Engaging Readers, Conversations about Writing, and the Wisdom of Combining Horses and Words

My previous post, with its question about how to engage readers, generated a microscopic blip on the "stats" for my blog -- but more importantly it also generated a couple of helpful conversations. My friend Peter Reed wrote, "I believe that current social media is moving towards a visual sense only. Check out Instagram or snap chat. Both are predominantly visual .... It's getting more and more difficult to get people to read something longer and more complex."

The chart to the left, shared by my friend Jill Widner, reveals some sobering facts about reading and books. My novel faces an uphill slog towards publication for a good reason. But still: 43% of books are read till the end, savored I hope, and loved. And if 70% of adults haven't been in a bookstore, perhaps at least a certain percentage of those bookstore-deprived people have ordered books online, or directly from an author's site, as I've done on occasion. Why pay the middlepeeps when you don't have to?

As a child, I read voraciously. While my sisters and their friends usually used their 20-pence pieces to buy Cadbury's chocolate or other sweets at H. Williams* in Dundrum after Mum picked us up from school on Wednesday afternoons, I always bought cheap volumes of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Fabulous Five series. I read them by flashlight under my duvet at night, but loved more furiously Watership Down and The Yearling, which brought me to sobs in the silence of my room. And now I want to do what writers did for me so many years ago; they replaced the cold blue of my room with sailboats and islands and horses galloping down shale slopes and rabbits in deep underground warrens and dying fawns. (I read The Yearling only once, and can't imagine reading it again. It turned me against guns and hunting and any desire to eat meat; I cried for days, and while that might sound devastating and terrible, I think it's not: "The more a child reads, the likelier they are able to understand the emotions of others," the chart above says. Yes. That.)

Pam, a long-time, now-retired colleague, asked me a couple of provoking questions: "But the question in your blog is how does a writer engage readers. So, who will the readers be? How do you expect or anticipate them to show engagement? Are they going to be readers or reader/writers?"

I had to think about the answer for a while. I wasn't thinking of an audience for my novel Entangled Time as I wrote it. My sister Moira had read the draft and said it reminded her of a cross between Maya Angelou and the novel The Help. I think that works. It's literary, I hope, somewhat historical fiction, and perhaps is written in an accessible enough way to be appealing to an audience with an interest in topics such as racism, dying, love, the nature of God, physics, intergenerational secrets and family dysfunction. 

But that brings me to the question of the audience for my blog. I began it to track how I'm doing connecting with my formerly abused horse Lexi without a sense that I was writing "to people." That was the plan, anyway.  Then I got self-conscious and started writing for an imagined audience, so my writing took on a more structured, formalized feel. And now I'm throwing in writing as a topic and I'm wondering how few of my potential readers might love both horses AND writing. Should I split the blog up? Two blogs: Horse training (via the clicker), and a sabbatical-theme blog about writing and engaging readers? 

Oh, screw it. That's getting entirely too complicated. People are multi-faceted. If you're like my dad and you think horses are worthless creatures that "bite at one end, kick at the other and consume a hell of a lot of money in the middle," then ignore the horse posts. And if you just want Lexi stories and not all these words about writing and readers and theories about humanity, ignore the writing posts. Yes?

It's a work in progress, that's for sure. Now to figure out how to get the visuals that will hold the attention of increasingly visual readers!

*H. Williams image scanned by Brand New Retro and found here.

Percolating

Places to Percolate

I woke last Saturday with a sense of shock. I was done; I had turned in my grades. I was looking at six months without teaching. Vertigo -- immediate, unprecedented. I've been working in some way or another since I started babysitting at 12 years old. I had summer breaks in college and for my first few years of teaching, and years ago I had a quarter-long sabbatical to write about Sebastian Barry closely followed by another one to work on the breast-cancer memoir that I wrote with my mother.  But that was 16 years ago. Since then I've been teaching straight, including summers, without a break.

At the end of every quarter I turn in my grades and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I wake the next morning and think about prepping. It's who I am. It's how I've lived. I can't imagine what it's like not thinking about what I'm going to do for my next set of classes -- tweaking curriculum, adding a new activity, figuring out state-of-the-art software. So a moment of giddy joy on Saturday turned almost immediately into a kind of panic. But before I could plunge too deeply into the void, Azalea came in to remind me we were going Christmas tree catching the next day and I was able to focus my energy on the familiar -- getting out the decorations, moving things around to make room for the tree, not-thinking not-thinking not-thinking about having nothing to do for six months.

What I know about myself is that the best way for me to write is to not write. I have to do nothing* in order to write freely. It's how I think. And it's impossible to do enough nothing when I'm working.

So Saturday I prepped for the Christmas tree, and Sunday we went and chopped down our Charlie Brown tree in the woods in a wee bit of a snow storm, then drank hot chocolate with Peppermint Schnapps to get warm before the drive home, and Monday I paid bills and cleaned things and continued not to think about the nothing that is waiting for me, and Tuesday -- which is today -- I ran on the ditch bank through snapping cold air, feet breaking through the thin crust on the snow that fell last week, and finally allowed myself to think about the nothing.

And this evening, after Azalea left to hang with her boyfriend, I made a plan. Right now I have a journal where I will write morning pages, and I will have this blog which is my baby-step move towards fulfilling my sabbatical promise. And tomorrow I will ask the Peoples of the Internets what you all think about how a writer who writes best by doing nothing can do something to engage with readers in the new world beyond the garret. 

For the moment, that's enough. I await your suggestions, peeps.

*And by "nothing," I mean I need time to be mindless, walking, running, cleaning the house, riding (for although riding itself is mindful, many of the chores around riding allow space for that "nothing" in which writing develops).

Healing Horses; Healing Ourselves; Healing Civilizations

I've felt paralyzed these past few days. I haven't wanted to write. Doing so has felt self-serving and selfish. We have a president-elect who believes climate change is a hoax while the vast majority of educated people in the rest of the world realize it's real. Scientific facts point to human activity as a significant cause. And yet now the upcoming leader of the most powerful nation in the world likely will dismantle the protections other world-leaders have been putting in place.

It's tempting to rage, to provide example after example of the awfulness in our future. But I won't. I've always had a strong sense that people are better than their portrayal in the media. And I know humans are innovative and strong. I love young people. I love that in many ways -- this 11/9 date notwithstanding -- we are moving in the direction of compassion and growth. In the last couple of days, three things have happened that give me hope.

First, a friend sent me a "Breathe" GIF. I watched the GIF and breathed, felt muscles soften and my shoulders drop, felt gratitude that somehow she knew what I needed when I needed it. I breathe when I'm on Lexi (or try to), but somehow I forget much of the rest of the time.

Second, a colleague and friend at work stopped me in the hallway yesterday and told me she'd heard I needed surgery. She offered to help, told me she had sick days and would take time off if I needed a driver to Seattle -- "Anything," she said. "Anything at all. I'm here."

I'm tough. I've had to be -- as most of us have had to be. But I almost broke down then. It's hard feeling alone when faced with significant medical decisions. In truth, I'm lucky. I have my daughter and she would help out if she could, and often she does. But she can't afford to take off work to come to Seattle for my medical appointments, so often I've gone alone. Yesterday, my friend's offer filled me with joy that followed me the rest of the day.

And in class the day after the election, my students engaged themselves in an active debate about the results of the election. I love my job, and I specifically love where I work. My town's economy is driven by apples, cherries, blueberries, grapes, and hops. There's a burgeoning wine industry, and a cottage industry in indie brews that is going beyond cottage.

More than half of my students are Hispanic. We are officially a "Hispanic-Serving Institution." These young people and their parents are the people that keep our agricultural economy going. They are apple pickers and the children of apple pickers; they get up at 4 a.m. in the harvest season and pick or work in the warehouses, and they put food (and now wine and beer) on the table of Americans for a pittance. Often they started picking as children, today's version of child labor. They live packed in tiny houses and apartments and send money home to Mexico. They write of their dreams to buy a home for their parents. They recognize the sacrifices their parents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters made in hopes of an education, of a better life, of the American dream. And they do it without complaint, sleep-deprived, hungry for knowledge, hungry to participate in the great Democracy that they've believed America to be: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" They believe in the truth of the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and so did I, when I moved here from Ireland.

And so in class on Wednesday, my students discussed who they'd voted for and why, and some of them told the handful of people who had voted for the president-elect how sorry they would be one day. "When we're all kicked out of the country and you've nobody willing to pick your food for you in 100+ degree weather you'll be sorry. You gonna go out there and do it?" They laughed about it. Good-natured ribbing. Because they are close, this group: they care for each other; they don't hate each other for voting differently. But the Mexicans in the class know what a Trump presidency means for them. And I think maybe the handful who voted for Trump got a moment of reality. In one young man's eyes, in particular, I saw something startled and questioning.

What happened in class heartened me. Conversation. Dialogue. Not hatred or judgment. Just statements of reality amongst students who have become friends. Some of them are unlikely friends, but they sit together and share their candy and are hard to corral when they get excited. Watching them smile gave me hope.

And then, this morning, I got up to find a new message from my Irish GIF friend. She wrote: "This will be the cloud with the silver lining, the next generation are learning from this, the world is on the verge of change, it is good. There will be dark days ahead but not for too long. The world is watching."

It's true. The world is watching. And young people the world over are activated. For me, right now, that needs to be enough. My daughter and I will become more politically active, because the future of the planet does matter, but I'm not going to give up on writing. My friend also sent me a quote from Toni Morrison: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

I started my little blog for me, to track Lexi's progress with target training. Then I thought I would use it to learn more about how to write in public and because sharing my work with Lexi is also a way to share how horses can help us. Now I think the quiet actions we take as individuals to find a kinder, more loving path are significant. When I work with Lexi using target training, making our time together fun, finding a way to help her brain heal from the trauma she endured, I take a step towards being a more compassionate person myself. How? Because it helps me be more mindful; it helps me tune into another living being. As soon as I make that connection, I feel better.

If my writing about it can help anyone else feel hope or find a path forward, then I am doing what I can to help our civilization heal. So write I will.

In gratitude for the pen.

My therapist is short and red-haired and always listens to what I have to say and never charges me a penny

It will be easy, they said. It will be fun, they said. You might as well give it a shot.

And so I did; I applied for a sabbatical. It's been 16 years since I've had one, and I've been working at YVC for 25 years. Time for myself. Time to write.

It sounded all well and good except for the promises I made. I had a funny kind of proposal, a two-way proposal. I told the committee that if a miracle happens and I get published right away and have to do readings, then I'll do the glamorous writer thing and travel and read to adoring fans and write in the peace of my hotel room at night. But most likely I won't be published (yet -- hope springs eternal), and if that's the case I'll take the time to finish the next novel and thereby get it done in a couple of years instead of the 12 years it took to finish Entangled Time.

But then, just because I wanted to increase my chances of actually getting a sabbatical, I made a ridiculous proposal. I was going to go on social media. I was going to promote myself. I was going to learn all about marketing my writing!

And now here I am, facing the dragon. I am going to have to share words with the world in some kind of public way because that's what writers do nowadays. No more garrets and talking to friendly rats in the glow of a dying candle.

Normally I would procrastinate. My sabbatical isn't till spring. I have MONTHS before I have to think of this whole "exposing yourself on Facebook" fiasco I set myself up for. But now it looks like I'll also have winter off work, or at least somewhat off, and that means I can theoretically start writing sooner.

And I have Lexi, and this little blog I started to track her progress, and maybe without thinking consciously about it, I have set myself up for how I'm going to meet the terms of my sabbatical. Because, you see, writing and horses are quite similar, and for me they are inextricably intertwined.

Yesterday an old school friend of mine asked me an innocent question. She asked me if Lexi was mine, and when I answered yes, she asked me if I thought having a horse was helpful with recovery from mental health issues. And that opened up Pandora's Box.

See, I grew up in a house of secrets and I turned to horses to survive the weight of those secrets. Horses freed me; they lifted me up, empowered me when I had no power. Writing did the same thing in a different way.

If I were to dissect the elements that have brought me here today, suffice to say I couldn't do it in a quick conversation over tea. It's too complicated and too messy and too much the stuff of dirty laundry. But I'm getting more and more convinced that sometimes we do need to drag the laundry out into the daylight and wash it where everyone can see where the dirt came from. Because when we hide the laundry, when we're silent, we end up being complicit in a world that lets horrors happen. I don't even want to speak about those "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys that shaped so many years of my life. They're responsible for an awful lot of evil in the world today.

So for my sabbatical, for me, I'm going to write on this blog. I'm going to write about monkeys and bastards, about genderfluid chickens and learning to train horses in a new way, about disagreeing with Skinner and yet loving clicker training, about what happens when a human saves a horse with PTSD, and when that same horse saves a human with PTSD.

And maybe I'll answer my friend's question about how horses can make all the difference when it comes to psychological wellness. They do for me, anyway.

In the meantime, meet my therapist: