It takes Earth 365 days to complete one circle around the Sun, while it takes Uranus 84 years to make that trip. Even that isn’t a lot of time compared to Neptune’s orbit. Just one revolution around our parent star takes her 165 years. How lucky are you to get a new start, to celebrate a new beginning every twelve months?

When I was in my twenties and thirties, the Eve of the New Year required planning. It might be a reservation for the set dinner menu and dancing at a popular restaurant, complete with noisemakers and a party hat you were not going to see me wear. I was never that drunk, except perhaps, on the first New Year’s Eve of my married life—at the Hotel Oriente in Barcelona, Spain.

My new husband’s ship had finally docked after days of delay chasing a Russian sub, and overnight leave had been granted. That evening, we opted to join the hotel’s celebration, which, in Spanish tradition, included eating 12 grapes, one at a time, in the final minute before midnight, as the old year took its last breath. Then, (you can only do this in a foreign country with a round-trip ticket), joining a conga line of celebratory Spaniards doing the bunny hop. (Stop picturing this.)

In my thirties, the New Year arrived in the company of beloved friends, as we prepared and enjoyed a gourmet dinner together, celebrating the well-being that is the gift of deep familiarity—friends whose presence felt as intimate as family. 

More recent celebrations have included dinner at home with friends, where we each wrote down our wish for the new year on a tiny scroll, rolled it up, and tossed it into the crackling fire in the fireplace. The Chinese have a similar tradition of writing down all you want and hope for in the coming year on a beautiful sheet of embossed paper, then setting it aflame. All your prayers are sent skyward, up and up, to disappear into the cosmos, where it feels as if there is a place they might be answered.

Maybe those atoms rise to the tropopause–not a fixed boundary but a fluid one–where weather becomes atmosphere. All turmoil ends, and chaos yields to order. The upper boundary where air forgets itself. 

Or the Karman Line, 62 miles up —the leaving line– the place where the atmosphere of earth becomes space. Where the air is too thin to fly, so flight becomes orbit, and orbit becomes falling, falling, falling. 

I wonder if, as you enter the New Year, your wishes are new, or whether you pray the same prayers every year, and what tradition enfolds them. 

Mr. Oliver’s parents were from the South, so New Year’s Day dinner featured Hoppin’ John, a mix of black-eyed peas, rice, and pork, symbolizing wealth, luck, and prosperity. My mother and a few close friends jumped off a low step on the stairs into the family room to symbolize leaping into the New Year together. They did this until it was no longer prudent to stick a landing in high heels.  

Then came the years when I asked myself whether finding something pretty to wear, securing a babysitter, braving drunk drivers, and 29-degree weather was fun or simply stress. I suspected this wasn’t me; it was me acting out society’s idea of a good time. That’s when lobster by the fire and Netflix started looking pretty good, and the New Year blessed the world with its appearance while I slept.

I did not have a plan for this New Year’s Eve. My idea was for you to come over, bring the champagne, and I’d build the fire. As the New Year takes her first steps, let’s write down our wishes for ourselves, for those we love, for the healing of the world, knowing the line between wishes and prayers is as thin as the seam between air and elsewhere.  

Perhaps they will rise to the tropopause, where movement turns to stillness, where storms flatten out, not gone, but no longer rising. 

May the New Year bring peace on earth, and may it begin in me; may it begin in you. May love prevail at the leaving line, the hem of heaven, the final blue. 

Happy New Year, beloveds, Happy New Year!

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

This is a story about memory. New evidence indicates that it’s not what you think it is and even photographs don’t tell the whole story.

In the earliest snapshot of a childhood Christmas, I’m nine months old and my parents have placed me in an open gift box under the tree. My two older sisters kneel next to me on the braided rug posing as if I’m a present they’ve just opened. Sharon, the oldest, dutifully holds the wrapped lid of the box with gentle goodwill. My sister Andrea looks stunned with disbelief, so I’ll say it again. I’m sorry I wasn’t a pony.

In a later photo I’m a happy diaper-clad toddler packing a six-shooter in a holster. My western ensemble includes a red neckerchief, a cowgirl hat, and a gigantic emergency-room bandage taped to my forehead. I’d fallen down an entire flight of wooden stairs, hit the landing with unstoppable momentum and tumbled headfirst down the remaining steps where I’d cracked my head open on the coffee table our father had made in his basement workshop.

As I write this it occurs to me that a resigned, pony-less cowgirl may have dressed me up in her Annie Oakley outfit to compensate for having been unable to stop my unsteady approach to the top of the stairs.

I don’t remember the fall, but I do remember being on an exam table where a kindly male doctor with white hair pinched the profusely-bleeding wound closed with butterfly clamps instead of stitches to avoid leaving me with the large scar I now have. I remember being asked how many people were in my family and knowing the answer, five, although of course that is a trick of memory and not possible. But in my mind at least, I identified us on my fingers by name if not number, and the doctor gave me a grape lollipop for each member of my original posse.

And then there’s the photo above of my sisters and me in angelic white choir robes with red bows at our necks, gathered around the piano. I’m nearly three now. Sharon is poised with her hands above the keys playing carols and we all are singing. At least our mouths are open and we’re holding sheet music, but in my memory, we’ve been instructed: “Just act like you’re singing and stop hitting each other.” On the back of that photo my mother has written, “The girls love to make music together!” Did we? Could Sharon play then? I don’t know.

That’s the thing about memory. Neuroscientists have discovered that every time you remember an event from the past you change it. So, the more you recall an experience or relationship, the more you distort it. Researchers did a test with 9-11 survivors. Each time they told their stories the details changed until just one year out from the event their accounts of that morning were significantly altered. Imagine what a lifetime of remembering does to experience. And what is true? The event or the memory you make of it?

I remember my sisters slipping our presents to each other under a tree we’d cut from the woods, while the others hid their eyes on Christmas Eve. I remember the ringing of a strand of red, green, and silver bells, passed one to the other, to signal that it was time for everyone to look, to gasp at the magical transformation, the growing abundance. With each ringing of the bells and moment of revelation, the little heap of presents grew.

I remember a midnight worship service in a white clapboard church where a flame was passed candle to candle to the accompaniment of “Silent Night,” until the countenance of an entire congregation was bathed in light. And I remember three jostling sisters crammed together at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while my sleepy parents opened the curtains so the river could watch, lit a fire in the fireplace, turned on the tree lights, and poured their coffee before we thundered down the steps.

The December dawn cast its soft rose light over snowy swans in the icy cove as we opened gifts, but were they there? I don’t know.

If memory can’t be trusted, what of our Christmas recollections is true? Maybe this: the unbearable excitement of believing in the unseen, in miracles; in thinking that just for one night the impossible is possible. Reindeer can fly, and if you believe, love will heal the world.

Happy Holidays.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Column originally posted: December 24, 2023

Twenty-three years before Tom Clancy would die of congestive heart failure at the age of 66, and at the height of his skyrocketing publishing career, he agreed to address the Maryland Writers’ Association. He peered into the darkened auditorium that evening from behind huge, 1980s-style glasses, as unpublished writers, and I was one of them, listened for words of wisdom, our longing, a palpable energy. We wanted Clancy to share his formula for success, his mojo–his secret for having gone from the obscurity of an ordinary insurance salesman, to the fame and fortune that came with the publication of “The Hunt for Red October.”

He had wanted to write a book for a long time, Clancy explained, but he continued to sell insurance. He had had a great idea for years, but had continued to sell insurance.  “What I did,” Clancy said, “was waste all that time.” The big glasses turned my way. “All that time, I could have been enjoying the success I have now. All the years I could have been a best-selling author with a book translated into 20 languages, I spent selling insurance.” 

I’m sorry, I mouthed helplessly. Stop looking at me.

And Clancy didn’t know, as he berated himself for lost time and opportunity that night, that he would not live to be an old man. Nor did we know that some of us who sat listening would be gone too soon as well. Beth died in an airport on her birthday. Carolyn is gone now, too.

“You probably have ideas for a memoir or novel,” he said. “So, what are you waiting for? Write the damn book.” 

Memory is fallible, but the message is verbatim, and here’s what I know. By “you” he meant us. And by “book” he meant all of it—stop waiting to be happy, to be rescued, to be fixed. 

Life is the book you are writing, so write what wants to be written and do it now. 

Raising kids? Write the damn book.

Selling stocks? Teaching? Repairing cars? Write the damn book.

I can hear Clancy saying from wherever he is at this moment, what he said that night about our excuses.

“Cry me a river. Just write the damn book.” 

So, in the years that followed, I wrote, but not because I thought I had been forestalling fame, but because he was right about time. 

Everything has an expiration date. No matter what we do to preserve our planet’s diverse species, find renewable sources of power, and end reality television… in 4.5 billion years, our star will run out of hydrogen. At that moment, she will balloon towards the planet, dry our oceans, blow off our magnetic field, and in a last violent expenditure of energy, carry us back into the embrace of her collapse. 

So, no matter what we do, this fragile planet that so graciously carries us around the sun once every 365 days will not exist someday. And I can’t quite take this in—that all the love, all the longing, the ancient mountain ranges thrust skyward as continents crashed– won’t exist forever. 

These are facts I recognize intellectually—like I recognize my great grandchildren will not know my name, that the dog I so love must one day die–but these are facts I can’t make sense of emotionally. So, I write.

Not that I think writing will preserve anything, but because writers are observers, always trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. You should be careful around us. We’re always taking notes. 

I wrote The Story Within to reach out to the people I will never meet. To put my work on a shelf, in a bookstore, between two covers, while the opportunity still exists. The world of publishing is changing at an alarming rate. I don’t know how long bookstores are even going to be around.

So I have to confess: for years I’d visit my book at Barnes and Noble—I’d take its picture like it was one of my children—as if it too, had left home to find its destiny, to make its fortune in the world. 

I hope it outlives me. I hope it inspires some good stories to be written—maybe yours—because our stories are the gravity that holds everything with mass together. They shine like facets from a single jewel. Our stories are what connect us. 

And maybe, in my heart of hearts, I do think sharing them will preserve something of this world. Maybe in ways we can’t understand (yet), our stories will save us. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Confession time. As a creative writing instructor, I’m super selective about the examples I use to demonstrate craft. If I’m going to share an excerpt from another writer’s work, it can’t just be technically correct; it must make the group laugh out loud, or choke up, or sit in stunned silence while they regain their composure because the resonant ending has left them unable to speak. 

Okay, I’m describing me, but I hope I’m eliciting a similar reaction in my students. 

Which is why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when, at the end of a story numerous workshops have found moving, one participant raised his hand and said, “I hate this story. It’s overwritten, ridiculous, and manipulative. I don’t know if this writer is a beginner or what, but it shows.”

Everyone else suddenly looked expressionless, like 30 small businesses had just closed. 

I have learned that in any group, there is likely to be a contrarian. Someone who begs to differ, who needs to disagree, just to disagree. It’s human nature. 

And I’m smiling at the one of you muttering, “No, it’s not.”

But I thought I would sound defensive if I mentioned that the writer of the sample piece had published 19 novels, 150 short stories, a multitude of them in The New Yorker, and had also won the Pen Faulkner award for Excellence in Literature. 

Twice. 

So, I asked more about the objector’s objections, and I could agree to a point. I’ve never read anything I wouldn’t have edited a little differently and said so, respectfully acquiescing to some of his criticisms. But the guy wouldn’t let it go, and I started to think, Okaaay, you are becoming a little hard to love, mister. Still, I wanted to listen more than to explain, and I recognize that “Because I said so” is an immature response in any context. 

But is it? 

I’m sharing this because everything I have learned about writing is true of life. 

Take vulnerability. In most workshops, you give everyone a copy of the story you have birthed with great effort, then listen in enforced silence as the group discusses it. The theory is you need to really absorb the criticism—not be distracted by defending the work.

It’s super fun, like being gagged and tied up while strangers abscond with your baby. 

But in a good workshop, your baby is nurtured by intelligent people who recognize her charms and offer insightful suggestions that improve her chances of survival. The instructor protects you from well-meaning participants who tend to point at you while they speak. In a great workshop, you learn that you can cut the whole first page and enter the story on fire. This kind of feedback makes you grateful you live in a democracy—groups are smart. 

But groups, like life, can also be full of overworked, tired people and one or two cranks, and the instructor may not keep people from addressing you directly, people to whom, by the rules of engagement, you are not allowed to respond. 

And in truly bad workshops, no one bothers to point out what is working in your story because they assume you already know all the good stuff, so they just get right down to pointing out all the places your story fails, like this is a moral obligation.  

Some of us have friends like this. Some of us may be friends like this. Writing and life. I keep telling you. Same-same. 

I have not tried this, but I have a theory: if you did nothing but read a story and praise what works, the writer would gradually improve through praise alone. And your kids might, and your spouse might—might get braver, take more chances, and, in feeling safe, be funnier, more insightful, and inspired. Impulsively hug you tight. Spontaneously reach for your hand in a parking lot.

My friend Margaret attended a writing retreat like this. The teacher’s instructions were simple: “Each day we’ll write stories from the heart, read them aloud, and tell each other what we love about them. No criticism and no suggestions allowed.” Margaret was a bit disappointed. With those limitations, she figured she’d just paid for a week’s change of scene, but that her writing would not improve. 

But she said later, “I was wrong about that. I learned I can write from the heart, hear good things about that effort, and be forever changed.” By nothing more than the reinforcement of the good! “I began to find my voice,” she continued. “They called me ‘a weaver,’ and they called me that again and again.” 

For some reason, I was deeply moved by this. Something about the word “weaver,” I think. About being seen over and over, which implies being witnessed by someone who stayed. 

I once had a dream in which I inexplicably and repeatedly heard the word “Rabbi”. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve learned to embrace what seems to come from nowhere. So, I explored the meaning, which in Hebrew is “teacher.” And I felt called somehow. Loved somehow. And moved by this as well. 

Years later, someone called me a healer, and it had the same effect. A stunned, “Really?” Followed by a sense of having been called by name.

Read me your story and I will tell you everything I love about it. Will you be changed?

My guess is yes. 

Writing and life. Same/same.