A mother’s midlife memoir paired with a gardening book?

What, you might well ask, could these two volumes possibly have in common?   And why would a married mom of two and a resolutely single, encyclopedically knowledgeable, former-Martha-Stewart-publishing-executive-turned-rural-hermit ever become writing partners, let alone dear friends?

Well, if age teaches us anything, it’s that life is full of surprises – and that the relationships that bloom and blossom in the langorous afternoon of life are often quite different from those of its bright morning.  No longer bound to our friends by social stratifications, proximity, or the shared duties of parenthood, we find ourselves connected, instead, at a soul level.  “Friendship,” writes C.S. Lewis, “is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What? You too?  I thought I was the only one.’”

And so it was with Margaret Roach and me.  Coincidence brought us together (we share a publisher, and our editors had given us galleys of each other’s last books).  But it wasn’t until we met in person, at a bookseller’s convention two years ago, that we each experienced that unmistakable “click” that signals this is someone who is meant to be in my life.

Reading Margaret’s work, I knew right away I was in the presence of a kindred spirit — someone who finds pleasure in the small moments, who draws sustenance and inspiration from the frogs in her pond and the flowers at her doorstep, who is more at home stirring a pot of home-made soup at the stove than hobnobbing with fellow writers at literary soirees.

Becoming her friend for real, spending overnights in her guest cottage and sharing countless dinners together, only confirmed what I’d already suspected: different as our lives may be on the surface (Margaret never has to postpone a writing project because a son needs help on his college application; I wouldn’t know a Chaenomeles x superba if one was in full bloom in my own yard), we nevertheless have much to offer each other – gifts of time and support and perspective on the universal challenges (and joys!) of growing older and, hopefully, just a wee bit wiser.

So maybe it’s not so surprising after all, that when we exchanged manuscripts of our most recent books, we each found ourselves scribbling excited “Yes!” notes and exclamation points in the margins.  There were so many common themes that we had to laugh.  And then we realized that of course our readers would probably enjoy getting to know one another as much as the two of us had.

Since our books came out last month, Margaret and I have appeared together at bookstores all over New England – and we can now report that our hunch was right.  The conversations are lively, our joint readings fun for all, and the connections and cross-overs always surprising and delightful.

So, consider this your invitation to come join us!  Win our books (signed, personalized copies), hear us speak, or if you can’t make it to one of the events below — jump in to our free online chat starting Monday on Goodreads.

 

 Duets with Margaret

The goodreads.com event
Goodreads is like a giant online book club that never sleeps. It’s amazing, and it’s free; a great place to get tips from other keen readers on books to look out for, according to your interests, and to “talk” to authors. Margaret Roach (author most recently of “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life”) and I will be there Monday February 25 for an open forum, to answer your questions about our new (or older) books, about writing, or about whatever you feel like asking about.

In our in-person events recently, the topics have ranged from finding midlife friendship, to raising adolescent boys (or unruly plants), to recipes we’ve swapped and books we’ve both read, to our writing “process” (Margaret paces, I sit still for hours on end)—no kidding, that wide a range, and more. Fun! So come share whatever’s on your mind. Won’t you sign up and join us?

The in-person events

• Sunday, February 24, 3 PM: POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER. Reading and conversation with author Margaret Roach from our two new books, her “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life” and my “Magical Journey” An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” at the Concord (MA) Bookshop.
• Thursday, February 28, 7 PM: Reading and conversation with author Margaret Roach at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY, hosted by memoir-teacher and author Marion Roach Smith.
• Sunday, March 3, afternoon: Two events, same location: 2 PM, “The 365-Day Garden” slide lecture by Margaret Roach. 3 PM, a reading and conversation with me and Margaret from our two new books, at Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY.

How to win the signed books

To enter to win a signed copy of “The Backyard Parables” and one of “Magical Journey,” too, simply comment below, answering the question:

What’s the last book you read that you recommended afterward to a friend, and why?

Then to double your chances to win—two sets are being given away on each of our websites—scurry over to Margaret’s book giveaway now and paste your comment there as well.

No answer to the question, or simply feeling shy? No worry; just say “count me in” or something to that effect, and we will. Winners will be drawn at random after entries close at midnight on Wednesday, February 27. Good luck to all.

Two days after New Years, with both sons back at school, I flew to Florida and set up camp in the guest bedroom of my parents’ house. My mom, keeping her promise not to tempt me with distractions, went about her carefree retiree’s life. Meanwhile, I holed up in my self-created bunker, sitting cross-legged on the bed for hours on end, bent over my laptop, pretending no one would ever read what I was writing. My immediate goal was not to send words out into the world, but to be quiet and disciplined and attentive enough to find out if I actually had anything to say.

Now, twelve months later, the book that finally began to take shape during those weeks is in the bookstores. The irony of the title Magical Journey, of course, is that I didn’t actually go much of anywhere, except in search of a bit of solitude and silence. Sometimes the most challenging journeys aren’t the ones that require backpacks and sturdy shoes, but rather a willingness to turn inward, to seek something deep and as yet unformed within ourselves. And sometimes, as the last two weeks have revealed to me, it is the work done in lonely isolation that ultimately forges and affirms our most essential human connections out in the world.

This morning, home again after a flurry of nonstop travel and bookstore appearances, I paged through the journal I kept last winter. Every day, I attempted to clear my mind and face my fears by writing longhand in a notebook before turning on my laptop and confronting my manuscript. A few excerpts from those arduous, uncertain days exactly a year ago:

“I am so slow. What I’ve written is probably not terrible. I’m trying to convince myself that it is at least good enough. Yet moving forward feels really hard. What is the right attitude? Maybe just to try to keep on writing without judging, to think my thoughts and feel my feelings, and get something down on the page, and then decide later whether it’s any good or not.”

And this:

“The slowness, the uncertainty. What am I learning from this process? That in my writing, first and foremost, I must put my faith in the truth. That the truth is mundane, embarrassing at times, difficult to distill clearly, yet still worth reaching for. That the only way through is through. That it doesn’t get easier. That living wholeheartedly can mean going within, rather than without. Not fun, exactly, but wholehearted nonetheless.”

And also:

“So strange to be in a time of life, a place, where Steve and Henry and Jack can all be living separate lives in different places. They are doing just fine away from me; I’m the one who feels the loss of all that used to be. All I used to be. Guess that’s what it’s been like for my own mom for years now. Perhaps I’ll get used to it. I feel alive in different ways – alive when I’m needed at the center of my family, making dinner or having a heart-to-heart with one of the boys, keeping all the balls in the air. And alive in a totally different way now, in solitude, when all the structure and to-dos fall away, and I’m left with my own thoughts, my own demons and dreams, my own inner landscape. Time slows. There is nothing to do but honor my commitment to keep at this, uncomfortable and hard as it is. But I wonder: to write from this vulnerable place, to be who I really am on the page – is this in itself some kind of path or calling? Perhaps, for now anyway, it is. And perhaps, if I can just stick it out, it will even lead to joy. Or at least lead me back out of myself, with some sense of where I’m meant to go next.”

Yesterday, my friend Dani Shapiro, wrote a thoughtful, lovely post about the difference between taking risks in life and on the page. Most of us, as she points out, will go to any length to keep our loved ones safe. Learning how to assess risk is part of growing up; making prudent calls, at the heart of every mother’s job description. And yet, says Dani, “When it comes to the writer’s life, risk is what it’s all about.”

She’s right, of course. We have to step out on that high wire again and again, even though we teeter with every step, even though we’re dogged by insecurity: “Maybe it won’t work. . . . Maybe it will suck. Maybe I’ll waste my time and precious energy on a piece of prose that will be dead on arrival.”

I don’t suppose there’s any way to avoid the inexorable loneliness of the process, the feelings of frustration and powerlessness that come at the end of a day in which the only thing you really accomplished was staying put in your chair. Still, I wish that when I was sitting alone with myself in that Florida bedroom, I could have flashed forward a year, to the joyous scene last week in a hotel room in Nashville.

Every single woman from my book group had flown in earlier in the afternoon to celebrate the launch of Magical Journey with me and to attend my reading at Ann Patchett’s beautiful bookstore, Parnassus. On that first evening, we were all gathered together, toasting our trip, our thirteen years of books and lives shared, and the publication of this new memoir of mine (despite the fact that the work of writing it had kept me from attending a single meeting last year.)

The conversation soon turned to vulnerability, and risk, and the importance of sharing our stories, even the painful ones. After all these years together, we trust one another completely, hold little back, know that we can close the door and bare our souls in safety. And yet, as my friends began to share their first reactions to my book, we found ourselves talking as well about taking risks in public and on the page. And how, perhaps, in taking some risks myself, I’ve cleared a space in which other women might be more willing to share their own stories, or at least come to feel a little less alone.

This, it seems to me, is the reason any writer undertakes the speculative work of memoir. Not so much to tell “what happened,” as to illuminate the slow, halting process by which we learn to make our peace with what is. And in that vulnerable revealing, in the stumbling, wayward truth of that story, lies something that is worth offering: not the gift of what we have accomplished but rather the gift of who we really are.

To be vulnerable on the page is indeed a risk – hang yourself out on the line, and anyone can come along and take a swing at you. Yet my own experience over these last two weeks has been the opposite. People are kind, and words build bridges. As I’ve met and talked with readers in Connecticut and Nashville and Washington, DC, and as I’ve read and responded to the letters and Facebook messages and emails from strangers, I’ve been moved deeply by the stories women have shared with me, joyful stories of change and growth, but also intimate stories of loss and hardship, suffering and grief. Stories told in confidence within this safe space, a space created by kinship and kindness and courage. Publishing a book, any book, is an act of faith – in oneself of course, but in one’s readers even more. How humbling and gratifying it is to have that faith returned a thousandfold.

I would not want to relive last January, all those days spent, as Dani says, “in the teeming, writhing darkness,” trying to beat back my own self-doubt long enough to make something lasting and sturdy out of words. But I’m glad now that I did it. What I’m learning, I think, is something one of my most admired writers, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, knew all too well.

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches,” she writes in Gift from the Sea. “If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” This, it seems to me, is the work of the writer: finding something of value to add to the suffering. Sometimes, yes, it is isolating, to dwell in that place of risk and revelation. And yet what we find on the other side is so worth the effort: community, connection, kinship, healing. Nothing less than the road back to grace.

To all of you who are supporting the birth of this book with your heartfelt letters, your messages, your words of encouragement, your online reviews and your real live attendance at my readings, a most heartfelt thank you. I am honored to be a part of this ongoing conversation, to meet you and to share the path with you, to be reminded that none of us journeys alone, that we are all connected, that my story is your story — and vice versa.

News from the road. . .

Building an audience is the writer’s job once the book is published — and that’s what I’m up to now.  (A far cry from that writerly solitude of a year ago.)  Want to help me spread the word?

Here are three things you can do:

1. Write a brief review on Amazon.

2.  Like my page on Facebook and share posts with your friends.

3. Share the book!  (One of my favorite stories: A reader wrote to tell me she was ordering five copies for friends for Valentines Day.  No sooner had she placed her order than an Amazon rep called to ask if there had been some mistake.  “No,” she replied, “I loved this book, so I’m buying more for my friends.”  The Amazon clerk read the description and said, “It does sound good.  I’m going to buy it too!”  Talk about word of mouth!)

Also, check my Events page to see if I’m coming to a bookstore near you. I’m visiting lots of independent bookstores — we need these stores in our towns, and they need our business to survive.  (This week I’ll be in:  Concord, NH; Portsmouth, NH; Manchester, VT; and Cohasset, MA.)

If you haven’t read Priscilla Gilman’s probing interview with me, Click Here.

A nice review from the Chicago Tribune (Editor’s Choice).

Finally, a word about The View from My Window, the collection of blog posts my husband gave me for Christmas.  Your comments — all 264 of them!–stunned me.  I read each one of them with gratitude.  And then I wished I could send every single one of you a copy of the book.  Which of course made me think:  there has to be a way.  For now, all I can say is, stay tuned. (This sounds like a project to take up a bit later, after Magical Journey is well on its way.)  Meanwhile, congratulations to winners Ann Laurence and Louise Olmstead, whose names were drawn at random on my pub. date.  

Margaret, I knew, was holed up in her own snug little house three hours from mine, working on her garden memoir, “The Backyard Parables.” Most mornings, before settling down to serious work, we would send each other a Skype greeting.

“You ok up there?” she’d type, usually around 6 am, the hour both of us consider the best for getting any real thinking done.

“Yes,” I’d type back. “Plugging away.”

“I’m here,” Margaret would answer. And somehow, just knowing that she was, brought me comfort. We were a writers’ group of two, with book deadlines just weeks apart. Whenever the going got tough, as it seemed to at some point in nearly every day, either one of us could reach out. Commiseration was never more than a click away.

We didn’t show each other our manuscripts until we had both finished writing – among other quirks we have in common is a need to work in deep privacy. But when Margaret came to the end a few weeks before I did, I felt inspired to push onward myself – I knew she was waiting for me at the finish line, eager to exchange our first drafts.

What we found, as we each began to read, was perhaps inevitable. Margaret was chronicling a year in the garden she has loved and tended for twenty-five years. And I was writing about the challenges of adjusting to a new stage of life without children at home. Yet it turned out that, unbeknownst to either of us, many of our themes were identitical: loss, change, acceptance, transformation, aging, gratitude, grace.

Some of the parallels made us laugh as we scribbled exclamation notes in the margins: Turned out we had both stood in front of our respective bathroom mirrors, tugging our middle-aged, crepey neck skin up and back, contemplating the very distant possibility of a nip or tuck to tighten things up beneath the chin.

But we also realized, as we read one another’s work, that perhaps what had seemed unique to each of us as we labored away in solitude is in fact universal: married or single, mother or childless, employed or not, rich or poor, gay or straight, each and every one of us must eventually find a way to navigate the tricky passage between youth and age.

It seems that the great challenge of our middle years is to figure out how to move into and through the second half of life with joy. Joy even in the face of inevitable loss; equanimity even in the face of relentless change; wisdom and grace even as old roles and old dreams fall away and new ones are slow to take shape. We may travel different paths through life, and yet perhaps there is no woman anywhere who doesn’t long at some point for an inner road map, some kind of guidance as we are called to release our illusions of control, to let go of who we once were and to embrace who we have become.

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me at all that my friend and I have both spent the last couple of years quietly grappling with these very challenges – for aren’t these also the topics of conversation whenever women come together and summon the courage to drop our public faces and share our true struggles and stories?

As it turned out, our publisher decided to bring our books out within a week of each other. And suddenly, it seemed that my sustaining vision – the two of us together, holding finished books in our hands – might actually become a reality. In October, at the New England Independent Booksellers’ Association meeting, we tried our idea out on some booksellers.

“You can have us separately if you want,” we said. “But we’d also be happy to come to your store together.” By the end of the weekend, we had a whole list of bookstores that liked the idea of our “duet.” And so it was that last week, the two of us sat side by side on a couple of stools at Margaret’s house and read aloud for the first time, to a room full of invited guests – our dress rehearsal, so to speak, to make sure the program we’ve been imagining all these months would actually work.

Wine was poured, dinner was eaten, and the conversation flowed. Our test audience was kind and enthusiastic, and the passages we chose to read seemed to speak to one another in two-part harmony – two friends, two lives, two voices, two books, with much in common and much to share. By the end of the evening, a room full of women who had arrived as strangers to one another were all chatting like old friends. I looked around and took a moment simply to allow myself to be grateful: for cameraderie and home made cookies, and also for the deep, spontaneous connections that the written word, when shared aloud, can always inspire.

“That was pretty fun,” Margaret and I agreed the next day over lunch, as we ate some lentil soup I’d brought to share with her. And so, come January, we are taking this show on the road.

In the meantime, learn more about our friendship, and The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life at Margaret’s blog, A Way to Garden.

You can read excerpts from both Magical Journey and from The Backyard Parables simply by clicking on the titles.

But perhaps the best way I can introduce you to my friend is by sharing her video with you. (To watch mine, just click HERE.)

It was Margaret’s idea to share the soup recipe as well. That’s below, followed by a list of all our joint appearances this winter. Mark your calendars! We’d love to meet you.

lentil soup, adapted by katrina

ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• 1 red onion, chopped finely, or one large shallot chopped
• 1 leek, white part only, chopped finely
• 2 celery branches, diced finely
• 4 twigs of thyme, chopped finely
• ½ teaspoon saffron
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 3 branches of parsley or cilantro, plus more to garnish
• sea salt and pepper
• large can of diced tomatoes with their juice
• 2 tablespoons double concentrate tomato paste
• 2 cups dry French green lentils
• 2 carrots, peeled and sliced
• 2 cups peeled and diced ‘Butternut’ squash
• 4 cups water
• 2 cups white wine (or vegetable broth)
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 garlic cloves, finely minced

steps

• In large pot, heat oil, add thyme, cumin, turmeric, shallot, leek, celery, and cook, stirring, about 5 minutes, till veggies are softening.
• Add tomatoes, tomato paste, cook one minute.
• Add lentils, carrots, squash, cook one-two minutes.
• Add water, wine, bay leaves, cilantro, season w. salt and pepper, cover and simmer till lentils are tender, about 25 minutes.
• To serve: Ladle soup into deep bowls, top with a poached egg, a heaping tablespoon of creme fraiche (sour cream or yogurt can substitute), chopped cilantro or parsley leaves, and a dash of paprika.

(Recipe liberally adapted from “La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life” by Beatrice Peltre)

about our upcoming events

Margaret and I will be reading together from our two new books, “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life” and “Magical Journey” An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” at bookstores and other venues around the Northeast this winter. Come join in our conversation–or invite us to visit your library or bookstore or book group (virtually by Skye, or in person) by emailing using this contact form.

• Saturday, January 19, 2 PM: at R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT.
• Saturday, January 26, afternoon: at Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT.
• Sunday, January 27, 3 PM: at Buttonwood Books, Cohasset, MA.
• Wednesday, January 30, 7 PM: at New England Mobile Book Fair bookshop, Newton Highlands, MA.
• Sunday, February 24, 3 PM: at the Concord (MA) Bookshop.
• Thursday, February 28, evening: at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY, hosted by memoir-teacher and author Marion Roach Smith.
• Saturday, March 2, 1-3 PM: at Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA.
• Sunday, March 3, 3 PM: at Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY. (I’ll do a “365-Day Garden” lecture that same day at Battenkill, starting at 2 PM.)

I ordered Jena Strong’s first collection of poems, Don’t Miss This, a few weeks ago, just as soon as I read my friend Lindsey’s passionately enthusiastic review. Although I am a serial reader of memoir, it’s been a while since I allowed a new poet to enter my life. I’m a loyal re-reader of the poets I love, more likely to return to my handful of old favorites – Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Danna Faulds, Donald Hall, and Stanley Kunitz – than to tune my ear to a new voice, no matter how heralded.

But Jena’s book drew me immediately, in part because it is a memoir in poetry, a collection in which each poem stands fully and beautifully on its own while, at the same time, adding another strand to a story that I can’t imagine being told in any other way. As Jena explains, “The poems here trace a journey – to some extent in real time – through marriage, motherhood, sexual awakening, separation, and healing.”

I was startled, when I opened the book at random the day it arrived and began to read, to find myself in tears. Startled to feel such a powerful connection to this woman whose life path is so different from mine — who is so much younger than I am, and who is in the throes of mothering two small daughters, claiming her sexuality, coming out, and creating new relationships even as she struggles, with great care and compassion, to protect and honor the sanctity of old ones.

This, at a glance, is not the story of my life. And yet, it seemed as if every poem I read revealed to me something that is absolutely the story of my life. And what took my breath away was not the superficial details that separate me from this gifted young poet, but the slow, undeniable revelation of all that connects us: the intensity of emotion, the longing for self-acceptance, the faith that guides our steps and the sense of mystery that astonishes and humbles us as we make our slow, halting way forward. The love for our children, our spouses and partners and friends, and finally, for our own vulnerable, imperfect selves. The sustenance of seeing the sacred in the ordinary, the soul work of cultivating gratitude for a life that is not at all the one that was planned but that is, instead, the one we are meant to live. The courage to share a personal struggle, in the belief that it is only by revealing our cracks and fissures that we grow up spiritually, into our own true selves, at last.

To read this small, exquisitely written book and do it justice, I knew I needed to clear space. I needed to leave my cell phone on the kitchen counter, my work on my desk, the dishes in the sink. I needed to lie in the hammock beneath a vast, all-encompassing summer sky and allow myself the necessary luxury of deep reading. I have taken Jena’s title as a directive: don’t miss this. And so, today has been a first-page to last-page day, a vacation day right in the midst of everything, a gift to myself of time and poetry, beauty and kinship, summer air and chosen silence.

May you clear an essential space in your own life during this final month of summer and sink right down deep into something nourishing and good, something that feeds your soul. Take a chair outside, put your feet up, read a book that gives you back to yourself. Don’t miss this.

>SUMMER READING!

Last week, I gave away copies of Mary Oliver’s Collected Poems, Volumes One & Two. In the spirit of summer reading, and because I so enjoy sharing books I love, I’ve decided to give away a book each week during the month of August.

Jena’s book is available to purchase here. (And her lovely blog,about “waking up, making the coffee, and seeing what happens” is here.)

To be eligible to win a signed copy of Don’t Miss This, just leave a comment below, and tell me what YOU are reading this summer. I’ll draw a winner at random on Tuesday, August 7.

In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to share one of Jena’s poems, one I’ve read every day since the book arrived. (As I said, I am a devoted re-reader of poetry that speaks to me.) And if you’d like to read more about Don’t Miss This, click HERE to read Pamela Hunt Cloyd’s beautifully nuanced review.

What If?

What if you knew
that everything was going to be okay,
that something was in motion
beyond your field of vision,
beyond even the periphery
of your knowing?

What if you knew
that everything you want,
everything you’ve been seeking,
trying to figure out, missing,
is right here, already whole
in your hands, in your life?

What if taking in what is
could satisfy your longing?
What if you could rest your frantic, racing, busy mind
and rest your neglected, tired body,
put your head down in someone’s lap
to have your hair stroked,
like a cat, or a child?

What if you didn’t need to understand
how it works,
but could enjoy the magic
of how love shows itself
in the most unexpected, simplest of gestures?
What if everything is just as it should be?

What if nothing had to be better,
bigger, different, or other?
What would you do then?
Who would you be?