Target and Trajectory by Joan Schweighardt

Signpost #1

Since we don’t drive yet, we walk everywhere. We meet in parks, or in front of the candy store, and we walk all over town. We walk along the edge of the highway when necessary; we cut through backyards when it can save time. There is no complication or weather event that can compete with our determination, our young legs.

The first thing to know about me is that I am a scamp. My family is dirt poor and totally dysfunctional. We have virtually no books in our house. There is no talk of higher education. The school counselor advises me to take steno and bookkeeping instead of college prep courses. My grandma advises me to start looking around for a husband once I’m out of school. But I’m not out of school yet, so I don’t fixate on the future. I am hoping there’ll be some signposts before I get that far along.

One evening I am walking with Susie. We are in the process of crossing a large greenway to get to the highway when the sky opens and it begins to rain and thunder and lightning. We are the tallest things for miles. We run like hell, falling to one knee and shrieking whenever a bolt strikes too near and then carrying on. We laugh like hell when we finally make it to the safety of the underpass. When the storm abates, we climb up onto the highway and head to McDonald’s for the burgers and shakes we plan to consume before we go our separate ways.

But wait. What’s this? A handsome young man has pulled over on the side of the road. He is just standing there, beside his red sedan, a little red gas can at his feet. We approach him without trepidation. The world is not yet what it will become. When we are close enough, he tells us he ran out of gas, and he doesn’t have any money on him at all.

We dig in our pockets, find the change we were going to spend at McDonald’s. We hand it over, give him directions to the nearest gas station. He thanks us profusely. He is about to head off when he thinks of something else. He reaches into his backseat of his red car and pulls forth a book, a thick one. He looks at us—Susie then me then Susie again. Two girls, one gift. He has to decide. He gives the book to me: Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. I recognize it for what it is immediately: treasure.

Signpost # 2

The girl who will win first prize in our community college short story contest read her story out loud in class some weeks before. The gap between her work and mine is vast. I don’t know why I ever bothered to enter the competition. I am not even supposed to be there, taking college courses in the middle of the day. But the parent company of the New Jersey-based ad agency I work for wanted to borrow me for six months, to help them organize and put together a book of the best of their creative endeavors. To compensate for expecting me to bus and train my way across the Hudson and into the depths of Manhattan twice weekly, they offered to give me the other three days off, with full pay! Free money! Free time! 

The girl who will win first prize is my friend. I like hanging out with her because she is the only person with whom I can talk writing in a serious way. I am in the lounge with her the day the contest winners are to be announced. Our writing professor comes strolling down the hall and sees us sitting there.  Joan, go comb your hair, he says, without breaking pace. 

What does it mean when a professor tells you to comb your hair? That morning I parked my car, hurried across the lot in the wind, and went directly to my first class, social psychology. In the near future I will have to present on the subject of thought and language, which one likely came first. I am terrified that I will shut down mid-way through my delivery. That’s what I had been thinking about, not about my hair.

Now I feel ashamed. Now I want to cry. Somehow this professor has figured out that I am not college material, that I am not supposed to be there. I had intended to go to the auditorium with my friend, to be at her side when she gets called up to the stage to accept her prize. Now I don’t want to. But when I look at her, she is smiling widely; her eyes are burning with excitement. She takes my hands and shakes them up and down. Go! she cries. Comb your hair.

I comb my hair and we walk to the auditorium in silence. We sit in the front, in case. She wins first place; I win second. 

Signpost # 3

I write for a local newspaper, a company that creates resumes for job hunters, a computer chip magazine. I have become a pen for hire. In my free time I take more colleges courses. It takes forever but eventually I get a degree in English lit and begin a master’s program. I never turn my back on my freelance work, but I find time too to begin my first novel. When it is done, I send it to the most prestigious publishing house I know of, the one that publishes most of the books I read. 

Six months go by and I hear nothing. I call and speak to one of the editors. She puts me on hold, looks all over for a manuscript or an unopened package with my name on it. It must be lost in the mail, she says when she comes back on the phone. She apologizes. Then she thinks to ask for the title of the manuscript. When I tell her, she exclaims. Oh, everyone here has read that, she says. Right now The Editor-in-Chief is reading it! He will decide soon. 

Soon after I receive a personal letter. The Editor-in Chief praises my work and regrets that he must reject it. Defeat yes, but also validation; what I wrote is publishable. I find another publisher, for that manuscript and the two that follow it. My dream is to have a break-out novel, but it is clear by book three that that is not likely to happen. I keep working. I keep writing.

(Almost) No Regrets # 1

There you have it, the trajectory of my life, the one the signposts (those above and others) led me to. I write numerous books—fiction, nonfiction, children’s—all of them highly readable, certainly publishable, but none of which will ever be on anyone’s bestseller lists. Simultaneously I advance from pen-for-hire to indie publisher, then literary agent. When these positions wear me out I settle back into editing,  consulting,  and—personal favorite—ghostwriting. Collaborative work, I come to realize, suits me to a T. 

No Regrets # 2

I become obsessed with the subject of touch. Why are some people great huggers, great touchers, while others are not? When the pandemic gets under way, the question become more crucial: What do people do when they want to hug loved ones but can’t take the risk? I ponder. I ask one of my oldest colleagues if she will help me put together an anthology to illuminate all the many ways to talk about “touch.” She says yes. I contact my favorite literary agent and she says she will help too.

After so many years making a living in the written-word world, many of my friends are writers. This is true for my colleague/ fellow editor as well. We ask our writer friends to contribute poems or essays to our anthology. We ask a neuroscientist, massage therapists, psychologists, healers, and others. Before we know it we have thirty-eight unique contributions. They are about everything from the piercing loneliness that COVID engenders to the joy of touching animals to alternative ways of being “in touch.” Collectively, they are brilliant. Our anthology feels like the biggest and most essential project in the universe. It is exhausting. 

A university press sees the beauty of our vision and agrees to work with us. It takes well over a year for them to accumulate peer reviews and for us and our contributors to make adjustments accordingly. Then we must work closely with their contract people, line editors, PR team. Two giants from the literary world offer us endorsements. 

The book is born. The book is beautiful. Because of the scope of the project, and the number of people involved, it feels like the culmination of something that began long ago. I will likely never have a break-out novel, but I can say I feel relevant. I have found a home in the very world where I always wanted to live. I acknowledge this fact for what it is: treasure.

—

Joan Schweighardt is the author of Under the Blue Moon, The Rivers Trilogy (Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead, and River Aria), The Last Wife of Attila the Hun and other fiction and non-fiction titles. Most recently, The Art of Touch: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond—an anthology she initiated and, along with fellow author Faye Rapoport DesPres, co-edited—was published by the University of Georgia Press. 

THE ART OF TOUCH

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing