Hears the wind

Once upon a time, we were staying with my Mother-in-law way out in the country. And I took long, long walks. Walking has a way of making story happen. Story finds me at those times. There were many long walks while we stayed with my in-laws.

We were temporarily homeless, as the trailer we'd been renting had been sold to someone else. We tried sleeping on the tables at Memorial park but that wasn't working, so we sucked it up and went down to throw ourselves on the mercy of my husband's parents at the their camp. They also had a trailer in town, but that was off-limits, unless they were there. So we five crowded in with them in the one room with a porch that they owned at the edge of what had once been the old family farm.

To keep from going any crazier than I already was, I took long, long walks and wrote things in the dirt along the way. Sometimes not very nice things. The kids were in school and Mark worked, first at a group home, then at the Junior High. I helped my m-i-l and tried to stay out of trouble.

Since there was no running water, we'd frequent Memorial Park, where, if you knew how to go about it, you could get showers. At night, we'd crawl behind stacks of boxes of things my m-i-l had collected. We'd get comfortable in large beds that were covered with chenille bedspreads and lovely old quilts. The nights were silent, and the evenings sang us into something resembling contentment with the sound of whip-o-wills. Lanterns lit the rooms and were extinquished at what my parents-in-law considered a reasonable bedtime, about a half hour after dark.

My m-i-l ruled her place like a warden and we didn't get by with much. We had a favorite show at the time (the whole family had, pretty much, the same favorite shows, one favorite at a time, the current one being The Young Riders). Sometimes we'd drive the twenty-five miles to my brother's house in Craigsville in order to take showers there and watch the show. My m-i-l would grill the kids afteward, wanting to know if they'd been doing anything they shouldn't. She was particularly concerned that they should not have been watching a parade or going to any kind of fair or anything frivilous and possibly fun, things that might promote bad behaviour.

Eventually, her concern for them got the better of her and she confessed to owning a television herself, and proceeded to dig it out from under stacks of tupperwear and boxes of unused products form House of Lloyd. Once the television was unearthed, she cleared enough space on a bureau and pluged it in and adjusted rabbit ears. During commercials, she turned down the sound and she and my father-in-law stood in front of the set so the kids wouldn't be corrupted by commericals they'd likely seen hundreds of times before.

I took long, long walks and let story find me.

One Saturday, with all of us home, our three girls and I got out our notebooks and started writing. "We'll write novels," someone said. And I started writing, "Manny waits until the others are asleep before taking the notebook from its place. He writes, 'circles', then crosses it out because he doesn't know what he means by that."

I wrote six pages. Then we were busy on something else and I put the pages away. I'd find them months later, after we'd found another temporary trailer. We lived in a place which we called Bootyville. We called it that because the trailer park owner's name was Booty. He liked to drive around on his four wheeler and look into our windows. He liked to frown at things we did and didn't do. We had a dog who wasn't ours. A little fellow we named Free, after a character in the movie, Flashback, and because the dog, a poodle, wanted to run free and roll in the mud, not be a poodle. He'd follow us home from our long, long walks.

I no longer took walks trying to get away, but because that was my habit. Eventually. my novel that had been forgotten began to join me on those walks.

One of our daughters won an award in WV's Young Writer's competition and she was to go to Charleston, to the college there and attend a conference. I went with her. One speaker was Colleen Anderson. I listened to this woman tell us that to be a writer, you don't have to do anything special, you just have to write.

I had written before, a novel called THE HOMING, about a boy named Kainey and a girl named Lacy. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I had a sign over my typewriter that read: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Writing must have been worth doing, because I did it very, very badly. The only thing worse than my prose at that time was my poetry.  Eventually, that novel ended up in a box under the bed in an old country house and the mice ate paths through it.

This time, I decided, whether it was good or whether it was bad, I would finish what I started.

In the morning, my husband and our daughters would head off to the Junior High School and I would go for a long walk and come home and write until time to get their supper. I bought myself a bike that spring and instead of walking, I'd ride the bike and come home and write. They feasted on a lot of instant mashed potatoes and quick-fix macaroni and cheese. But every day, I made up for the the quick food by baking something special. I told them my ambition was to be a fat old baker woman in my old age. But my ambition was to be a writer.

I wrote all the time. I carried my yellowruled notebook I'd bought in Charleston, at the college where one daughter after another attended the Young Writer's Conference. I'd write while my husband and oldest daughter played pool. I'd write while the girls watched boats launch at the lake. I'd write in the car and mostly, at the kitchen table. I wrote it all by hand. A cheap green and black pen I got in a bag of goodies at a Halloween party. Some days I loved what I'd written. Other days, I knew beyond a doubt, that none of it was good. It didn't matter. I kept going

I sent two poems to a publication called RHODODENDREN. I had sent things off before to have them come back with form letters saying various things along the line of "this isn't needed, but thank you for the effort". But the two poems were published.

The first person outside the family to read HEARS THE WIND was Joy Lackey. Somewhere, I still have her note of encouragement.

I sent Hears the Wind to BIG places first. And got it back, with kind letters telling me why it wasn't quite right for the market. A year or two passed and then I heard of the WV Writer's competition. I sent it in in 1995, about four years after I'd written it, and it won first place. My book made it to the same list as the work of Colleen Anderson, who'd first inspired me to finish what I started. I'd made my first money writing, with $250 first prize.

When I began to look for less ambitious places to send my manuscript, I found Mountain State Press. I sent it to them that same year it won in competion, 1995. They accepted it, praised it, but it didn't go anywhere. A year passed and another and occasionally a letter would come. Editors changed and one wanted changes and one liked it the way it was and the manuscript was in limbo while they decided what to do with it.

It wasn't until 2003, that the manuscript became a book. By that time, it didn't seem to matter so much. Eight years had passed since it had been accepted! I'd moved on. Poetry was my new love, rather than prose. I'd found medicine poems. Or, they'd found me. Some of the poetry I wrote was good. Open mic nights at cafe's and bookstores were the new ecitement. I couldn't get enough of the heady joy of the spoken word, shared with others, like storytellers of old.

Then the book was published, in 2003. And I was going to follow it into wherever it led me. So, we packed and started back to West Virginia to the book fair when I got this little "click" in my spirit that said "look up". There above the theater where the local acting group sometimes held their plays was the sign MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

The book would flounder. I didn't have the drive needed to sell myself or the work. It was no longer my honey, my work of art. It was a book I once wrote that led me places. I was more amused than proud. There was that moment when I held my new book, when I saw the beautiful artwork by Sharon Harms and saw my name in print. This had weight. A book that I had written. It was momentarily heady. But the book had already done what it came to do. It had allowed me to move into story and to believe in myself and through this work, I met other writers, Joy Lackey, Roberta Woods, Margaret Winebrenner. And, I had finished something.

The book belonged, not to me, but to Manny and Beth, the characters in the work. Eight years wait to see them in print had given me distance. I winced at the letter inside the front, which had once seemed so important. I didn't want to let the publisher down, but the tide had come and gone in that eight years I waited for them to decide what they were going to do.

I read the book again not long ago, and parts of it amaze me. I considered myself a Christian at the time I wrote it, but there is so much in it that is Pagan. I wrote it from what I instinctively knew. The story is not one of racial prejudice as some think, but is of religious prejudice. It's about a boy who wants to find his way back to his true spirit path, but hasn't a clue where that path is found. It's about a girl who is, as I once was, alone, and happy that way; a hill child who likes her own company and her own thoughts.

Though the book didn't go much of anywhere, it was a success. All in all, it never was such a bad little story.
http://www.mountainstatepress.org/5.html


http://www.amazon.com/Hears-Wind-D-Kate-Dooley/dp/0941092453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293977510&sr=1-1