AGS Johnson

After the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist disaster, I excerpt a passage below that the anniversary called up in my mind from my novel that is due out this fall, The Sausage Maker’s Daughters.  Though the speaker is an antiwar activist during the Sixties’ Vietnam period, her disheartening experience with violence only begetting violence seems appropriate to today’s wars and all that has happened since 9/11/01.  Please let me know if you agree.

The setting is Bascom Hill, the center of campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the late Sixties.  A protest demonstration has turned violent when the authorities attempted to suppress the gathering.  Our young, idealistic speaker steps up to address the crowd.

“”A strange thing happened when I faced thousands of expectant students spilling down the Hill.  In the background, the illuminated dome of the state capitol mystically hovered over the storm cloud of breath rising above the gathering.  The fear and anger I saw in students’ eyes inexplicably caused mine to dissipate like the vapor they created.  I was left with unexpected sadness.  When I spoke, it was quietly, about renewed commitment to nonviolent change.

“How tragic,” I began, “that threats and violence speak louder and more influentially than nonviolent words and actions.  Is this humanity’s shared truth, our shared burden?  Will we never learn to talk, to exchange viewpoints peacefully, before it’s too late?  Could we, the leaders of tomorrow, begin a new chapter by writing a peaceful page in history today?”

I’d lost them, the whole crowd.  I sensed it in the sudden quiet.  Their outrage required an object and I wasn’t up to supplying one.  The subdued crowd clapped politely for me when I relinquished the mic and stepped down.  Here and there I caught an expression that might indicate someone thinking instead of thirsting for action.  But I’d disappointed them, no question.  A fiery young comrade of mine, followed by several black speakers, soon reenergized the rally, but failed to reenergize me.”“

Unlike blogs which should be short and punchy, I’m told, the evolution of the voice that became the protagonist whose story would become the novel I wrote throughout grad school and well beyond—well that evolution was anything but short and punchy.

The evolution was long, arduous, tedious, exasperating, frustrating humbling, and did I mention tedious?  Little did I imagine that the two and a half years it took to write the novel as the master’s thesis required for my degree was only the beginning.  Ten solid years of writing, rewriting, editing, and writing some more with a couple years off for the vicissitudes of life (more on those later), and only ten solid years later did I hear myself declare albeit only to myself and my computer: I’m done.  It’s done.  The voice had become a completed novel, as good as I could make it.

Alas, the literary world clung irrationally to its earlier position of not give a rat’s ass that I was, at long last, ready to bestow my novel upon the world.

And so another, dare I say grueling evolution commenced: learning the business of book publishing and selling at exactly the time the business of book publishing continued its freefall, changing so rapidly even experts struggled to keep up.

And there’s where we are today: me and my novel on the precipice of publishing and stepping out into the great big world where, they say, everyone has at least one story in them they long to tell.

I invite you to join me on these last stages of a long journey from inspriational voice to book in hand, or on Ipad, Kindle, cell phone….  Who knows—your story could be next.

As undoubtedfly the oldest student about to hit campus, I spent hours angsting over what to wear to my first MFA-level writing classes, having been out of college and my teens and twenties for some decades.  I choose to believe this was not an indicator of my depth as a writer.

I had had some success in corporate America where women wore suits and heels and carried purses disguised as briefcases and learned to curse with the best of the far-more-prevalent guys (more on respect for the power of words to come).  That look would never do.

So after a carefully contrived casual outfit of jeans and a top with long sleeves (more about women’s arms later) and enough makeup to cover most wrinkles gained honestly in the aforementioned prior career, I attended my first graduate-school-level writing class.  I still stood out in terms of age, but not absurdly.

And that was when that voice I blogged about last week made known its purpose.  From that first class through all my writing classes until my master’s degree was finally earned, that voice increasingly took on flesh and blood.  It breathed, cried, screamed, ranted.  That voice became a youngest daughter, a little sister, a child, an adult, a fearless human being too often pretending to be brave.

That voice became my protagonist, my novel’s main character, inhabiting a bit of fictional space complete with a house and schools in a conservative Midwestern town, nuns, lovers, radical politics and so much more.  In short that voice became a challenging, controversial woman I obsessed over for a decade.

The voice became the story of a young woman’s life, navigating the complex and confusing times that were the Sixties, not to mention the politics of family.  And to some degree, the story is everyone’s story about coming to terms with life.  More on that subject next time.

It started as a voice, a voice so brash and cocky it was clearly compensating for something.  The voice woke me in the middle of the night.  I crept into the bathroom, careful not to disturb my sleeping husband, and perched atop the closed toilet to write as fast as I could to capture that voice.

The next morning, I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten, something that would ultimately take me years to fully discover.  Had I recorded a personality, some anger, perhaps bravado whispering beneath the surface of the words?  Metaphorically I sat on that sheet of hastily scribbled paper for months, reading and rereading it, putting it away and pulling it back out.  Putting it away.  It haunted me.

Months later, I took the now typed single sheet of paper to my wiriting group (more on the subject of writing groups to come).  I read it to them.  They looked somewhere between throughtful and confused, finally agreeing that the voice was interesting indeed, but what was it?  No one knew.

More months went by, maybe a year, and that paper with that voice that compensated for something went in and out of my consciousness.

Meanwhile, since the literary world was making it clear that it had not been waiting for me with great anticipation as I tried to peddle my first novel, I decided upon a change of tack.  Perhaps my undergrad business degree, which had served me well in my first career, was not the best foundation for an aspiring novelist.  Not long after that conjecture, I enrolled in a master degree writing program to fill in the foundation for my second career.

And that is when That Voice declared its purpose.  Next time: The Voice and Its Intentions.