Tag Archives: Meg Wolitzer

Spring News Round-Up

BookEnds Book Club, BookEnds novels, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, , , , , , ,

Following the publication of several novels last year, 2024 sees the publication of two BookEnds novels: Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW) was published earlier this month, and you can watch the BookEnds BookClub featuring Nora in conversation with her mentor and program co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell here. Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Books) is available for preorder now. Joselyn’s novel will be featured at the BookEnds BookClub in September, in conversation with her mentor and other program co-founding director, Meg Wolitzer.

We are proud to announce that 2022 Fellow Giano Cromley’s BookEnds novel American Mythology is forthcoming with Doubleday, Summer 2025! Several Fellows from our recent and incoming cohorts have also signed with agents this spring. 

BookEnds alums are also busy and active in their community, with new works in progress; supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. Check out this recent post from 2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier on serving as a BookEnds selection committee reader.  

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out program co-director Meg as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon. To learn more about BookEnds, check out our Fall 2023 Open House!

Pod Rewards: Writer Geeks, Unite!

BookEnds novels, BookEnds pods, Creative process, Drafting, Literary Community, Revision, , , , ,

2023 Fellow Craig Holt reflects on working with his BookEnds pod. 

I have always been impressed with the way the writing community supports its own. Whether it’s online or in flesh and blood, we recommend each other’s books to friends, review one another’s books, celebrate each other’s successes, and listen to each other lament the inevitable slowdowns and five-car collisions on the long and winding road to a finished draft. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent critiquing each other’s work. 

I’ve had the good fortune to participate in some excellent writers’ groups and I have exchanged plenty of pages with wonderful peers in my MFA program. I even have a coven of reliable beta readers in my life. I’m grateful to all of them. But as a novelist I always wished I could exchange entire books with other authors and take a deep dive into each other’s revisions over the course of months. I always assumed that such a dedicated gaggle of authors would be difficult to come by and impossible to sustain. How would you structure it? Who has the time? Where do you find peers generous enough to devote that much time to other people’s projects? 

The answer, for me, was BookEnds. 

BookEnds was – and continues to be – an exceptional learning experience anchored by an unprecedented level of mutual support between writers.

First of all, there is the question of scale. Instead of going over ten or twenty pages of one person’s work every few weeks or once a month, my amazing podmates Miranda Shulman, Fae Engstrom and I started by reading each other’s entire manuscripts. We spent our first three meetings talking through our initial impressions and learning what the author was trying to achieve with the book. Thereafter, we gathered every week on Zoom, often for three hours or more per session, to go over one podling’s book. 

We started by addressing big picture issues and then worked our collective way over the course of six months down to line edits. We weren’t obligated to meet every week, but all three of us had been encouraged to essentially run our novels through a woodchipper and reshape the splintery, resinous hash into a new draft. Having read each other’s manuscripts in their entirety, we were eager to see each other’s stories reborn. 

But there was more to it than just the quantity of feedback. There was also the quality. I was struck by the depth of insight Miranda and Fae brought to my work. They are experienced authors and careful readers, and they came to every session with a wealth of ideas, many of which surprised me. Their feedback came from a place of real understanding of my characters, and an enthusiasm for helping me create the story I had intended to write. They were relentlessly honest and unflaggingly encouraging. Miranda and Fae put as much into my story as they did their own, and it was a pleasure to do the same for them. 

Before the program began, I worried that spending so much time on other people’s books would wear me out. Instead, working on Miranda and Fae’s stories energized me. In thinking critically about their work I gained insight into my own story, and their remarkable progress inspired me to slog onward. 

Even after we began work with our mentors (for more on that happy topic, take a look at Daisy Alpert Florin’s excellent post on working with program director Susan Scarf Merrell, among many other posts on working with mentors) our group continued to meet regularly. We continued to go over pages, but we also touched base to talk through slowdowns in our plots or float ideas for alternate narrative routes. Sometimes we got together to listen as one or the other of us lamented being blindsided by self-doubt or just shook our tiny fists at the literary sky. We guided each other to our BookEnds destination, and beyond. 

Since completing the program last June, we’ve continued to meet. We’ve gone through another round of edits on each other’s books, and we share notes on the good and humbling process of querying. We remain invested in each other and in our fellow BookEnders. And as part of the active and encouraging BookEnds Alumni group, our support network continues to grow. There is sustenance there. Fuel for the long journey. So, yes, BookEnds helped me improve my book. Just as importantly, it expanded and strengthened my writing family.

People talk a lot about how solitary the writing life can be, but BookEnds showed me that being a part of the writing community is about more than craft. Investing in other writers and their work can make the process a little bit less painful and a lot more rewarding. 

Craig Holt’s work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He graduated from the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program and, more recently, from the BookEnds, where he worked with program co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

Fall News Round-Up

Novel Tips for Novel Writers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Please join us to learn more about the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at our annual Open House on Monday, October 16, 2023, 4-5 pm EST. Register here!

Following the publication of several novels last year, 2023 has seen the publication of two BookEnds novels: Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt) was a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion and an Alma Award nominee. Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane) has been received to high critical praise, most recently from Library Journal in an audio book review: “An unnerving psychological suspense about compulsion and corruption.” 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2, 2024) 
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, July 2024)
  • Giano Cromley’s American Mythology (Doubleday, Summer 2025)

This coming spring, we will announce BookEnds BookClub events for Nora’s and Joselyn’s books, along with an event for BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman’s new co-authored novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, May 2024). In the meantime, you can always watch our first book club events here, featuring mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden (longlisted for the Booker Prize), in conversation with his BookEnds mentee Caitlin Mullen; Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year, in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell; and Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line, in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother. 

BookEnders are busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; the alumni meetings and Alumni Visiting Writers events, this fall featuring Lucy Ives, Melissa Chadburn, and Laura Warrell; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. 

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out our co-founding Director Meg Wolitzer as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon.

Summer News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels

BookEnds novels, Literary Community, , , , , , , ,

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House, June 21, 2022)
  • Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville Publishing, July 19, 2022)
  • Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press, August 16, 2022)
  • Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, February 14, 2023)
  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, Spring 2023)

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions and #1000wordsofsummer, the alumni meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!

Slack Therapy: How My BookEnds Pod Became My Writing Support Network

BookEnds pods, Literary Community, , , ,

As the new BookEnds cohort gets underway with podwork, 2020 Fellow Colleen Curry reflects on working with her pod during the fellowship. 

By the first time I met my BookEnds podmates in person, I’d already read their works in progress. I was so impressed — and intimidated — by how good their books were. I was so nervous to meet them. When BookEnds co-founder Susan Scarf Merrell excitedly introduced us at the Southampton Writers Conference, I realized how powerful it was to be introduced to writers through their work. Something formed instantaneously around us, something like being on a team, or part of a family. These were my people. I would root for every possible success for them, and help them achieve it — not because they were helping me in return, but because their work mattered to me.

During our fall semester, we meet biweekly for three-hour video calls, and in between those meetings, we Slacked — pretty much every day, nonstop, sharing all our ups and downs of the writing life. My BookEnds work was focused on revision — I had a lot of work to do on plot and scenes — but that fall with my pod was also about learning how to be a writer. When I started BookEnds, I’d brought a lot of my anxiety and insecurity into my work, and into my pod meetings. My voice was uncertain, on the page and on screen.

A few weeks into the fall semester of my BookEnds year, I sat down to work on my revisions and decided to check Slack before I got started. There was a barrage of messages waiting for me. “Guys,” April had written, “I’m alive, but barely.” An emergency doctor’s appointment had derailed her week, and her pages were going to be late. “But how are you guys doing? Hanging in there?”

This wasn’t unusual. We were all feeling the pressure of writing as fast as we could, with every ounce we had toward our submission deadlines while balancing jobs, parenting, illnesses, and the rest of the responsibilities of adult life. And this was all as the clock was ticking down to a global pandemic that we had no idea was coming. 

Jenn was quick to respond. She’d had a time like that, when she was struggling to balance workload and life, and she promised it would get easier. The fact that we’re writing at all through these moments is a testament to us, she said. “That gives me hope,” April had written. “Thank you so much, poddies.”

Jenn had been getting up before dawn for weeks to revise her novel’s structure, and she’d just cracked open a pivotal scene between two of her characters. “Heartbreaking,” she’d written. “I’m so proud of you,” April responded.

And then there were questions from them both: “How’s it going with you, Colleen???”

I had avoided responding for a few days — and I had been avoiding my book for more than a few days. Every time I sat down to rework a scene, or write a new one, I was flooded with doubts: Was the work ever going to be good enough? Was I smart enough to actually pull this off? Had I read enough good books? Did I even know how to write?

I reread our messages a few times, noticing the effect they were having on me, the sense of comfort and solidarity and inspiration from a few brief messages. I wrote back to my podmates, and then I turned to my work, buoyed, ready to tackle my revisions.

Each time I submitted work, Jenn and April arrived to our meetings with pages and pages of notes — careful, gentle, thorough, brilliant insights into what I was trying to do and how I might try to do it more effectively. They spoke to me like friends, but also mentors who had read and written a little bit more than I had, who had seen some writing tics and could tell me how to get rid of them, who could point me toward authors who might help me figure out a better way to show what I was trying so hard to show. And they shared their struggles, their worries about their work, about their books, about how to fit writing into their busy lives. And slowly I began to see that I could write — and not only that, but I could revise, work hard, and fit writing into my life. As the weeks went by, I grew more confident. With their support, I realized: Hey, maybe I can actually do this.

Then the pandemic happened, and our already intense year received an enormous, world-altering shock. Susie and our other BookEnds co-founder, Meg Wolitzer, swooped in with heroic, superhuman support: our cohort met weekly to talk about how to proceed — and sometimes, how we just couldn’t proceed at all. And all the while, Jenn and April kept Slacking, kept texting, kept checking in with updates. Life got even crazier for all of us, writing became even harder, but somehow, we made it through our year with manuscripts that were ready for agents to read. More than that: we made it through with a new support system for our writing lives. 

It’s been nearly three years now since April, Jenn, and I first started our work together, and we just met a few weeks ago for a video chat about Jenn’s latest stories. It’s such a joy to continue reading her characters after so long. This time when we met, I wasn’t anxious or uncertain. I was excited to see my friends, and to spend a couple of hours together talking about writing. As long as we’re all writing, and reading, and Slacking about it, there’s too much to be grateful for to waste time worrying. That goes for the writing, too. I don’t show up to the page worrying anymore, at least not the way I used to. I can do this work. I have enough supporters in this program who have told me that — over and over again, for years — and I’ve decided to believe them. 

My BookEnds book is on its way. It was like a little egg back in 2019, a fragile egg I was carrying around very carefully trying not to break. It took awhile for me to realize that I had to break it in order for the thing inside to emerge, to grow into the thing I wanted it to be. There was no better nest than my little pod. It transformed my relationship with writing, and with myself. 

Colleen Curry was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020 and is working on her first novel.

In Treatment?

characters, Creative process, Drafting, exposition, Revision, , , , , , , , ,

Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin on when therapy scenes work in a novel, and why they often don’t—yet are still invaluable to the writing process.

In an early draft of Sheena Cook’s novel, A Tender Hate, Scottish detective Iris Larkin is ordered to go to therapy when her personal issues threaten her ability to do her job. If therapy was a way for Iris to work out her issues, it was also a way for Sheena to discover what those issues were.

“I was trying to work out on the page the secrets Iris wasn’t telling anybody, the secrets I didn’t even know,” Sheena, a BookEnds fellow, said.

There were seven therapy scenes in the draft Sheena submitted to her mentor, Meg Wolitzer, at the end of 2018. At Meg’s suggestion, she cut them down to three. But when the book went on submission, one editor suggested cutting the scenes altogether.

“She told me the scenes did not move the plot forward,” Sheena said. “It was a surprise, and I was sad to take them out.”

When I heard Sheena’s story, I was well into a revision of my own novel, which included scenes where my main character, Isabel, goes to therapy in the aftermath of a sexual assault. At the time, I considered whether or not to cut the scenes but, in the end, decided to keep them.

The scenes remained in my draft throughout my BookEnds year and were still there when the book went on submission. It was only when my editor, Caroline Zancan at Henry Holt, did a close edit that she suggested I remove the scenes. 

“I think you needed to write those scenes to get insight into Isabel’s character and motivations,” Caroline wrote, “but you don’t need to spell out those motivations so neatly for us.”

Like Sheena, I was surprised, but when I looked closely at the scenes, I could see the novel didn’t need them. Aside from a few exchanges, which I reassigned to other characters, I scrapped the scenes entirely.

All of which got me thinking: do scenes of therapy in novels ever work? 

“Therapists work well in fiction when they are used to move the action along,” said Sandra Leong, a BookEnds fellow and practicing psychotherapist. “They work less well as a form of exposition about a character.”

Therapy is central to the plot of BookEnds fellow Jennifer Solheim’s novel Interstitial, about a rock band on the rise. When Nate, the band’s lead singer, passes out on stage during a performance, he goes to therapy to understand what is happening to him. His therapist, Kathleen, is a former musician and working with Nate brings up issues for her about her lost music career. Therapy works in Interstitial because it is crucial to the central question of the novel: it defines Kathleen as a person after she leaves music. She plays a pivotal role in the band’s story, but—as Sandra explained as crucial to the role of therapists in novels—she also has a fully developed storyline of her own.

Therapy can also work in fiction if it leads to an explosive revelation that causes change in the novel. In Pat Conroy’s 1986 bestseller The Prince of Tides, for example, what is revealed in therapy is a secret so dark and long buried, it clarifies what has happened to the characters up to that point.

But, Leong points out, those kinds of breakthroughs are rare in therapy and can feel contrived in fiction. “More often than not, therapy is a slow drip of information,” she said.

While sending your character to therapy can be a useful exercise, those scenes don’t always need to appear in the final work. When considering whether or not to use therapy in a piece of fiction, Caroline says it’s important to distinguish what you as the writer need to know about your character and what needs to be on the page.

“The things that often come up in therapy,” she said, “are often more powerful as the subtext rather than the text of the novel. It’s important for you to know these things, but let us see them at work in the characters’ actions and interactions.”

In the end, Sheena removed the therapy scenes from her novel, keeping only the most essential points, which she lets Iris muse on throughout the novel. But even though the scenes didn’t stay, she doesn’t regret writing them. 

“I learned so much about Iris by writing those scenes,” she said. “And besides, I love eavesdropping on other people’s secrets.”

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her novel My Last Innocent Year will be published by Holt in 2023.

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Working with Meg Wolitzer

Mentors, Revision, , , ,

2019 Fellow Sheena Cook reflects and speaks with other Meg mentees. 

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with my manuscript A Tender Hate, which I had only been working on seriously for about a year when I applied. The manuscript was full of holes, and by the time I got to the second half of the BookEnds fellowship and began my work with Meg, my podmates had helped point out where the holes were and how to fill them with missing scenes. When I first met with Meg after she’d read my manuscript, I knew what I wanted to say, but didn’t know when to reveal which information.

Meg saw the structure from the first. “Well, this novel is in three parts,” she said. “The first part can end with this sentence here, the second part can be the big flashback and the third can be back in the present where the first part left off.” It was as if she had taken me to The Container Store and picked out three perfectly-sized and -shaped boxes, and sent me home to fill each one with what I already owned. I left that January meeting filled with energy. It was a sorting exercise. I could do this.

I had been longing for a structure, an architecture, a template. Meg gave it to me, as if she had intuited what the manuscript needed.

Indeed, Caroline “Coco” Picard, whose BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press in 2022, said this: “Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent.”

I totally agree that Meg has “uncanny ability” as a mentor to novelists. She plucked a phrase from the middle of my novel and turned it into the title, A Tender Hate—and that title, it turns out, was the essence of the novel, the “core of the book’s concerns.”

Journalist Colleen Curry, who worked with Meg on her novel Married Women through the early months of the pandemic, said these were the nuggets from Meg that would stay with her: “Cut every part that isn’t the reader’s favorite, never stray too far for too long from what the book is really about; there should be something on every single page that delights the reader.” With these simple phrases, Meg sharpened Colleen’s eye toward her own work and reminded her of the purpose of the task.Colleen went on: “Meg’s line edits are so insightful, and her generosity in helping other writers is a model for all of us.”

When Stephanie Gangi came to speak to the BookEnds alums group about freelance editing, she said that what she looked for in an editor was someone to stand shoulder to shoulder, nose to the grindstone in the editing. Over many months and through multiple drafts, this was what Meg did for me. She was shoulder to shoulder with me, nose to the grindstone, generously inhabiting my manuscript and my characters along with me. In the last couple of weeks of my BookEnds fellowship, before the manuscript was submitted for  the agent read, I was in Scotland, so Meg and I were working at a 5-hour time difference which she accommodated without missing a beat. I would send the manuscript to Meg at my bedtime and when I woke up, there it would be in my inbox with a full edit.

At the last minute, Meg saw that there was an important missing scene. I had about half an hour before I was supposed to press “send” to Susie. I would normally mull over a new scene for days, writing drafts long, then reducing, sitting with it until it revealed to me what it wanted to say, but because Meg assumed I could write a whole new scene in minutes, it made me rise to her expectations. I wrote it in minutes and inserted it into its place. Shoulder to shoulder, indeed. 

“It’s Meg’s perception of how fiction works in the minds of readers that left the deepest impression on me,” Colleen said. “She understands why readers come to fiction in the first place, and what makes them sink into a book. Her lifelong study and deep love of stories remind me why I write.”

What a gift, Coco and Colleen and I agreed, to have had Meg’s brain and heart laser-focused on our work.

Sheena MJ Cook grew up on her family farm in the north of Scotland, became a lawyer in Edinburgh and London, then moved to the US and did an MFA in creative writing at Bennington. Her short stories and novel extracts have appeared in Two Serious Ladies, Literary Orphans and The Southampton Review, among other publications. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2018 and a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019, when she worked on her novel A Tender Hate. Her novel is now on submission in the UK and she is working on the next in the series.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Meg Wolitzer on Unjamming the Narrative

Awards, Creative process, Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Publication, Revision,

2021 Fellow Coco Picard on her work on two manuscripts with the BookEnds co-founding director.

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with two manuscripts, The Healing Circle, (Red Hen Press, 2022) and a nascent work, The Other Jane Dick. In looking at these projects with Meg’s generous and laser-sharp attention, I discovered my propensity to pack in the jokes. “Give them space,” Meg said. To let them land. Not only to provide the manuscripts a broader range of emotion and depth, but to let the reader enjoy the experience of reading without (my words) being force fed. 

Because I have a visual art background, I think about scenes and narrative like a painting: ranging contrasts and saturation are important in a picture. It’s essential that the individual components that make a composition serve rather than dominate the whole. Colors respond to one another. The relationship between shapes must be harmonious. My tendency, I discovered, was to try to make every part of my composition (or novel) a punchline. Meg and I talked about this. “Probably it’s because someone somewhere along the line liked that.” 

I realized that one way I mitigate my insecurities about longform fiction is by pushing the scenarios into absurdity, almost as a way of sublimating my own anxieties driving character dilemmas. So, for instance, The Healing Circle began as a nonlinear story of a hospitalized woman searching for a miracle cure. The Other Jane Dick is about a heartsick, low-rung art curator, who accepts an invitation to attend a globe-trotting, “branding” junket. In both books, the initial drafts kept everything on the surface. It was as though each narrative arc and its contextualizing world was described in saturated, dense colors, all sardonic, jokey, self-aware, and hard-nosed. In both instances, my characters refused sympathy as a result. They exhibited little emotional range and consequently denied that range of the book, withholding what was at stake in such a way as to ultimately refuse admitting a reader into the watery marshlands of vulnerability, change, and consequence. 

In recognizing the ways that I jam jokes, I was able to recognize that tendency in other formal decisions. Meg helped me prioritize certain aspects in each book over others. She encouraged me to reduce the waxing philosophic monologues (a little goes a long way) in The Healing Circle and make the individual threads of that book linear, even if different time frames punctured the fictive present. Similarly, in The Other Jane Dick, Meg helped me add space between elements to more fully highlight the difference between contemporary art culture and influencer culture so that my protagonist’s imposter syndrome came across.

Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent. My characters—all of them—are significantly more compelling and complex because of that mentorship and the space it afforded. 

Coco Picard was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her novel The Healing Circle won the 2020 Women’s Prose Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Comics and criticism have appeared additionally in The Paris Review, Seven Stories Press, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is the author of The Chronicles of Fortune(Radiator Comics, 2017) and founded  the Green Lantern Press in 2004. www.cocopicard.com

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Suzzy Roche on letting the note fail

Literary Community, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fellow Sheena MJ Cook reflects on our May 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event.

Suzzy Roche is a founding member of the singing group The Roches who has recorded over fifteen albums. Her debut novel Wayward Saints (Hyperion/Voice) was a selection of the Spring 2012 B&N Discover Great New Writers Program, and her second novel The Town Crazy (Gibson House Press) was published in 2020. Since she was a teenager, Suzzy’s life as an artist, actor, singer and dancer has interwoven with her writing; the influence of music and lyrics on her writing is part of what we invited her to discuss with us, but we came away with an understanding of Suzzy’s commitment to her artistic process over time that goes far beyond the influence of one practice over another.

During the couple of weeks since the event, while I have been finishing a revision of my novel manuscript, what kept coming back to me was when Suzzy said that as she gets older, she can no longer reach the musical notes she used to. Yet, instead of fleeing from the note, which is her impulse, she makes herself stay there. “Let it fail,” she said. “Let it go where it’s going. Allow yourself to do it ungracefully. Go towards it, stay with it.” It’s that imperfection—the desperation of an attempt at the right note, listening to the singer aim for a note and not quite making it—that breaks open our hearts.

Suzzy talked about Marilyn Monroe having a sorrow about her, how everyone wanted to touch that place of pleasure and pain, the part that was falling apart, utterly human and not “figured out.” 

It made me think of Leonard Cohen’s lines “there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” It also made me think of the polio in Joni Mitchell’s left hand, which forced her to experiment with open tunings, allowing her to form the chord shapes that still break open our hearts today. Mitchell stayed with the failure, worked around the problem and strengthened a different part of her.

By contrast, I was trained in classical piano and if I hit a wrong note, I got a wooden ruler across my knuckles. It was physically frightening to fail, to hit the wrong note. My mother sang the correct note (with its name: B flat minor!!!!) from the kitchen while scraping mud off a basin of potatoes. When Suzzy told us it was not only fine not to hit the right note—and to stay on it, let it go where it wants to go—I wished she could go back down the years and have a word with my piano teacher.

I reread Lily King’s Writers and Lovers last week, about an aspiring novelist whose editor says, “Linger here. Let the reader feel this.” When she stayed with it, felt the moment, her understanding of it expanded. Things began to thrum across the book.

Suzzy said that if she is beginning to unkindly attack what she’s working on, she takes a break, moves to something else, then comes back to it. “I’m going to sing you again,” she says to her work. When she sticks with it, allowing it to become itself, it always finds its good place. “Let it be you, the gentle, imperfect you.” Sometimes it takes years to open up. She lets go of the intellect and lets in an openheartedness. It makes her vulnerable, allowing herself to be seen, however imperfectly.

As an inflection point, when the group discussed whether or not we listen to music as we write and how it affects the mood of our work, Meg told us that Kazuo Ishiguro thought he’d finished the manuscript of Remains of the Day, but then heard Tom Waits singing “Ruby’s Arms.” The crack in Waits’ voice as the song’s narrator says goodbye to Ruby made Ishiguro allow his emotionally buttoned-up butler a moment of having a crack in his emotions. Here it comes again: the crack in everything. It’s as if the breaking heart of Tom Waits’ soldier funneled itself through Ishiguro, cracked open the heart of his butler and the light got in.

So in my revision work after we met with Suzzy, I decided to do an experiment by listening to a song on repeat during breaks from editing the final draft of my manuscript. I had a scene near the end that wasn’t failing, exactly—it just wasn’t as satisfying as it could be. So, instead of avoiding it, I decided to “Suzzy” it: stay with the failing note, press on it, watch where it wanted to go, be kind to it. The scene is about a character who has helped someone dear to them die. I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World” on repeat.Williams sings about everything the person choosing to leave the world will never feel again: the breath from their own lips, the touch of fingertips, a sweet and tender kiss, wearing someone’s ring, someone calling your name, somebody so warm cradled in your arms, dancing with no shoes, the pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one. 

In the old draft of the scene, my character only glanced lightly on the emotion behind the act, or rather I, the writer, had only touched lightly on the emotion. I listened to the song on repeat, I felt in my own body what my character might have been feeling, then I went back into the scene and let more emotion in, more senses, more loss. I stayed with the work, treated it kindly, sang it again, let it go where it wanted to, to an imperfect place—and finally, pressed “send” into the hands of a kindly stranger.

Zadie Smith says to “resign ourselves to the lifelong sadness that comes with never being satisfied” with the imperfection of our work. Perhaps this is an oblique complement to what Suzzy said: “It’s a gentle thing, this imperfection that comes with age. Be nice to the thing you’re trying to create and be nice to you, the creator of the thing.”

Sheena MJ Cook grew up on her family farm in the north of Scotland, became a lawyer in Edinburgh and London, then moved to the US and did an MFA in creative writing at Bennington. Her short stories and novel extracts have appeared in Two Serious Ladies, Literary Orphans and The Southampton Review, among other publications. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2018 and a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019, when she worked on her novel A Tender Hate.