How a 70-Year-Old Poet Strayed into Fiction

Diane Wald has been writing and publishing poetry since she was 15 years old. She turned 70 this year. She has published three poetry collections (most recently Wonderbender with 1913 Press), five chapbooks, and more than 250 poems in literary magazines. She has won prizes and fellowships. She has taught poetry in colleges and universities. She designed an MFA program. In April 2019, her first published piece of fiction, a novella titled Gillyflower, will be published by She Writes Press.

Did I ever imagine myself publishing a long piece of fiction, especially at this age? Not really. All my life I have adored reading fiction – perhaps even more than poetry at times. But writing poetry always came quite naturally to me and as I began to learn more about it and found that other people could relate to my writing, I just continued as a poet. I figured “that’s who I am.” As for age, I’m 70 in years, but I don’t feel old. I feel experienced, hopeful, and grateful, so that really doesn’t enter into how I operate.

That said, I’ve written a few pieces of fiction over the years. I remember an especially terrible short story I wrote after a trip to Lake Tahoe. When I say terrible, I mean Terrible. I found a copy of it a few months ago and couldn’t even read the whole thing. Cringe-worthy. Preachy. Boring. But in the mid-80s I wrote a long novel on a tiny Atari word processor on my dining room table in a wonderful old apartment in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. I was obsessed with that story; there was nothing to do but to write it down.

That particular story had been germinating in me since I was an undergraduate. It was somewhat autobiographical, but it centered on a person I knew well, a fascinating character who had had a fascinating life. For some reason, my own situation at that time allowed me to free up my brain enough to get it all down on paper. I had no one to show it to, since I didn’t know any fiction writers well enough. I boldly sent it around to a number of agents, and got some really positive feedback, but always along with the familiar “there just isn’t much of a market for fiction these days.”  I guess I gave up on it, although I can’t remember consciously making that decision. I was teaching and writing and had a lot of other things going on.

And after that, right around the same time, I wrote a novella: the book that became Gillyflower. I remember it all pouring out of me over a period of about three months. I knew the title from day one. When I was finished, I loved it. It had the same feel as my poetry in that it was about me and also not about me at all. But I didn’t have it in me to send that book around the way I had sent around the novel. (Remember, sending things around was more difficult in the days before email and Submittable!) So it sat in a box, inside of a bigger box, in the basement of my house, until about a year ago, when I stumbled on it again.

I was, literally, cleaning house. Finding that box was a delight and a revelation. Just holding it in my hands made me feel happy, and I took it upstairs and read it all in one sitting. I realized the book needed to be rewritten (how could it not, at the very least because I am so much older now), but it excited me. Getting it onto my current computer so I could work with it was an interesting challenge.

Somewhere in my study I must have had the floppy disks (remember those?) it originally lived on, but luckily I also had this hard copy. I fed it into a copy machine, which turned it into a pdf, and then I made that into a Word document. You can imagine how odd it looked. There were some characters on the old Atari that didn’t even translate into the alphabet – they looked like bizarre symbols. But in a way that helped me revise the whole work; it was like a manuscript found in a cave, scratched on parchment by some old version of myself.

I sent about revising. The plot itself stayed pretty much intact, but there were necessary refinements of language, tone, and pace — things I’d picked up over the years that I didn’t know when I first wrote the book. My day job of 17+ years requires that I write a variety of prose pieces almost every day, so I’ve had lots of practice.

In some places the writing was embarrassing, but I knew I had to steel myself to read it and use what experience and skills I had to make it as good as I could make it. I revised it with the same passion I’d had when I first wrote it, and that feeling gave me confidence in the project.

And then I had to find some early readers. That part was terrifying. I finally settled on a few dear old friends (also writers) and my brother (an artist in many media). One of the questions I had inside my head was “Will only women like this book?” Two of the readers were men, and they liked it as well as the women.

There I stopped to consider the situation. The last time I sent out any fiction — although that was many years ago — it took months to get replies to every query. I knew the internet would make things faster now, but that’s when I started to think about two other factors: my age, and my “reputation.”

Around 70, no matter how healthy you are, you begin to develop a sense of this lifetime being finite. I have no intention of checking out any time soon, believe me, but I have to admit that the idea of endless waiting for agents and/or publishers to pick up my book was truly unappealing. Trying to get poetry published is hard enough! I wanted this book in print, and fairly soon. I did enter a few novella contests (and came close in one of them), but that seemed like a hard path as well.

And then there was my “reputation.”  If anyone even has heard of me, they’ve heard of me as a poet.  I am not part of any “fiction scene.” Sending around a fiction manuscript with a cover letter extolling my accomplishments as a poet was not going to work — I just knew that. I needed a different way, and I was determined to find one.

I started by doing what I always do — searching the internet. At some point I looked at “women’s publishing” or some variation on that. I found She Writes Press and read through their extensive website. I loved the idea that the company was founded by women and that, once accepted, you would become part of a real community of women where wisdom and experience were dispensed freely and gladly. I liked the idea that, as a fiction neophyte, I would be guided through the publishing process every step of the way from copyediting to publicity. I submitted my manuscript, and it was accepted.

Every day I wake up wondering what new thing I’ll learn from this amazing group of women and what new task I’ll be assigned to move my book along its path to publication.  The feeling of community is right for me now. Gillyflower’s publication date is April 16, 2019.  It’s one of the first things (if not the first thing) I think of every day when I wake up.

I’m still writing poetry of course, but I’ll admit I’ve picked up the fiction bug. Maybe I’ll go back to some version of that first novel. Maybe it’ll be something totally new. I know that for me, it’s part of growing, and if you aren’t doing that, well, that’s sad, and you’re done. I’ve very happy about that day in my basement when that old manuscript called out to me.

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Website: https://gillyflowernovel.weebly.com/

About GILLYFLOWER

Boston, 1984. Even in a world without cell phones, messages come through loud and clear if one is listening. When thirty-something Nora Forrest travels to Manhattan to see a Broadway play starring her idol, an aging Irish actor named Hugh Sheenan, she doesn’t know whether what happens in the theater that night should be credited to witchcraft, extrasensory perception, synchronicity, or simple accident―and she knows that many people would tell her nothing had happened at all.

Told through the voices of four people, Gillyflower is a story about intersections and connections―real, imaginary, seized, and eluded. It’s a book about everyday magic, crystalline memory, and the details that flow through time and space like an electrified mist. It’s a detective story, a love story, and a coming-of-age story―for the never really young and for the almost old.

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips