Juggling Life and Art: One Woman’s Story

For many women writers trying to achieve book publication, there are detours, roadblocks, and dead ends. The release of both my first book, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, in 2019, and my novel The Remnants of Summer this May illustrate the circuitous route some women and their books travel. 

In early 1993, when I was thirty-three years old, both of my parents died, just thirty-six days apart, from unrelated causes. My father died of complications from multiple sclerosis, while my mother died of heart disease.

I was pregnant with my second child at the time. I’d been working a day job and writing in my spare time when I wasn’t mothering. The literary agent I’d acquired a few years earlier had suggested I write a novel to go along with the short story collection I’d completed after graduate school. I wanted to write about my childhood growing up in Michigan, living in the land of lakes. Maybe we could get a two-book deal, my agent had suggested.

I’d graduated from a well-respected writing program and had published a few stories in literary magazines. But like many writers who’ve graduated from creative writing programs, I hadn’t sold a book. With my parents gone, a new baby to care for, and a spirited toddler, I used the little energy I had to keep trudging through the grief, an interminable journey. 

When I finally emerged from that journey and began to coordinate my working and child-rearing lives along with spare-time writing, I knew I needed to finish the novel about Michigan and family I’d started back in the late 1980s, if only as a tribute to my parents and their lives of hard work, a way to process the grief.

I also felt residual guilt about my mother’s death. I’d been working two hours away in the weeks of her long hospitalization following her initial heart attack, and on a particular weekday she turned down a last-minute opportunity to transfer to another facility for a heart catheterization. She wanted to stick with the plan already arranged. I felt guilty that I hadn’t left work on the day of that decision and driven down to Detroit to her hospital and talked her into the catheterization. Perhaps she wouldn’t have died.

Later, I gave that guilt to the main character of my novel, The Remnants of Summer. The story takes place in a working-class suburb of southeastern Michigan over the course of two summers. As the novel opens, the main character, Iris, a fourteen-year old falls asleep at the beach while watching her younger brother Scott. As a result of her inaction, her brother drowns. I was like Iris, trapped in guilt and mourning the loss of my parents as people and as touchstones representing my childhood.

I completed a draft just before 2001 and sent it first to my old agent and then another. More than ten years had passed. The market for fiction had changed. My novel was “too quiet for the current market.” 

I put the manuscript in a box, buried it in the basement, and started another novel. I kept writing and submitting my work, one manuscript at a time.

In November of 2012, when I was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just before my fifty-third birthday, I thought, “Finally. Maybe cancer is not too quiet for today’s market.” I began to study memoir, adding to my toolbox with each conference I attended. My plan was to write the book quickly and make some money before I died to help my husband pay off parent student loans. I’d originally been given six to eighteen months to live before my oncologist determined that my cancer had the highly coveted EGFR mutation which responded well to drugs that could extend my life.

I also returned to the old novel, revising it yet again. Meanwhile, I learned about yet another small press to which I could submit. I needed to select a manuscript and decided on the cancer memoir; it was the shiny penny in my pocket, unvarnished by grime, age, or rejection. 

In October of 2019, at the age of sixty, I published my first book, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, about my journey with stage IV lung cancer. I would have happily taken that sole publication to my grave. But when you keep living longer than you expect, you learn to push on. Mostly for your children, sometimes because of your debt, often because there is part of your ego that needs gratification and validation. If work is what you know, work is what you do.

In May of 2021, my second book and first novel, The Remnants of Summer, greets the world. I wrote the books in reverse order. The novel was a thirty-year effort. Both books explore grief as I mourn my parents and my own eventual death. Yet both also celebrate the working-class world and the joy of simple family pleasures – the scent of suntan lotion, popsicles slurped at a rest area picnic table, the glimpse of sun dappling a lake’s surface. 

Sometimes when you try to do your art, life gets in the way, creating hurdles. Sometimes when you’re almost losing your life, your art can help you save it, at least for a time.

—

DAWN NEWTON is the author of Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, which details her journey with stage IV lung cancer. She was trained as a fiction writer and received scholarships to attend Michigan State University and Johns Hopkins University. Dawn has taught composition and creative writing at several colleges and in K–12 classrooms in Virginia and Michigan. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published in various literary magazines. She has three grown children—Rachel, Connor, and Nathaniel—and lives with her husband, Tim Dalton, and their dog, Clover, in East Lansing, Michigan. 

Website: https://dawnmarienewton.com/ 

Twitter: @Dawn_M_Newton 

Instagram: @dawnnewtonwrites 

THE REMNANTS OF SUMMER

Iris is sinking. As the summer of 1974 begins, she must grapple with the events that have lain dormant since the previous summer when her brother, Scott, drowned in their neighborhood lake. On her watch.

While Iris flounders with the weight of her guilt and grief, she seeks redemption from her family and yearns, in particular, to repair a strained relationship with her sister, Liz. But new developments threaten her efforts, forcing her to navigate the turbulence of the present summer while reckoning with the emotional trauma of the past.

Set in a working-class neighborhood, The Remnants of Summer is a story of how collective grief and personal guilt threaten the individuals who make up a family. As Iris sifts through the images of the past, she wrestles with waves of guilt and responsibility, acceptance and forgiveness. Surrounded by the gentle rhythms of a Michigan summer, she endeavors to rise up and become visible once again.

Tags: featured, womenwriters

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips