Apple Business

I started a new project this spring. I set my nearly complete memoir aside. I made the decision in a flash.

I knew the memoir was getting to me. Many times in the ten-years-long process I had to take time to recover from the things that make my story worth writing. I knew that once my book was done, I would be free. I would be done with it.

At my core, I’m an idea generator, a starter, a planner, a push through the obstacles person, but once the finish line is in sight, I balk, I turn away, I avoid. I’m sure therapists will have insight here and yeah, I know. But knowing a thing and being able to sort it out are two different things. My stepmom said that any time we can complete any small thing, it builds within us the ability to complete more and more things. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea that momentum can build slowly, has helped me complete tasks I would otherwise abandon. I have a mountain of abandoned sewing projects that I’ve been tackling one at a time. Many of these projects, once complete, go directly to be donated. The feeling of completion is there even if I don’t keep the item. I have been determined to complete my memoir for so long, I kind of lost sight of my own free will, my own happiness.

Within hours of deciding to set my memoir aside and try fiction, I was giddy with relief, as if it had never occurred to me to allow myself a more joy-filled life. Don’t get me wrong, my life is full of a million bits of joy in every direction, even in the worst times in my past, there was a glittering of joy at the edges. During the memoir years, my worst days were those when I wrote, edited or researched my past.

Now, everyday is a surprise. What do the characters in my book have to say? What do they look like? What do they want? What are they afraid of? What magic do they bring with them? I dream of them every night and wake up thinking about them.

During the memoir years, I read publicly fewer than five times and cried one hundred percent of the time.

My new project? I’ve read five times in three months. I have not cried once. It was close a couple times, a crack in my voice here and there, but all good, all dry.

At last week's reading, my intention was to improve my speaking. Voice and presence. I had crossed the border of reading aloud will be the end of me to, being nervous, yet brave.

I walked by an apple tree on my way to the reading and was overcome by the beauty of the fruit, nowhere near ripe, but perfect in every other way. I tucked it into my bra. It fit there as if the bra was made to hold that specific apple. My husband turned to smile at me when I stopped. I didn’t mention the apple I’d picked, rather just noted the apple tree’s abundance.

Once, when I was co-officiating a wedding, while writing the wedding speech, it was suggested that a joke might be inserted to soften the formal nature of the event. I wasn’t thinking of that at the time, but I thought of it later as I wondered how I came to stand in front of a group of writers, I only know from this very room and announced that, my pages were printed in fifteen point font. I didn’t want anyone to think I was reading ten pages in twelve point standard. I had timed it. About eight minutes. It’s possible, with my intention to speak clearly and less fast that I was too loud. I have several friends who are low hearing, so I may have put my “which ear is your good ear?” voice on.

As I sat waiting for my turn, I felt something close to confidence. I mused on groups and how we fit into them, even if our place is on the edges. I mused that group dynamics often bring me to compare and contrast my own place in complex sibling paradigms. I am the youngest in my birth family of two and the youngest in our mixed family of six. I have been in many chosen family scenarios, where my role has been twin, middle, youngest, but rarely have I been oldest. In this room, I am squarely in the middle or at least I perceive it that way. As in sibling relationships, I want to fit in, to find space - the bigger the family, the harder it is to find space - . Once I feel like I won’t be shunned, I want to entertain, to win over, to continually work to keep my place in the hierarchy. This class clown/fawning situation may be why I, after saying my first name and font size, lifted the warm apple that was nestled in my dress and announced its presence before quickly tucking it back in and proceeded to read my pages. Hopefully not too loud. But no tears, and I didn’t rush through in fear I was taking up too much space. The apple was a comfort, a weight near my heart. A little dose of fairy tale magic.

My friend Kelly, who I met in the room we both read in, wrote me a note the next day, about the reading, about the apple.

Stories are powerful, but at a reading, the physical is another layer of the experience. The podium, the lights, the clothes folks wear, whether they sway or stand still. Whether they push up their glasses, mess with their hair, bite their lips, whether or not their hands shake. Sometimes, an apple, hidden inside a dress and shared briefly will make you think of apples more than if it was placed on the podium for eight and a half minutes.