My books arrived last night! And friends have been getting their copies this week so it’s out in the world and is no longer just my story. Over the next few months, I’ll share more about my process of putting Tsunami together and expand on some of the ideas I touch on in the book, but today I want to celebrate the journey of the book itself.
Although it’s a short book, this was not a quick book to write. It took a few years and then when I started sending it out—well, I had trouble even finding places to send it to. It’s less than 18,000 words. Publishers either wanted longer books or the few publishers who published prose chapbooks wanted shorter books. They wanted something closer to 50 pages. I hate to admit I tried to squeeze and reformat and take pieces out to somehow get this out into the world. It didn’t work and I’m so grateful it didn’t. Oh, it came close. I was semi-finalist for a prize, and I got some lovely rejections. But at a point, I stopped, set it aside, and went back to focusing on poetry.
Gathering the Pieces of Days was accepted by Unsolicited Press in 2022. I went to my first AWP in 2024 in Kansas City and was talking to my friend and fellow press-mate Cathryn Shea. I wondered whether UP might be open to publishing a book like Tsunami. So I sent the publisher Some Stewart an email and asked whether she’d like to take a look. She did and loved it and scheduled it to publish on August 11, 2026. And she published it the way I wrote it, as a series of vignettes. I didn’t have to try to make it be something else.
That’s an important lesson. I owe it the books, to the poems, to everything I write, to honor that work—to let the book or poem or story or essay be what it wants to be.
Not that I don’t revise my work. I do, extensively sometimes. I got feedback on each of those vignettes from my poetry group. And on the revisions too. And putting it all together. And I did another editing pass before I officially sent in the final manuscript to Unsolicited Press. That’s when I sent it to my friend Lisa for her to read. We experienced the tsunami together, and I wanted her blessing. She shared some of the writing she did about the tsunami, and with her permission, I incorporated pieces of that, using my own words, into the vignette “Lisa’s Story.” I added an Author’s Note.
I was having coffee with a friend this morning, as we do most Saturday mornings, and we talked about how I was going to have to be talking about my experience and the tsunami a lot now, something I have not done. She commented that she always sensed that the tsunami was off limits as a topic of conversation. That I didn’t want to talk about it. Of course, there have been a few people with whom I shared my experience, but otherwise I didn’t want to go there.
So this is a big deal for me. I had to spend my whole hour in therapy this week talking about talking about it. There are reasons for that, of course, some of which I’ll share and some of which I won’t. What is important, and one of the gifts I hope readers will take from this book, is how necessary it is to share our stories. No matter what they are, no matter how little or big they seem. Even just one on one. So I am sharing this story with you.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.