In many ways, when you write a book, it becomes a snapshot of that time in your life, autobiographical or not. That’s not to say that a reader can tell what’s going on in an author’s life—not at all, although guesses abound and are sometimes right—but for the prolific writer, it’s like smelling a certain scent and being taken back to childhood, or feeling a texture that reminds you of a relative’s house. You’re transported.
When I reread things I wrote, they are of a time in my life. There’s the book I wrote while I was pregnant. There’s the story I wrote postpartum. There’s the novel I wrote when I thought I might have to give up on a certain dream, and another I created when I realized I’d be leaving Texas. There’s my first one, my first good one, the one I wrote during this or that trial or phase, etc. There’s deep examination of issues I wrestled with. There’s posthumous relationship studies. There are larks, side quests. There are explorations of beliefs. Reading any one of them might remind me of when I wrote it, what I was dealing with, how I felt and who I was with.
With a novel, for me, that’s usually a span of a few months, occasionally a year or so, that I can point to on the timeline of my life with relative specificity. I can say: “I’d just left my first agent and was afraid I’d never find a second. I was determined to do things my way. I dug into the literary side of things at the behest of a critique partner. I excavated childhood pain and explored the concept of forgiveness at its most dire during the same summer that my best friend and I decided to start lifting weights together.” You see how many things are rolled tightly into a specific project?
But the collection I have releasing today spans nearly two decades of my life.
All of my books are special to me. They all mean so much. It’s not that You Have to Let Them Bleed is my favorite or more important. But it is my first full-length book, and it holds within it 19 years’ worth of pouring my heart into this exquisite art and refusing to give up in this ridiculous industry.
This collection represents so much of my life during these two decades of toil and growth.
It’s my college poetry class, and me being one of the only students to bring in a poem for review every single class instead of hitting the mandatory three total for the semester.
It’s my dad dying, years of grief I can still just barely contain inside. It’s also his belief in me, support of me, love for me.
It’s my poetry critique group, the four of us who used to meet once a week for years to analyze and improve line by line, word by word individual poems, including the eight that frame out this collection.
It’s my prose critique group, the dozen-or-so-shifting of us who met once a week for years and years to learn and grow together, support each other, cheer each other on and commiserate. The majority of the stories in this collection moved through them.
It’s my mom, and her pride in how hard I work. It’s countless dejected and excited phone calls. Hours of scheming.
It’s my friends who’ve laughed with me, at me, and let me cry on their shoulders. It’s my friends who’ve read this story or that, my beta readers who’ve texted me wild reactions, my husband who’s given me the side-eye after the darkest of my dark pieces (and still crawled into bed to snuggle me—brave man).
It’s a couple of dear friends who I’ve parted ways with. It’s the holes they’ve left behind in my heart.
It’s my decision to do this even though it would’ve been so much easier not to. Over, and over, and over again.
It’s what I come back to, time and again, to process and express and change my world. It’s my whole dark and tender heart spread across the page in lines of text. You’ll have to forgive me if it’s a bit bloody.
When the book is out, it’s not mine anymore. Not just mine, anyway. It becomes the reader’s.
It becomes a book for all of those people, past and present in my life, who are waiting to see it. It becomes my friend Dan’s, who wrote the beautiful foreword. It becomes my friend Caitlin’s, who’s cheered me on from day one. It becomes my critics’. It becomes my old teachers’, my current coworkers’, my kids’ when they get older.
It becomes a book for the stranger who pops into the independent bookstore and takes a chance—or the one at the big chain who ventures beyond the front displays. It becomes a book for people in Minnesota who like events like tonight’s. It becomes a book for someone on Instagram who told someone else on Instagram they should check it out. It becomes a book for the person struggling, the person longing, the person exorcising fears.
If you want it, it becomes yours. For better or for worse, I have to release it.
There are more things to write. And these I’ve left for you?
You’ll have to let them bleed.
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