Nevertheless, She Persisted

A gluttonous reader since childhood, I have always wanted to write. The first time I dropped out of school I took a typewriter to a Caribbean island to write the great American novel. I didn’t do it, but I read Middlemarch, Tristram Shandy, and Moby Dick. I wrote a few short stories as my son was growing up, but I didn’t really focus until he left home. Child-rearing, work, writing: I could only manage two out of three. Each demands creative thought and preoccupies me while driving or in the middle of the night. 

After my son left, it took two years to write the first novel. I revised and revised, and wrote to over a hundred agents and many publishing houses without success. 

My next novel, The Year of the Child, took five years because in the middle of writing it I took in two foster children – talk about midnight worrying! I had a fancy New York agent for that one, who sent it to all the big houses.

They all rejected it, and she suggested I turn it into a young adult novel. I considered this carefully, but this was a book about motherhood. I had 13-year-old Leanne and her baby, Leanne’s mother and her struggles, the woman who took Leanne in and had a complicated relationship with her grown daughter, and that daughter’s own harried young motherhood. They all mattered to me, and I wasn’t willing to focus only on Leanne. Instead, I began a new novel, and sent The Year of the Child to many small houses. Each rejection took many months. 

I wrote sixteen drafts of my third novel, Seeing the Edge. I changed the tense, switched from first person to third, created and removed a diary, and after the fourteenth draft, killed off the husband instead of the wife. 

My fourth novel is still in progress. At first it was about a woman who finds her late mother’s diary and imagines her life, while the mother contradicts her from heaven. Then it became the story of the woman’s youth in the 1960’s. I finally settled on the story of her parents’ long marriage, beginning in 1946. I’ve been writing it for twelve years. The couple now has teenage children, the husband’s writing career is stagnant, and the wife is secretly embarking on her own writing. 

Sixteen years ago I retired; seven years later we adopted our granddaughter. I put the novel down, but started a blog to keep my writer alive as I adjusted to motherhood. 

Blogging brought unexpected gifts. First, self-discipline. A first draft of a novel takes at least a year; what does it matter if I skip a few days? With an essay I dump all my thoughts on the page in a morning or two, and then tidy them up. For a while I was publishing one a week. Second, writing practice. Whatever I write, I’m sharpening skills – fluency of thought, rhythm, editing.  And my confidence now approaches smugness. I never doubt that the ore I dig up will contain valuable nuggets, and an organizing plan will come clear. Finally, over eight years I have developed a small, enthusiastic audience. It’s nice to be read and appreciated.

My granddaughter grew older and easier, and I kept pursuing my novels. As I waited for Joan Leggett of Twisted Road Publications to decide on my second novel, I revised the first, Dreaming the Marsh, using Joan’s critique and a comment from my first reader, Mary Anne. Joan said, “There’s nothing wrong with magic, but it has to be a more integral part of the story.” Mary Anne told me that Vernell, the coffee shop owner who comments on developments, was a cliché: just another black woman who cooks and says wise things. 

I holed myself up for a few days and outlined revisions, and in a few months I was ready to submit again. Dreaming the Marsh is now eco-fiction infused with magic realism, featuring a giant sinkhole, a lovesick geologist, twin sister real estate developers, two battling county commissioners, and a coffee-shop owner with mystical gifts, as well as visits from the Ancients, magic writing on the wall, and two romances.

In the new version, Vernell is much more than she used to be. Though she still has ordinary concerns – taking care of her mother, being aggravated by her minister, worrying about her bright nephew – she is now connected to the Ancients, to all the prehistory of Florida. She is clairvoyant, and magic happens in her shop and all around her. 

I’m 72, and finally publishing a novel after over 30 years of trying. I think I never knew how much I wanted it until I had it. Maybe I couldn’t let myself know; it’s painful to hope too hard. Since Joan decided to publish the book, my life has changed, and I have changed. I get up in the morning eager to begin work, and when I don’t have writing and publishing business to attend to, and can return to my next novel or my blog, the ideas just flow, and the words tumble over each other. I think this is what I was meant to do. Before I retired I had a gratifying, interesting career practicing and teaching law, but the work made me more anxious than happy. When I’m writing, or thinking about it, I escape life’s ordinary tasks and troubles. Writing makes me happy. 

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Elizabeth McCulloch was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lived in New England, the Midwest, Canada, and the South, before putting down roots and finding her home in Gainesville, Florida, almost forty years ago. Previously a lawyer, then a teacher, she has had children of various stripes: one born, two foster, one step, and the granddaughter she is now raising with her husband.

Elizabeth has always loved to read and always wanted to write. She began seriously pursuing her dream over 30 years ago, with pauses in the pursuit for various events and catastrophes. She has completed three novels and is working on a fourth. At her blog, The Feminist Grandma, she writes illustrated personal essays about family, friends, aging, social justice issues, and whatever takes her fancy. At Big Books from Small Presses she posts illustrated reviews and other essays about books.

Website: https://elizabethmccullochauthor.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/feministgrandma

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.mcculloch22

DREAMING THE MARSH

Mother Nature has had enough and a day of reckoning is coming, foretold by words that mysteriously appear on the side of a shiny new building. When the reckoning arrives, in the form of a giant sinkhole that swallows the site of a planned development, a large lake, and several miles of interstate highway, the citizens of Opakulla, Florida struggle to understand what is happening. A geologist wants to study it, the developers relish its wild beauty, and the mayor plans to stop it. Only the owner of a local café, who speaks with the Ancients, understands it, and she isn’t telling.

“In this lively and entertaining debut, the hapless characters struggle to understand the curious magic that is destroying their land and their dreams. Elizabeth McCulloch shares with us her own deep love of our fragile planet and lays out the consequences of our inadequate frame of reference for viewing the universe and its mysteries.” ~ Pat Spears, author of It’s Not Like I Knew Her and Dream Chaser

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing