Show & Tell Friday: Summer Solstice Edition

Hey, all! I'm posting this here and at my author website a wee bit early. This is the fault of baby brain: if I waited until tomorrow, I'd never remember.

Today is the Summer Solstice: the longest day of the year, the official first day of summer  and, as it so happens, my husband’s birthday!

Oh, how I love the summer. Sunday was the first night I’d noticed the lightning bugs. I’m sure they’d been around already, but we’ve got an infant in the house, and so some things have lately gone unnoticed. We tried to get our 3 year-old to catch them with us, attempted to explain just how cool these little glowing creatures are, that they mean summer and freedom and magic–but she just wasn’t into it. Oh, my broken heart. But she’ll get it one day.

Some good stuff to share:

1.) Native Eyewear is sponsoring a contest called the “Locals Only Project,” where viewers can vote for the best outdoor town. Native Eyewear will travel to that town and make it the centerpiece of their next catalog. My town, Brevard, NC, is up this year! And we are truly lucky and blessed to live where we do: in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at the foot of Pisgah National Forest, with the best mountain biking track and hiking trails East of the Mississippi.

Check us out and vote here.

2.) Last night I pulled a movie from our DVD library that I haven’t watched in a long time. Called True Women, it was a CBS miniseries in the ’90s starring Angelina Jolie, Dana Delany, and Annabeth Gish, and based on the novel by Janice Woods Windle. I’d picked the DVD up in some pile of “for sale” stuff a while back. Set over five decades, starting in 1830s Georgia and Texas, against the backdrop of the Indian Removal (Trail of Tears), the Alamo and Texas independence, the wars with the Comanches, and eventually the Civil War and women’s suffrage, it’s full of capital-D Drama.

Parts of it are overly-sentimental–mostly the over-the-top Southern accents, which only Gish really gets right–but it’s a rousing adventure and a story of three very independent Southern women in a wild and dangerous time. The relationships between Delany’s and Gish’s character (they play sisters), and between Delany and her character’s husband (played by veteran Western actor Powers Boothe) is lovely and real.

Check it out: an escapist adventure for a few hot summer nights! (And I bet you could get it for free from your local library.)

3.) Speaking of libraries–very cool places to be in the summer–here’s the list of the latest books I’ve checked out. (All novels.) They’re sitting on my bedside table and the side table where I feed my baby. I’m optimistic I’ll make it through all of them in time to check out more for July, especially considering the wee hours and I have grown quite friendly:

Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The Casual Vacany by J.K. Rowling

I’ve got to admit: I’m a chronic re-reader. I just finished re-reading Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, and Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. And, I recently gulped down Susanna Kearsley’s newest, The Firebird, as soon as Amazon.com delivered it to my door earlier this week. More on that soon!

4.) In my CD player: (And, yes, I still have a CD player) I’m currently listening to new albums by two camp buddies of mine (read: friends I worked with for years at a camp in the NC mountains): Bradley Carter’s The Real Job (CD jacket designed by another camp buddy and talented artist, A.J. Power) and Shannon Whitworth’s High Tide.

Quite a bit of talent comes out of the NC mountains. Check them all out when you have a chance. And I’ll write more later about all these books and this great music, here and at my blog. No guarantees on when (she types as the infant cries from the bassinet), but it’ll come.

Happy Summer Solstice to everyone!

A Phone Call from Pat Conroy

I read The Prince of Tides for the first time when I was 10 years old. (Probably, this was too young, but there you have it.) I took the book from my parents’ study one summer day when the house was silent. I remember distinctly having to hoist myself up onto the bottom level of the built-in bookshelves—just like launching myself out of the Botany Woods pool minus the ladder, a skill perfected by all us neighborhood kids—standing with my toes poised, my heels hanging over the edge. I stretched, reaching into the family stacks until I found it. I can still feel the worn edge of the binding, the multiple old creases there. This was a book that had been read often by my parents. It was beloved.

As thorough as my education had been thus far, Lake Forest Elementary had not prepared me for the magic and mystery of Pat Conroy’s storytelling. Though by then I was an avid reader, nothing I’d read was so viscerally familiar as the spellbinding way in which he talked about my home state, South Carolina. Nothing I’d read had affected me so deeply. It sank into my bones, became part of my DNA. Part of family’s DNA, really, as we all—my father, mother, sister, and I—fell in love with his writing. Pat Conroy: literary patron saint of the Crawford family.

So when my first novel was sold to a small press, and all the cogs began turning in the creaky wheel towards publication, suddenly I had to find authors from whom I’d hope to gain endorsement. I could think of no one, at first, but Conroy.

It didn’t matter that my novel was historical, set about 200 years before most of his. Or that I was a writerly nobody. Or that in my mind he was so big, so beloved, he probably received requests like these every day. I decided that, since this was the one and only time in my life I’d have a first novel being published, I’d shoot for the moon.

I wrote him a letter, via his literary agent, asking him if he’d be so kind as to read an advance review copy of my novel, Keowee Valley, and if he liked it, to perhaps offer a quote (also known as a “blurb”: basically, an endorsement).

Most of the letter was heartfelt, genuine, thoroughly shameless fawning. It’s an odd thing, as a 30-something, to write a fan letter. But the man is my favorite living writer, and I knew no other thing to do than to tell the truth.

About a month later, I’d forgotten about it. (After mailing the letter I’d determined to put it out of my head. I figured he probably got a stack of fan mail each week—he’d likely never see mine.) Then, one afternoon after ignoring my cell phone all day like I tend to do, I noticed I’d five missed calls. My husband was giving our two year-old a bath; I could hear them giggling and splashing. Standing at my desk, I began listening to my messages.

Pat Conroy
Photo credit: www.patconroy.com

There he was. Pat Conroy. His voice boomed out of my cell phone, gruff but with a smile in it. At first, I thought, My sister is playing a very mean trick on me. I’m going to kill her. But as he continued, referencing the letter and his own response to it, I knew it to be true. I walked numbly towards the bathroom, calling for my husband. When he emerged with towel in hand, looking at me inquisitively, I had a hard time speaking.

“Pat Conroy left a message on my cell phone. Pat Conroy is on my cell phone,” I stammered. Then I sat in an ungainly heap on the hardwood floor, my legs giving out.

There are plenty of people out there who really won’t get how big this is. Not many folks these days go gaga over writers. My husband has known me for quite some time, and so knew how I felt about Conroy’s writing. But still, I tried to explain it to him thus:

“It’s like Bono leaving you a message on your cell phone,” I told him.

My husband went to college in Athens, Georgia, in the late ’80s. He saw U2 at the Omni in Atlanta during their Joshua Tree tour, and he’s taken me to two U2 concerts since we’ve been married. He loves those guys. He particularly adores The Edge. Perhaps I should’ve named him.

So, I sent an ARC of Keowee Valley to the address Conroy left for me, along with an effusive note of thanks. Then I waited.

I pretended like I wasn’t waiting. I told only my family that he’d left me the message. (They, of course, sent up a plane with a banner.) I told everyone I doubted he’d even remember, or that if he decided he couldn’t offer a blurb, I wouldn’t care. It was enough that he’d liked my letter—that he’d left a message on my cell phone.

I lied.

I wanted, more than anything, for the man to like my novel, for him to see something worthy in my writing. Of course I did.

Long story short: He liked it. He really did. And he offered a blurb I’ll treasure always.

Too often when we get a chance to meet or interact with our idols, we’re disappointed. They’re not the gods we liken them to; certainly, they’re not perfect. Sometimes, they can even be rude. Twice I’ve met other writers I’d admired, and they brushed me off. One, during a panel at a book festival several years ago, even told a snarky joke at my expense in response to a question I’d asked. (No, I’m not telling you who they are.) Maybe, she’d had a bad night. But I haven’t bought a book of hers since—not because I’m vindictive, but because I no longer see her, or her writing, in the same light.

Not so with gentleman Conroy. He took the time to call me, to leave a long, detailed, and unfailingly kind message. Who does that sort of thing anymore?

Apparently, the great ones do.

This has been a long, rough, exhausting journey to the publication of my first novel. Nothing about it has been what I’d expected. There have been dark moments when I wondered if the whole deal wouldn’t fall apart, when I doubted myself and my work. I still do.

But the light moments, like Conroy calling me and ultimately offering such praise for my work? Like the other incredibly gifted and generous writers offering kind words for this first-time author, a person they’d never met? They have been the glow of lightning bugs in the summer night.

Sheer magic.

Reclaiming Summer

Rhododendron in Pisgah National Forest
(Credit: myspace.com)

The rhododendron are blooming in the Pisgah National Forest. Milky white with pink centers, in fanning green bushes tall as trees. On my favorite trail they grow like a great tunnel, canopying above. Running beneath them yesterday, the smell was like the forest exhaling summer.

It was only my second trail run since I'd sprained my ankle pretty terribly last month. If you're a runner, or even a part-time runner, you know what the first run back after a break is like: it's wonderful. Truly, you feel like a rock star, like you could run for days.

And then there's the second run. This was yesterday for me, running on very sore legs and a grumpy ankle encased in an Ace brace, my eyes scanning the trail ahead for unruly roots or rocks. My dog (an extremely athletic, almost 9 year-old black lab) bounded ahead, pausing only to drink from creeks or to look back at me as if to say, "What's up with you? We're in the forest, don't you get it?"

Then there was the rhododendron. And soon I was looking up, breathing in. Sure, I felt every jar in my ankle, blinked back sweat from my eyes, readjusted my sloshing Camelback. But when my dog shoots me one of those looks, one of those looks that says, Come on, you ridiculous human, this is the LIFE, it's imperative that I listen.

At the end of my last post I mentioned seizing the summer, trying to recapture the essence of what made this season so spectacular when we were kids. But it's hard, isn't it? Our lives are insanely busy, complicated, and the days pass so quickly that looking at a calendar is a recipe for whiplash. But if we don't do it--don't slow down, don't take a moment to just be--then the moment is lost, and we never get it back.

It's time to reclaim summer.

Here are three items from my personal "to do" list--things I hope will help me take back summer from the oppressive heat, the jam-packed schedule, the blood-thirsty mosquitoes in my backyard:

My daughter, 2 years old, baking a birthday cake for her daddy yesterday.

1. Enjoy time with my daughter. Really enjoy it. Take her for walks in the woods, for creek adventures and ice cream. Show her how to catch lightning bugs. Listen to what she has to say.

2. Read as many books as is humanly possible. Even if it keeps me up late at night. Even if I look a decade older in the morning. Read anything I want--magazines, books from the bestseller list, biographies, beach reads. Be brave enough to put a book down if I don't fall in love with it. (As an English professor, I have a hard time with this.) But summer is far too fleeting to trudge through a book you don't like.

So far, my reading list this summer has included Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, Melissa de la Cruz's Witches of East End, Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, Adriana Trigiani's The Shoemaker's Wife, and various issues of Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Poets & Writers, Parenting Magazine, and a little book a dear friend gave me that we keep in the bathroom, called Very Nice Ways to Say Very Bad Things.

3. Breathe. I mean it. Really breathe, deeply and cleanly, inhaling the light (the smell of rhododendron in full bloom, wafting scents from restaurants I pass on my walks around town, my daughter's giggles, my husband's clean shirts, the sweet early morning mist) and exhaling the dark (too little sleep, a calendar that would make the most "together" woman I know weep, short tempers, a cluttered house).

After all, it is summertime. And the intrinsic magic of summer never really fades, no matter how old we get.

So what's on your reading list? (I need ideas!) What do you plan to do to enjoy summer?