Jo-Ann Mapson

Rejections and Lighthouses

Let me begin by saying that I have never been a huge fan of the month of August.

As a kid, the most dismaying sight on earth to me was school supplies stacked up in the market aisles. I did not thrill at the smell of pencil shavings. I was not an eraser chewer. The blank, lined pages of college rule paper repelled me. I reveled in summer, in our rented beach houses at Balboa, where the first thing I did was obtain a library card so as to read as many books as possible even though I was too old for the summer reading program where they gave out cool prizes. I also liked dark summer nights when the California temperatures cooled down enough so that I could sit outside on the porch and read by flashlight. School clothes and new lunch pails? The enemy. Worse yet, was that hideous elementary school practice of posting room assignments an entire week before school began, to ensure that everyone had an adequate mourning period to grieve that they had once again, no doubt by cackling, coffee-swilling, pre-historic teachers, been separated from our chums. I was never a teacher's pet. The only subject I was good at was spelling. This has led to me playing a mean Scrabble game, and I can occasionally outsmart Spell check.

So on principle, I don't favor the month.

It terms of my writing, August is generally the point when I am two-thirds done with a manuscript, despising it, fighting the urge to throw it in the trash and begin again. Really, the only thing that keeps me from doing that is: 1. I need my check, and 2. Jodi Picoult, my writing partner, who reads my chapters as I finish them and cheers me on (No doubt Jodi was one of the popular kids. She went to BOTH Harvard and Princeton. She also writes really fast, finishing three books in the time it takes me to complete one. Shall we hate her? No, we must love her. She is a friend worth loving, plus she edits me and keeps me from looking like a complete fool in print--outside of print I am on my own.).

August in Alaska is much cooler than California. We have misty rain nearly every day, and yes, I have become Alaskan enough I head out into it without an umbrella, frizzy hair be damned. I like to watch mama moose and her twins stand in the rain and ruin the willow trees. I watch her and think, she probably wasn't very popular in moose school, either, but look at her, look at those beautiful children. Plus willows are probably not fattening. You don't see mama moose gorging on York peppermint patties.

The first two weeks of August I work the Saturday Market for my friends Walter and Susie. It's a craft fair kind of place. In their booth they sell the most wonderful things: Walter's incredible jewelry, trade beads, baskets, antique ivory and bone carvings, crystalline limestone bears, some silver, snuff bottles, and other unique finds gathered along their travels. They go to Fairbanks to work the fair, and I sit the booth here in Anchorage, talking to tourists, and making money. Since not that long ago I was a tourist myself, I enjoy this. There's always a lull when I can run down to the farm booths and stock up on organic tomatoes, snap peas, all manner of greens, and laugh at the size of the Alaskan cabbages. But it's hard work, setting up the booth, selling all day, and knocking the booth down at six p.m. After eleven hours I come home ready to lie on the couch and can barely muster the energy to pet the dogs.

This last Saturday evening my new-old husband brought in the mail and dropped it in my lap. The first envelope I opened was from my agent, one of those 5X7" manilas that generally hold fan letters. Hurray, I thought. I don't get a lot of fan mail, unlike my friend Earlene Fowler, whose fans send her homemade quilts, recipes, adoring missives, and chocolate by the pound. And on this particular Saturday I needed a lift. So it was with a hopeful heart that I slit open the envelope from Cincinnati, Ohio, to observe the cute card with the lighthouse perched on rocky cliff overlooking a stormy sea.

I once explored the lighthouses of Nova Scotia with my son and my mom. The beaches there go on for miles. Tides sweep out so far it feels like they might never come back in. The sand is empty of beachcombers. Everybody is out fishing or in town working. I remember standing a hundred feet out and thinking this is all the same ocean, how can that possibly be? What a wonderful planet. How lucky I am to be here, right now, with my mom and my son and standing in this magical place. And then I remember a dinner of fried clams with my mom, who when she is in the Eastern part of the U.S. and Canada, transforms into her New England self, salty and funny and indulgent to a surprising degree.

But this lighthouse card turned out to be no fan letter, and my trigger to happy reverie ended there. It might better be called an anti-fan letter.

Joyce D. of Cincinnati wanted me to know how much she didn't like Bad Girl Creek. She didn't like any of the characters, and she was singularly disgusted with Phoebe and her childlike size, which made her having sex with Juan (also a very small person) in her words, "Yuck." Joyce D. also wanted me to know she was putting Bad Girl Creek into her box for garage sale books.

I showed the letter to my new-old husband and asked him, "If someone sent you a letter like this about your paintings (see Stewart's art), how would you feel?" He answered, "I think I would have a drink and spend the night watching mind-numbing television." Well, I have been sober for almost twenty years, and Joyce D. is not going to make me fall off the wagon I have worked so hard to ride all this way. But her letter nagged at me all that night, and well into the next day.

Part of me considered boarding a plane to Cincinnati, hiring a P.I. (Joyce D. did not include a return address), locating Joyce D's place of residence, and knocking on her door. When she answered, I would say, "Hi, Joyce. Here's $24. Can I have my crappy book back?" I would then find the women's shelter and say here, this may be crap, but it might take somebody's mind off her problems for a while. Enjoy. Pass it on. Use it as a coffee blotter.

To me, stories are medicine against the hard knocks of life. I knew this when I was four, and laid in bed waiting to get well, and my mother kindly read to me. I know it now, when I find a new author in the bookstore and walk into walls on my way out because I can't stop reading long enough to properly manage the door. Today, as I package up a book to send to Sharie Marich of Dedham, Massachusetts, who isn't feeling well and needs all our prayers for a speedy recovery, I pray that book medicine works, even if all it does is distract her for a few hours. Sharie's friend Ann wrote to me and told me of her situation. I'll pray for Sharie, and send her a book, the same way my mom used to bring me back a comic from the market when I lay abed with my own illnesses.

Whenever I get a mean letter like Joyce D.'s, I think hard about going to work at Home Depot instead of writing for a living. I dwell long enough to get sick of myself, and then I go back to work. But I want Joyce D. and anyone else who ever writes a mean letter to a writer to know the following: Your letters leave dents in us. We're human, we writers, and in some of us, our feelings are even closer to the surface. This is what makes us able to create stories. Think of it as if writers lack the final protective layer of skin between body and soul. This rawness allows them to be open to people's hearts, their sorrows, and to be able to locate the thread of hope that ends a story with uplift instead of doom. In that way, we're lighthouses. Yes, sometimes the boats don't see our signals, and they shipwreck, but mostly they chart their courses by the glimmer of our thousand candles and make it into port.

Verbena, my Papillon, was the omega dog in the pack for six years. It helps to think of her as the new lighthouse on the block. When she entered the household, my older dogs snubbed her, snapped at her, and every afternoon around four p.m., went on a dual pursuit, chasing her around the yard and in the house. Poor Bean. The only thing that saved her was agility and persistence. The other dogs think my new-old husband is king, but Verbena loves me best. At night she circles on the bed, flops down against the bend in my knees, and sighs, which may be the biggest gift a human can receive. I am her lighthouse, and believe me, she is mine. If I'm sad, she's there, her raspy tongue giving me a kiss, her crooked tail wagging like a flag of hope.

In a sometimes-choppy sea filled with unkind rocks, we have found one another and are grateful.

Joyce D. of Cincinnati, may August pass swiftly for you. I did like your card, at least until I opened it. Tell you what. If my book doesn't sell at your garage sale, send it to the address on my website and I will refund your money. I don't know if they have lighthouses in Ohio, but maybe you could use the $24 to tour one.

Myself, I find such exploration most illuminating.

Love and prayers to all of you this endless August. Sharie, feel better.

More later,
Jo-Ann

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