All in a Day’s Work
Weekends are chore times, and four busy summery weekends had passed without us being here to do the picking up. The kids’ rooms were particularly disastrous. I made several mid-week attempts, with children helping, to tidy their rooms, without getting much of anywhere. Finally, yesterday, we awoke with the gleeful knowledge that we had nowhere to go and nothing much to do. Can one clean gleefully? If you’re Obscure Canlit Mama, yes, yes, you can. There’s something so satisfying about cleaning when it’s really beyond dirty: moving furniture, organizing, purging (don’t tell the kids). Under the couch in the girls’ room I found: fuzz, fabric, dead bugs, a spider’s web with large unhatched egg, crayons, pencils, hair bands, toy cars, Little People figures, several bouncy balls, a nightgown (!), a bath toy, and that’s just what I can recall. Didn’t take any before pictures, but see above … the rooms: floors cleared, shelves tidied, everything in its place and a place for everything. It took hours. And the kids didn’t help (which was helpful in and of itself; thanks, Kevin).After supper, we hitched up the new bike stroller–yes, we did! After contacting the manufacturer directly, Kevin discovered that the necessary parts were living in our basement (we’d had them all along). So we went for a family ride, all the way to TCBY for frozen yogurt, and then a bit further, too. After jogging with the stroller these many weeks, biking with the stroller didn’t even feel like real exercise. Which was pretty nice.
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Obscure Canlit Mama has news. It’s kind of good news/bad news, except I can’t separate the two. My agent called on Friday afternoon. To set the stage, we’d just gotten home from Nina’s buying club, CJ was pounding on a wok with a barbeque tong he’d dragged out of a bottom drawer, and I was preparing a baked mac-and-cheese for the kids’ supper so that Kevin and I could go out to celebrate our anniversary, so my hands were kept busy during the conversation. My agent hates to give bad news (who doesn’t?). Listen, there’s bad news and then there’s bad news. Along that spectrum, this was disappointing but not unexpected. She doesn’t think the stories will sell (to a publisher). She’s read the earlier novel version, and feels the stories leave too much out, all sorts of research and context; besides, she says, it’s grim out there and publishers aren’t buying novels these days let alone a difficult-to-sell, almost-certainly money-losing dreaded short story collection. But. She said, Let me just toss an idea out there … have you considered writing this material as a memoir?
Um. No.
She said she’d give me a few weeks to mull it over, and call back.
So, let me ask you: if you could choose, would you rather read a short story collection or, hmmm, let’s call it “creative non-fiction,” set in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, during the contra war, told from the perspective of an American child living in Managua, whose parents are peaceworkers? In other words, would you rather read what could have happened, or what really did? Be honest.
Here is the other thing my agent said (to paraphrase): You are meant to be writing, this is what you’re supposed to do.
It’s a tough thing for me to believe, sometimes. I know the work that will be involved, maybe. But I also know I could write what she’s suggesting. I could do it. And it wouldn’t have to mean giving up on the collection of stories, because the two would be quite different beasts.
The real problem is that contemplating taking on this project would be like moving that couch. What awaits beneath? Do I really want to know? And the things I’d choose to purge or to arrange on the shelf: are they even mine, or do they belong to too many other people, too?
