Patry Francis. Period, or, P.F. I Love You

Last year I signed up for a six-month long master essay/memoir workshop at Denver’s only independent writing school, the kick-assish Lighthouse Writers Workshop. I laid down my good money and my essays for people I hardly knew so that they could tell me what they thought, and in turn I would tell them what I thought about their work. We squirm and giggle before each class, and make disclaimers before having our pieces read and critiqued. We apologize in advance for what we are about to submit. “It’s really rough,” we say, or, “For those about to read this piece of crap, I salute you.”

We turn in our stuff, dead trees be damned and wait for the slings and arrows, and of course, my classmates are not hiding in the bushes the next day to napalm me on my way to the car. Nor am I filling their gas tanks with sugar and figuring out how to do them bodily harm with their own manuscripts. We are nice and tender and supportive while being honest and helpful; the way I’d like to be treated with my craft and calling, yes, but it’s also the way I’d like to be treated in general.

It’s no worse than a lot of other vocations, but it’s a hard gig, this writing thing, and without role models, without community, it’s too easy to be too hard on one’s self. I made the mistake of trying to work in a vacuum for several years, and because I’m me, tried taking inspiration from the suite of quality programming at VH1. I would spend my lunch hour watching Beyonce Revealed, or The Fabulous Life of Christina Aguilera, or Behind the Music, shows that weren't helping me develop any sort of skill, but that started me on the important tack of thinking that success in the arts is possible. Period. The problem with these shows is that, while they do mention the struggles and sacrifices these stars-to-be had to make to further their careers and empires, it’s easy to overlook them. What we don’t see and can’t see in these glossy shows are the real doubts, the hurdles, and backbreaking, soul-breaking setbacks that artists must endure to bring their works to light. What we don’t get is the journey vs. destination philosophy. We get a lot of imagery, but none of it has anything to do with real heroism. Well, duh. What did I expect?

Once I’d drawn the conclusion that one can only spend so much time with VH1’s reality shows without risking brain injury, I imagined other heroes of the journey. Every time I pushed myself away from the desk and said, “This is too hard,” I would remind myself of Jane Austen, who had to use a well of ink and a quill by candlelight for god’s sake to do her writing, which was frowned upon in the first place, since she was shirking her other womanly duties like using her spindle and loom or something. But eventually I decided relying on Austin was lame, too, because to be honest, I don’t really identify with someone whose work I haven’t read since high school, and even then I was only pretending to read it. As long as I’m telling the whole truth, I should also say that the things I know about her are only secondhand; they’re bits and pieces of facts I’ve heard my well-read friends mention, and I’m probably making up a fair bit of it to fill in the gaps.

But forget all that, because today it’s with great relief that there’s a new hero in town, and her name is Patry Francis. She’s the author of the just-released novel, Liar's Diary. **UPDATE** Penguin Group, publisher of THE LIAR'S DIARY is offering a 15% discount if you order direct from them. To receive the discount, type PATRY in the code field.

To use the lovely and talented Susan Henderson’s words from LitPark (with permission), here’s why:
“What if you worked for years as a waitress and then went home at the end of the day to your husband and four kids, and in those rare minutes of free time, you dared to dream that one day you might write a book? This is the story of my friend, Patry - a story that leaves out years of false starts, revisions, and rejection slips. It's a story that writers know intimately, though the details are different. Every one of us is well acquainted with the struggle of getting a story on paper, of honing it and believing in it enough to send it out, only to receive rejection, or worse, silence for our efforts.
Imagine, after many years, you beat the odds. You finish that book. You find that agent who sells your manuscript. Your dream is about to become a reality. But just as your book is due to be released, you discover you have an aggressive form of cancer.
Patry's story struck such a deep chord with many of us, not just because she is our friend, but because those of us who know her or read her blog have relied on her company through the ups and mostly downs of trying to write and sell a book. She is our buoy. She has shown us time and again her great gift for shedding light in the dark. Even her blog post about her cancer showed this - in her greatest time of need, she was still somehow comforting all of us and showing us glimpses of joy. Patry is part one of this amazing story.”
What happened after that is like one of those holiday movies about giving and love that you can’t help but watch again and again, despite the corniness and what your cold-hearted husband might say. (As if he doesn’t cry like a baby during every episode of Little House on the Prairie ever taped.) Uh-hem. On New Year's Day, or thereabouts, author maven Laura Benedict wrote to author maven Susan Henderson, calling her attention to Patry's publication date. "Perhaps we could do a 'Patry Francis/Liar's Diary' blog-o-rama or carnival or something to promote the book?" she wrote. "I'm such an amateur at this stuff that I don't know what's possible."
Susan didn't give a moment's thought to what we might try to pull off, or how; Susan simply said, "Yes! Let's do it!"
Susan writes:
“In less than one month, over 300 bloggers, writers, readers, and just big-hearted people signed on to take part in this day. I am overwhelmed and grateful for every single person who said yes or helped spread the word, but let me reserve some enormous thanks for the people who traded hundreds of emails with me to put this together: Karen Dionne of Backspace, Jessica Keener of Agni and The Boston Globe, Dan Conaway of Writers House, and Alice Tasman of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency.
What began as a personal gesture of caring for a friend became an astonishing show of community - writers helping writers; strangers helping strangers; and most surprising of all, editors, agents and publishers, who have no stake in this book, crossing "party lines" to blog, to make phone calls, and to send out press releases.
This effort has made visible a community that is, and has been, alive and kicking - a community that understands the struggle artists go through and rejoices in each other's successes. It's a community made up of many small voices, but - guess what? - those many small voices can create some noise. So while today is for Patry, it's also a symbolic gesture for all of you who work so very hard for little or no recognition, for all of you who keep going despite the rejections, and for all of you who have had illness or other outside factors force your art or your dreams aside. We are in this together.”
So Patry Francis, when I’m struggling or fighting with myself or isolating myself from what’s wonderful and right, I will think of you—and Laura, and Susan, and all the other friends I’ve met along the way. I salute you. And as my three-year-old likes to say, “Love you, mean it.”

Happy is Good Enough: The Eli Gottlieb Experience

I’m going to talk some trash about Eli Gottlieb. The author, Eli Gottlieb, who wrote the New York Times Notable Novel of the Year The Boy Who Went Away, and regularly contributes to the magazine 5280. I’ll admit that I’m putting all this here, at the top of the entry, because I am trolling a little. I’m wondering if, one night, when he has nothing to do, Eli will open a browser window, point it to Google and enter his own name into the search box. Maybe, after a bout of ego-surfing, he will end up here. After all, it's happened before.
A few years ago, I "blogsmacked" Laura Pritchett, the author of the kickass novel Sky Bridge. Although I never intended to flag her down, I gossiped to the blogosphere that she’d just won a contest that entitled her to something small, like a free workshop or something. A contest that I figured would make little difference to her career, but could really boost…someone else’s. It was like Michael Jordan trying out for the Special Olympics, I argued. “Hey, Barbara Streisand,” I think I wrote, “why don’t you just try out for American Idol?” And in reply to the email she sent me after finding my snarky entry, I made sure she understood the good news: She’s Michael Jordan. She’s Barbara Streisand. It’s textbook Godfather, hon: Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
I clung to that same philosophy for the half-day I spent at the nonfiction workshop Eli led as a part of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Summer Literary Festival. “Where are you going?” my mom shouted into the phone, “A misery festival?” Her hearing is not as good as it used to be, and sometimes my goiter cozies up to my vocal chords and muddies everything I say. And I was weary; Sophie had pneumonia at the time, just two months after she'd broken her collarbone, and I'd adopted the philosophy "Why sleep when you can fantasize about checking in to a mental health facility--preferably in a nice, warm climate?"
“No, a literary festival.” I chuckled. Because if you believe that there are no accidents, you might say that Mom had it right the first time.
Like all Real Authors®, Eli had something about him that made the twelve of us in the class sit down, shut up and listen. He’s been a prizewinner, a fellow; he’s been an editor and a gentleman, and he cameos as Ann Patchett’s boyfriend in her big-time memoir Truth and Beauty. He was working his craft—and working it hard—way before I painted myself green and gold for the Colorado State University Fall Freshman Chug-off Invitational and then almost set myself on fire in the big bong-lighting snafu of ‘87. (Note to self: Paint is flammable.) And while I was developing a foolproof system for choosing the perfect Wendy’s value meal based on appetite, mood and wardrobe (patent never pending), Eli was studying and teaching in Rome and Vienna.
Eli was going to make sure that our tuition for class was well-spent, and so he came out of the gate sprinting. “The bad news is that you write,” he said. So right away, we understood where we stood in the world of art and media: Siberia. Nobody reads, he told us, and more specifically, nobody reads us. I was sitting next to him, and when I leaned over to peek at his notebook, I saw scrawled in blood his outline for class.
I. You’re all going to die.
a. Alone.b. Penniless.c. Unpublished.
II. Why everyone hates you.
a. Why you suck.b. Why you should give up now, before you embarrass yourself any further.
III. Markets for your work.
a. The express checkout lane at Safeway, right next to the little rolled up horoscopes.b. The free Web page you get with your Earthlink account.c. The Gay Porn Cowboy Newsstand, on Broadway and 1st (not that I’ve ever been there.)
IV. Wrap up, Q&A and parking validation.
I could tell right then that I was in for an experience similar to Paper Chase, only with Richard Lewis standing in for John Houseman. I couldn’t wait to hear the rest. I wanted him, as the kids say, to bring it on. And then he did.
The gist of the rest of his opening statement was that we have chosen to be writers, a vocation that continues to breed a fiercely competitive climate in the all-out absence of demand. But at least we’ve chosen nonfiction. God help you if you decide to write a novel. You might as well put yourself on Dr. Kavorkian’s wait list right now, which, by the way, is populated to the margins with writers, as it should be, along with the poor souls who put their good money down on a Gigli/Glitter double feature.
And that was the point at which I’d started assigning nicknames to Eli like Slappy and Jingles and Sunshine. As in: Boy, Smiley is just full of good news.
As if I were in front of the Oracle at Delphi, I had to ask, “Will I, Gladbags McGee—I mean Eli—ever sell my collection?”He adjusted his glasses, looked into the middle distance, and spoke. “An essay collection is a tough sell. The only way to guarantee a sale is to get one of your pieces into the New Yorker. And even then, you won’t get rich. You might get happy, but you won’t get rich.”
I wrote in my notebook: Happy is good enough. Get into the New Yorker.
It wasn’t just me; none of us were going to make any money. Personally, the news came as a let down, considering the kind of huge money I’m pulling down right now as a stay-at-home mom. Further, we hadn’t earned our MFAs and all the networking contacts that go with such a thing. We were delusional and green and perhaps too hopeful. We live in Colorado. We are on the untrained, unsophisticated side, and I don’t think I’m telling any secrets when I say that, while most of us weren't yet qualified for stellar rates on car rental through AARP, nobody in the room was young enough to appear on the pages of Elle, either. And Eli knows that because he was once an editor there.
He was giving us the tough love treatment, of course. I’d bet money on it—money I’m never going to make writing a book, mind you. He was playing bad cop, forgetting that he'd left the good cop back at Hazel's Donut Haus. There was something about his delivery that told me, if it’s cool to sound all maudlin about our chosen labor of love, it’s extremely uncool to pat us each on the tush and tell us to, “Go out there an get ‘em, tigers!” We were the Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman to his drill instructor—which in this case would be played by Lewis Black instead of Louis Gossett, Jr.
The next note I wrote myself said: That sly bastard.
If I was right, he was tearing us down so that he could rebuild us. Better, stronger, faster, or at the very least, little, yellow, different. If I was right, he was cheering for us in there, under his white man’s fro, and he was probably doing it in Italian, because he could. And it was working, because by the time his class was over, I was saying as much to myself as I was to him, “You don’t scare me, Eli.” Yes, I learned about markets and pitches and agents and publishing, but the knowledge that matters most, the knowledge that I will continue to apply, is about myself. I am unafraid of writing. More importantly, I am unafraid to be a writer.
A few years ago, when I fingered Laura Pritchett for being the overachieving author-maven that she is, I was afraid, very afraid. But things have changed since then, and thanks to the introspection our friend Eli afforded us, I now know what they are. First I had a baby, then I had a goiter; I’ve lost my income and the freedom to use the bathroom by myself ever again, and I'm all too often moved to ask the question, "Are you poopy again?" Shoot, what’s a little rejection letter in the mail? Just this side of two years ago, I was in labor for two days and then pushed a human being through my vagina. Between pregnancy, midnight, 2 and 4 o’clock feedings, childhood illnesses and a thyroid gland gone awry, I haven’t slept in—no shit—almost 26 months straight. Top that, J.K. Rowling.
I've tried the corporate thing; I've tried the start-my-own-business thing. One was lucrative, but soul-sucking; the other was wildly unsuccessful and soul-sucking. You can do the math on which one was which, or you can conclude, as I have, that I've chosen poorly in the past and I'm not dead. I'm a little embarrassed now and then, but I'm not dead.
I’ve chosen two vocations that will last my lifetime, or maybe they chose me: Writing and motherhood. They are both utterly hopeless, everything you do is wrong, there is no insurance and the pay sucks. That’s what vocations do, though; they rob you of everything in one way and embarrass you with riches in another, and thank goodness. It makes me shudder to think about how close I came to law school. Being a lawyer? Now that would have embarrassed and killed me.
So I say, Chuckles, pass me the cannolis and take a few for yourself while you’ve got them in front of you. You earned them, tiger,now go get ‘em. And guess what else? It could work out. This whole thing could unfold in crazy, wonderful, non-maudlin ways, and I could end up not dead again. Better yet, I could end up like a Gen-X Anna Quindlen, only with the perfect Wendy’s value meal at my desk instead of a Pulitzer. Maybe it’s my medication talking, but I’m optimistic. In fact, if I had a little hat that I could toss up in the air, I would. Because you know what I think? I think I’m going to make it after all.