Get interactive. Join the conversation. Here's where Kelley answers your questions, throws down opinions, and talks about work and life.

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#108
June 6, 2007
From: Kelley

Nicola has recently published her new novel, Always, and it rocks. Find out more here. Get it at your local bookstore or on amazon.

Next on her horizon: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life. This is a fabulous thing: a memoir of Nicola's childhood and early adult life with emphasis on how she became a writer—the events, people, feelings, challenges, fears and joys that led her to the work.

It's more than a book (although there are over 45,000 words of text): it's a beautifully designed object, a box of Nicola that includes several small volumes, photographs, juvenilia (Christmas lists, an early poem, her first crayon-drawn book), reproduced diary entries, a CD of songs with her band... and more.

I've never seen anything like it. Imagine that someone hands you a small box, perhaps like the cigar boxes of my youth in which kids saved their most precious objects. And in the box is a story in many dimensions, multiple media, so many different ways to experience the memories and feelings and thoughts of the person herself... I think it's seriously cool, and I think it may well set a new paradigm for memoir.

See for yourself.

But hurry: it's a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, and that's all there will ever be.

#109
August 14, 2007
From: Kelley

Paying forward is better than looking back.

No editing necessary. I don't think I can respond to every point right now, because there are baked potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge with my name on it (and I don't mean that to be flip, just that I've been thinking about your comments a long time and could think about them longer, but then you would never have a response). I appreciate the conversation and that you're willing to take so much time to continue it.

It's been a wee while since you sent me this (my bad, very sorry) so I'm curious—did you get the Goss book? As much as I've talked about it here in the virtual pub, I'm pretty sure I haven't yet found the right way to encapsulate her point (oh ho, maybe that's why she wrote a whole book about it, laughing now). Or perhaps it's that I find my understanding of "hope" is changing as I try to integrate her perspective into my view of things.

Am I in the same place with this? Hmm. Yes and no. I don't feel hopeless, but I no longer rely so much on hope. I think that what you said above—Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment—is perhaps a good parsing of her point. If we rely on magical thinking, if we decide okay, I will get this thing or person or result I want if I don't step on a crack, or if I don't call her first, or if I pray hard enough, then maybe we miss the opportunity to just give a rebel yell and do the thing to the fullest in the moment when it needs to be done. And if we do the thing, and it doesn't work out, it doesn't mean we did it wrong. It doesn't mean we were wrong to reach for it, to throw ourselves out there (to, as they say, dance like no one's watching). It just means that it didn't work out. And that's how it goes sometimes. Right now, I think that's what she means, and right now I can mostly be okay with that. Would I be okay if it were the death of a lover I was talking about, if it were Nicola's death? Probably fucking not. So I'm not sure where I am.

Except that I know I'm in a doing place, a place of action without as much expectation as before. I do think that it's possible to act without hope, by which perhaps I mean this expectation that things will work out the way I want them to. I still want them to work out, on some level I still hope they will—I just don't necessarily pin my self-esteem or lifetime happiness or sense of worth on it the way I used to. And in some weird way this has freed me to, among other things, be braver about what I write and love my writing more. Why? I don't know, it's a mystery.

And since I'm in quote mode at the moment, here are a couple more:

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. —Anais Nin

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn. —Mary Catherine Bateson

I know this is in no way a complete answer to your very thoughtful comments. Thank you for them. And thank you also for your kind words about digging and spoons. It's true, that's what I want in almost every respect right now. Life's short. Let's just reach right in.

K