About 15 years ago I wrote a story, "Creative Writing," and took it to the local writing coach in the Alabama town I lived in for advice. It was a story about a young woman who would like to write fiction but is blocked by a minor trauma she suffered when she showed her work to the wrong person. Submitting a story to a writing coach in Alabama may sound like a small thing, but this particular coach, Sonny Brewer, was widely respected and worked with an assortment of people I thought of as "real writers," and he knew the business pretty well, having written and published a good bit of fiction himself. I knew him to be knowledgeable as well as kind, so I trusted him to be fair and as positive as he could about my story. He was generous in praise for the story and told me it reminded him of the short stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Hers was a name I'd heard but I hadn't read her work. I knew her to be a real writer, so I was flattered and went straight to the library to check out a book of her short stories. My thought was, "If I could write like that.." but crises intervened in my life at that time and my creative urge was again thwarted. I put the story in a file which I carted around for another ten years without another thought.
Fast forward to 2021, by which time I had aged considerably and was less daunted by being humiliated for being inferior. I wanted to start writing again, so I enrolled in an online class in short story writing conducted by--you guessed it--Joyce Carol Oates. I started working on that story based on my freshman year in college and the essay "What I Really Want From Life." I invited Will Nixon, a local friend who had been teaching creative writing at Bennington College--and who had taken Oates' online class to join me for coffee and discuss writing. Together we read several books of short stories by Oates, Elmore Leonard, and others. Over coffee and pastries, we discussed what Oates was teaching us. I rewrote the story about the college freshman which became "The Opening Curtain" until I was rather pleased with it and Will pronounced it acceptable. The story was about 30 pages long by then--too short to stand alone and not long enough even to be a novella.
The idea came to me to make a book out of it anyway, by compiling it with some of my best short stories, which had been languishing in a file cabinet for years. Joyce Carol Oates urged her writing class to hold on to every attempt they make at writing, revisit, and rework them as many times as it took to have it say what you wanted it to say in the first place. I had a trove of fits and starts but didn't know what I was keeping them for until I saw that suggestion. I pulled out a few stories and essays and worked on each to make them better. I consider "The Opening Curtain" to be the flagship of the book, but I must mention "Travelin' Light," which gave the book its title. One of my best friends in life died suddenly in 1997 at the age of 57 and I had been so devastated I did all I knew to do--I started writing what I felt was her story as a novel and wrote all I could, which was about 50 pages. I also hacked out a poem for her. I looked over those pages and decided there was at least a short story of a kind there, and added both the story and the poem to my book. As of November 30, 2022, I have corrected the first edition which had a few typos still, added a paragraph or two to clarify a weak spot in "The Opening Curtain," Added an "Introduction," and had my designer clean up some space problems in the text. It is now listed on Amazon as "Second Edition." and will be available as an eBook by the end of the first week in December.
The pieces weave together and serve as glimpses of the inner life of a woman who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, navigating the best life she could on terms she herself laid out. Its author is listed as Mary Lois Timbes, who manages to inhabit and put her name on the best things in my life. It's a little book--an easy read--and at this point it could use all the reviews and other support my blog readers might offer. I hope Travelin' Light interests you! https://www.amazon.com/Travelin-Light-Stories-Revised-Memories/dp/0985773340/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2X7PW162QKB4T&keywords=travelin%27+light+by+mary+lois+timbes&qid=1661696124&s=books&sprefix=Travelin%27%2Cstripbooks%2C81&sr=1-1 .
