Spirited Woman Blogger Team

Guest Blogger - Jennie Nash - Serendipity

The novel I have just (just!) finished writing is a story about a fabric collector. Well, it’s a love story and it’s a mother-daughter story, but one of the characters happens to be someone who loves fabric. She buys it all over the world, and hoards it, and, revels in its possibilities and in the end, finally discovers the best reason of all to use it. I can’t explain why I chose to write about a fabric collector, or what excited me about it, or why I bothered to spend so much time learning about fabric and weaving and sewing, but I did. And now I am in the strange position of taking a book out into the world and having to face real live fabric collectors.

I have been here before, with a character who was a food photographer, one who was a painter, one who was a building contractor, and I always worry about getting things wrong, or seeming presumptuous, but mostly, I can’t wait to connect with people who understand my character, in some ways, better than I do myself. And I know it will happen, because it always does. Books spark these amazing moment of serendipitous connection – and whether you’re a reader or a writer, they’re like gold.They make you feel alive with possibility, and connected to the whole universe, and filled with joy. At least they do me!

So last week, there were two such moments. The first came when a former student asked if I would come to her book club if they chose to read one of my books this year. I said that I would be delighted, and sent along a blurb about the new book (The Threadbare Heart, due out in May 2010) just in case they were interested in waiting for that one. Well, this student wrote back to say that she had read the blurb about the new book and that I had, in fact, written her life story! I had no idea that she was a seamstress and a fabric collector and that she had held onto a piece of fabric inherited from a grandmother and that, like my character, she lived in the fire-prone hills of California. But this woman is all those things, and so is my character, and the serendipity of that—of just knowing that – made my whole day.

Guest Blogger - Jennie Nash - Creative Moonlighting

Every time I get deep into the writing of a novel (I’ve written three now), I end up also getting deep into some other kind of creative endeavor. With one book, it was painting. With another, it was felting purses. With the most recent one, The Threadbare Heart, it was making jewelry. When this first started to happen, I thought that there was something wrong – that I was avoiding my work, or scared of finishing – but I have gradually come to realize that when you open your imagination up and invite the world in, lots of things will fly through the door. Creativity begets creativity.

Take the jewelry-making jag I recently went on. There I was in the middle of this novel. I had a year to write it, which is not very long. And I am the mother of two busy teenage girls, and I teach writing classes and I coach other writers and I try to be good to my husband and there was publicity to do on the last book, still, and life was very, very busy. I did not have time for jewelry-making, and I did not have the money for it, either. (Making jewelry is not a cheap undertaking! You go to the bead store to buy, say, a bit of silver wire, and you walk out with a string of beautiful jade rondelles and a pounded silver heart pendant and some silk string that would be great with grandma’s pearls. It adds up!)  But my friend invited me to make jewelry with her, and I felt drawn to do it, and so I signed up for a class, and once a week I left my writing behind and drove up the hill to learn a different beading skill.

Half the time I wouldn’t finish the project. The other half of the time I would finish, but by the time I got home, I would decide that I hated what I had made – it was too short or too long or the green didn’t match the blue or the pearls looked really stupid with the coral -- and I would snip the wire and take apart all my hard word. This is to say that I am not a very good jewelry maker. But what I enjoyed was the creative struggle, and the chance to think about color and balance and rhythm in a very tangible way. Putting words on a page is one of the most intangible things you can do. It’s just black and white scratch marks, really; there is no right and wrong. And the same might be said for jewelry, but I could see it when something didn’t look good, and I loved that visual component. It gave me a boost to try to “see” the way my story was unfolding, and inspired me to delete a scene if it wasn’t working and just do it again. If I could re-string a bunch of beads, I could re-write a scene. My jewelry-making, in other words, fed my novel-writing.

Guest Blogger - Jennie Nash - What Cancer Did For My Writing Career

I’m always reluctant to jump on the “cancer made me a better person” bandwagon, because sickness is an indirect and unpleasant path to self improvement, but the fact of the matter is that cancer changes people, and in some cases, it changes them for the better. It did me. It was the thing that gave me the courage and the faith to become the writer I wanted to be – but my lesson did not come in the normal “Wow, I almost died so I better live my life the way I really want to before I really DO die” way. It came on a stage in a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska.

I had been invited to Alaska to give a speech to breast cancer survivors from all over the state. This honor was bestowed upon me because I wrote a memoir about my experience called The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer, and I was getting some national attention for the book. The Anchorage event was a big celebration for survivors, and it was held in a big ballroom, and I was the main attraction. I was seated at the head table near three women who had tirelessly given their time to plan the event, and next to a woman who was in the middle of treatment. She had no eyebrows, no hair, that sickly pallor to her skin, but she had dragged herself out to have lunch that day and to celebrate being alive.

I knew that the year before, the keynote speaker at this even had been Dr. Susan Love, who is a surgeon, a pioneering researcher and the author of the bible of all breast cancer books, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. Dr. Love is in the business of saving lives. She raises millions of dollars to fund cutting edge research to try to find a way to get to cancer before it spreads, before it kills so many people. She has something serious to say, and when she speaks, people listen because they know they will be educated and informed and inspired – and maybe they will even hear the thing that will save their mother or their sister or their best friend from dying.