than to me, weeds are beautiful and resilient. I allow them to germinate and grow. There is something about their persistence as I watch them sway in the October breeze while my Denver daisies are already shriveled petals and seed pods waiting for winter birds to devour them. When my mother helped me create a flower bed in the backyard this summer, we left the weeds, too exhausted to find out if they were in fact weeds and not particularly interested in killing anything green that filled in the beds around the daisies. I watered everything equally.
There’s a quote that states, “Everyone has a book inside of them,” but at my friend’s reading, I realized that this wisdom does not apply to me. I appreciate the variety of thoughts and ideas and my sometimes inability to connect them or reign them in. There isn’t really a theme or a narrative through-line. My brain is meant to be a space for ideas to germinate and grow. The disorganized detritus of everything I read, watch, and hear creates fertile ground for more ideas. I don’t always want to sort through to see which idea belongs to another or to create rows for each seed type. And I definitely don’t want to do any weeding.
Since the book launch, I’ve been thinking of a book as a bunch of fragrant yellow roses, whereas what I write is more like a haphazard clutch of wildflowers, always surprising me. Even now as I write, the words coming out onto this page are a surprise. I planned to write about something else entirely. Instead, some weeds pushed through the concrete sidewalks around my house and in my mind, my pen pulling the words from my brain.
There’s something else, though, about not being able to write a book. When I stopped centering myself as the hero in every story that I wrote, the ideas for stories shrunk while the rest of my world expanded greatly. Instead of seeing every event or discussion as a slight, I found compassion for my former friends and co-workers. As my father told me his stories as he was dying, I understood better the decisions he made and the things that he said. Perhaps my whole life has been thinking of myself as some kind of precious, ornamental tree. The kind of tree that always demands more care than any other aspect of the garden. One day, or perhaps over something like a season, I realized that I am part of an orchard of other fruitful trees. When I walk outside and notice the bruised and decaying crabapples near my front door, I remember these imperfect and diseased parts of myself. This life is not all beauty. And neither am I.
Before closing out this essay, I looked for the exact quote about books and it’s actually a little longer than I remembered: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain.” For now, I’ll take this advice from Christopher Hitchens. And I promise that I will invite you to my book launch when, and if, it ever happens. Until then, you’ll find me in the backyard nurturing weeds and flowers equally. Or you’ll find me happily writing away at a coffee shop in Flagstaff. I’ve learned that the real privilege of writing is to actually have the time to put thoughts on paper and to cultivate them long enough to see which ideas may bloom.
