writing toward the light

This week I suddenly realized I hadn't checked lately to see if one of my favorite novelists has a new book coming out this year. I discovered Ellen Gilchrist when I was in my early twenties and a writing teacher told me that yes, one could write books about the same characters, and yes, they could all link together in some way. That Ellen Gilchrist had done it and done it very well.

I still remember lying on the floor of what I called the "aquarium apartment" reading her novel The Annunciation. I remember stopping after each chapter and closing my eyes and thinking I might never read another book. I loved that one so very much.

Well, of course I DID read other books. I caught myself up to what she had written thus far and then I waited patiently and sometimes not so patiently, for her next one. I have lived through dating, graduate school, marriage, and having children waiting for Ellen's next books. She has never let me down. They keep coming, and I still love them.

The first year I went to a writing conference, once I had actually completed a novel, Ellen was the keynote speaker. I had corresponded with her in earlier years and she had always written me back with encouragement. At the conference, I got to hear her read from one of my favorite short stories. I had to go to the ladies' room immediately after, because I was so teared up. And then I got to meet her and her grandson, and I felt like I had completed a circle.

These days I am hesitant to check for her new books. I'm afraid there won't be one. One year the book that came out was a huge volume of her collected short stories and that scared me. But this week, with spring coming, I realized she might have a new book coming out too, and I checked.

A Dangerous Age comes out May 13th. And her memoir, The Writing Life, came out a few years back but I have not bought it yet. I have to keep something in reserve, you see.

After discovering that I have a new novel to look forward to, I pulled her journals off the shelf, Falling Through Space, and opened it up.

This is what I read:

All these characters, all this research, all these pages and pages and pages. Perhaps it will be the best thing I have ever written. Perhaps the worst. Still, I have to finish it. A poet once told me that the worst thing a writer can do is fail to finish the things he starts. It was a long time before I knew what that meant or why it was true. The mind is trying very hard to tell us things when we write books. The first impulse is as good as the second or the third -- any thread if followed long enough will lead out of the labyrinth and into the light. So I believe or choose to believe.

The work of a writer is to create order out of chaos. Always, the chaos keeps slipping back in. Underneath the created order the fantastic diversity and madness of life goes on, expanding and changing and insisting upon itself. Still, each piece contains the whole. Tell one story truly and with claruty and you have done all anyone is required to do.