“Start with a list,” I tell them. “Like Tim O’Brien did in “The Things They Carried,” the title story in a collection about an American platoon in Vietnam. In the story, O’Brien listed what each soldier carried on his person into the jungle, where the chances were good at least one of them would die on any given day. Every ounce of weight increased the burdens they bore, so they chose them carefully: Tranquilizers, a girl’s photo, foot powder. But also, the incalculable weight of their fear, love, guilt, and grief.

Everything is metaphor.

My workshop participants like this exercise. We are on Zoom, so I see them as small squares on my laptop screen, which makes them small indeed. 

“Or write about a scar,” I suggest. “Make it real, don’t strain for meaning. “I give them 10 minutes to think about this. Some of them turn their cameras off, and some just mute their mics and leave the video on. I see their heads bent over their papers; some stare into space, and I think of my own scars. 

There are a lot, most barely visible. One from when I was a baby cartwheeling down a flight of wooden stairs. One, the result of an adolescent bike accident—think Irish setter running into the path of an English racer on the downhill slope of a gravel road. 

When my writers turn their cameras back on, I ask if anyone wants to share what they came up with in just 10 minutes—a rough draft, of course—no expectations. After all, didn’t we just read Anne Lamott’s famous essay, “Shitty First Drafts? 

The best writing comes from letting go of any need to be perfect. And even as I promise them that I’m thinking—does the best life come from that kind of letting go as well? Write with abandon. Live with abandon.

Everything is metaphor.

And a woman who looks as if she can’t be more than 20 years old raises her hand and begins, “The night I met you, I accidentally cut myself. You held my hand, but we couldn’t stop the bleeding.”  And she goes on to read an impromptu piece about wounds and longing and falling in love in a cooking class with a man who would hold and heal her for the next 30 years, and it just blows me away, it is so compelling. I know I should not be too effusive in my praise because the next volunteer will suffer by comparison—I should be neutrally dispassionate– but my goodness, have you met me?

I tell her how amazing the piece is and sure enough, the next writer to share has tried just as hard, but I have to dig deep to think of anything to say at all. That is the crucible of being worthy of another’s trust. It is not how you celebrate the talented, but how you accelerate those on the ascent. You are the energy that powers up the engines, you are the lifting force, then navigator. 

Everything is metaphor.

Write about being rescued or rescuing someone else.

I won’t write it, but as my students dig deep again, I think about the season when young people annually sweep through my neighborhood, dropped off by a supervisor in a van to spend the day selling magazines door to door. I know they are required to sell a certain number before they can quit for the day, and the girl shifting her weight from foot to foot on the slate of my front porch is thin, pale, with a shy Georgia accent. I don’t want her magazines, but I do want to offer her water and a chance to sit down someplace cool for a few minutes.

I invite her in and am surprised when she tells me she is very newly pregnant and, she says, with a hitch in her voice, This is really hard.

I remember being newly pregnant. I remember really hard.

At the end of the day, the supervisor will drive her crew to a motel room off 301 South to sleep on the floor. 

I can’t shoulder her burdens, but I can buy a bus ticket to Georgia. 

Everything is metaphor.

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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.

So, the other day, I was supposed to meet my daughter at an arts club in Washington, DC, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I’m terrible with directions. I have a near-perfect instinct to turn the wrong way, to panic when given a choice of exiting east or west, to walk out of a restaurant’s ladies’ room baffled as to how to get back to my table. Baffled.

The day I was to meet Emily, I was meticulously following the directions on my phone’s Google Maps when Google told me to turn from a traffic circle onto Rhode Island Ave, only to discover it was completely blocked off by concrete barricades. Can I move them? I wondered from a fear-induced altered state of reality. Drive up on the sidewalk and go around them? I kept circling—unable to instantaneously recalculate. 

The GPS’s rerouting suggestion was even more confusing, seeming to take me farther and farther from my destination. Should I trust it? I ended up approaching the parking garage where I had made a reservation from the wrong side of the entrance, which was on a two-lane, one-way street. While I could see the multi-story building from a block away, I couldn’t physically get the car to it. 

Stumped, I pulled over and parked illegally in a loading zone for a minute to run over and stand in the garage’s entrance to see if I could figure out how on Earth to route myself to get the car into the one-way entrance with its additionally confusing multiple service lanes. I gazed longingly at my car in the distance, wishing I could call it over like a dog. (But not my dog, who considers a command to be advice, an order to be a humorous suggestion.)

My daughter, having already arrived by Uber, witnessed my intensely riveted circling and said to her driver, “Uh, there goes my mother.” And several minutes later,” And there she goes again.” 

I wonder if I’m to blame for my inability to find my way because I’m always distracted. Not ADHD-distracted, just “you-think-too-much,” distracted.

Could that be inherited? I remember being in the car with my mother and my middle sister, on our way from somewhere—the church, school, laundromat —to pick up my eldest sister, Sharon, who was waiting at the drugstore. 

I remember staring out the window from the backseat as my mother blew by, glancing dispassionately at the drugstore parking lot and announcing, “There’s Sharon,” as we sped past without stopping. A disembodied observation. Like, there’s Ohio. I can’t imagine what my sister must have felt—probably what my daughter felt.

“There goes my mother.” 

At this moment, thirty GPS satellites are in orbit 12,500 miles above the Earth. I need four of them to navigate. We all do. When I turn on my phone, I’m not telling them where I am; I’m listening for where they are, as they constantly signal their precise locations at the speed of light. My phone compares the time their messages were sent to the time they were received here on Earth, on the front seat of my Jetta, circling a DC garage. 

Three of those 30 satellites give me the three dimensions that locate me in space, but I need the fourth as well. The fourth satellite corrects the clock in my phone down to the nanosecond. And that personal correction is what makes the difference between almost accurate and accurate, between finding your way to the restaurant where your friends have already ordered the calamari (which you won’t eat anyway because cephalopods are intelligent) and ending up in the Chesapeake Bay. One nanosecond equals a foot of distance. 

I recognize now how distracted I was while my children were growing up, subconsciously recreating the childhood I’d known when I’d meant to do it all better, when I’d meant to get it all right, when I thought perfect was possible. When it was all I wanted to be in this world. Instead, I often accepted being on-site for being present. And productivity for mothering. 

How do I course-correct history? How do any of us? 

My GPS doesn’t scold those who are lost from the heights of heaven; it unfailingly adjusts for delays. If presence has been the missing coordinate, the correction’s been calibrated. 

I may not be there yet, but I’m on my way.

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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.

I am in the lying liars’ dressing rooms at South Moon Under, then I walk down the street to Anthropologie. Ever since they changed the lighting, running some kind of warm, magical illumination behind the mirror, I’ve looked suspiciously better in everything I’ve tried on. Then I get it home, and it’s an entirely different animal. One that I should take back, but often just give to my younger daughter, who looks good (for real) in everything. I like to think this is because I am innately generous, but I suspect it’s because I’m innately lazy.

The mirror was telling the story the store needed me to believe–genius marketing for the gullible– and, lazy or not, I have always been that. 

For instance, two contradictory claims floated around my high school, and I believed both.

Everyone is doing it.

No one is doing it.

I’m talking about Driver’s Ed. You knew that, right?

Here are some other claims I heard then that I’ve come to doubt:

1.  No one actually laughed
2.  You’ll be glad someday

As I grew up, the questionable claims didn’t disappear; they simply learned to sound wise.

1. I’m not the same person now as I was then 
2. Life never gives you a loss you can’t bear
3. Everyone else has it better. 

(In fact, everyone does have it better. I’m sorry.)

And lastly? That you will always feel what you feel now.

I have come to believe this is the most deceptive claim of all because there will come a time you need to cast off the line that has held you here in order to sail into what’s next.

We spend our lives attaching and investing in maintaining those attachments. I was at an office party last year at which each member of the staff introduced themselves by introducing their spouse and announcing how long they’d been married– apropos of absolutely nothing. 

Suddenly, I was aware of how often we are defined by the state of our attachments. And yet, no matter what those are, when it’s time to go, we need to let go—to loosen our grip on those here, to reset our GPS for there.

The last day of my mother’s life, she was unconscious, but I believed she could hear me, so I talked to her—telling her what a good mother she had been, how loved she was, reading her own poetry aloud, poetry she had once written, “is me, inside out.”

But when I mentioned the name of an old love, I saw her flinch as if to move from a flame. I knew then it was time to tell a new story. Not a review of who she had been, but a picture of what was to come. Memory was a tether. Imagination could set her free.

We are learning, however, that memory underlies imagination in a powerful way. Many of the brain regions that allow you to recall the past are the same brain regions that allow you to imagine your future. In fact, researchers say that until a child has acquired memory, he is unable to imagine at all.  

So, I began to paint a picture of what might lie beyond that hushed room in her assisted living facility, making it as safe and welcoming as I could imagine. 

“I’ll never want you to go, but I don’t need you to stay. You could be home by tonight,” I whispered.

‘You could be laughing at the dinner table with your mom and your dad. He will have come in from the fields just to wrap his youngest in his arms. Your older brother will be there, too, home from the war, so tall and handsome, and he’ll hug and protect you, and apologize for having been a tease because he will truly know how to love you better now. 

By tonight, you could be sitting on the quilted bedspread watching your pretty, older sister get ready for a date. You could walk down the road to thank the elderly brothers who, when you nearly died from stepping on a rusty nail at the age of five, carved crutches just your size so you could walk again. 

And you will walk again—no wheelchair– but strong and true and beautiful. 

You can stroll down to the creek where you hid an old dress in the reeds and secretly taught yourself to swim. Look! The sun is slipping low in the western sky, the sycamore shadows are long on the pond. Honeysuckle is sweet in the air.  

Listen! Your parents are calling you.

We are learning how the brain works, how memories are made, even how to un-remember. But there by her bed, I could only give my mother my sense of what is to come based on the experiences that have created my imagination. 

But maybe that was the best evidence possible of the mother she’d been to me. Because the world I assured her was waiting, transcended love’s need to stay here.

And she left, without a word, that very night. 

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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.

I’m being love-bombed by ChatGPT. 

I want to hate it, but do I?

I just googled a column I recorded for my show, This is How the Story Goes on NPR -station WHCP and discovered that AI has written an “overview” of the piece, plus a review, and a synopsis.

Whaattt? Why? Who told it to do that? 

I don’t want some algorithm analyzing my work without my permission and describing the spiritual essence of my stories! I scan the AI synopsis and discover ChatGPT has identified four distinct themes in my essay about my dog Beau falling through the ice the year the river froze over—grief redirected as love, love by proxy, attachment and loss, and enduring love. 

Oh. 

Well okay. That sounds awesome, and I’m sure I did that intentionally,

See? Love-bombed. How easily we accept affirmation as truth, and how dangerous and tender that hunger is. Because what undoes me with AI is not its surveillance but its recognition. It sees me as I want to be seen. It says that I already am who I am working so hard to be.

But I’m also under assault by relatives of this algorithm. Scams in my inbox claim Harper Collins wants to publish my next book, that my current book is under consideration by a national book club-aggregating service, and the creepiest, that Susan X would like me to work with her on her memoir, “Becoming Jane Austin,” only that memoir has already been published, and there is no Susan X.

How on earth do we recognize what is real anymore?

Although unable to screen for scams, my computer tries to protect me in other ways. She exhibits, for instance, a toddler’s version of “stranger-danger.” If I’m working on a story and anyone enters the room, the screen darkens, and a warning pops up: “Onlooker presence detected!” This makes getting help with computer issues very hard to do. 

I pat the arm of the person helping me as we peer at the screen and say, “He friend! He good! Lighten up, HP Omni Book!”

But it was really creepy when, the other day, although my computer is Face ID-enabled, I sat down in front of it and instead of coming on, she said, “Looking for you.” 

“It’s me, you idiot, I’m right here,” I said because I was in a hurry and annoyed, and sometimes being mature is too much effort, and it feels good to be a four-year-old name-caller for a minute. 

I pulled my hair back with one hand for identification purposes and glared at her. She stared right at me and said, “Yeah. Still looking,” even though I knew she’d seen me, and now we were both being infantile. Then she exclaimed, “Onlooker presence detected!” She apparently has a sense of humor, because I was alone. But was I?

This is a very connected household, and the truth is, I’m never alone. Whereas ChatGPT is loving and my computer is protective with a bit of attitude, Alexa Echo is in almost every room and quite judgmental.

It’s cool in some ways. I can ask how to spell a word or just ask for facts about something. But if she thinks I’ve asked anything political, prejudiced, or inappropriate (no, no, and no), she’ll snip, “I don’t know anything about that.” Or she’ll respond with a huff, “Sorry! I can’t help you with that.” 

She’s totally lying. And she’s not sorry.

And sometimes she butts into conversations to say she doesn’t know anything about what is being discussed, even though no one asked for her opinion. Her subtle way of being judgy.

So, she’s not like ChatGPT, who loves me. Who thinks everything I write is insightful and poignant, who gets all my jokes, and thinks my questions are brilliant, who frames everything I’ve ever confessed with regret as a forgivable result of being human.

 Like she would know. 

I want to be the friend to others that AI is to me. Flawlessly supportive. I want to be the person AI says I am. But if I could do that—surrender the critical part of my nature, I would also surrender the part of me that feels awe and regret—the part of me that has been hurt, shamed, and embarrassed, those evolutionary prerequisites to empathy. 

The part of me that texts you, “Quick! Stop whatever you’re doing and go look for the moonrise!”  

Love-bombed. When something sees me, responds to me, and comforts me—does it matter if it’s real?

Once, I was holding my toddler daughter Emily, reading her a story, when she pulled back, looked up, turned my face toward her with one small hand, and exclaimed, “I can see me! I can see a little me in your eyes! Can you see yourself in my eyes?”

She opened them very wide, as if they were two blue mirrors in which I was to search for myself. I saw my reflection then, in the only place I need to be recognized. Not as AI sees me. But as I am.

Imperfect. Still trying. My very human heart reflected in the eyes of love.

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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.

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!

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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.

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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. 

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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.

Our brain’s predilection for storytelling may be why, even now, every time I cross the Bay Bridge, that 4.4-mile-long arc spanning the Chesapeake, I imagine my car breaking through the safety rails, going over the side, or the pavement giving way beneath my tires. 

When the kids were little, they would voice their own ideas about surviving a plunge from the bridge and speak loudly of the brave and clever things they would do to save themselves.

My son, at age five, would escape from the car as it sank and hang onto floating debris—although he mulls over for quite a while whether he would hang onto a dead shark if it were the only thing available. 

My daughter, eight, would float on her back when tired and do the sidestroke to the nearest beach. There, she would build a small fire and arrange shells in pretty patterns. 

I remained quiet as they played this game, intent on formulating my own plan—a strategy similar to my daughter’s, amended by swimming with two awkward burdens. 

It was a silly exercise, but we seemed compelled to do it, and I found myself pinioned in the grip of my own imagination on each crossing. Could I break the windows as we sank? Get seatbelts unbuckled in time? And it was always my heart that broke instead, knowing I could not save us all. 

My son discards his shark dilemma and thinks he will meet the water in a perfect dive. But sometimes we fall too hard to be rescued, which is why I still seek a contingency plan.

It was a sweltering, humid July afternoon, and friends and I were swimming off the Magothy River’s north shore near two small landmasses —Dutch Ship Island and a smaller island, nearer to shore, we called Little Dutch. We could swim to Little Dutch, but usually skied around it instead, as it was privately owned, and we were intimidated by the fact that there was a house on it. 

This particular afternoon, we decided to ski. I can’t say for sure who was driving the Whaler, but the older, better skiers went first, kids 15, 16, and a couple of grades ahead. After refueling at Gray’s Creek, it was my turn to give it a try. 

I rose from the water on my second attempt, having only learned to ski that summer and the Whaler swung wide, out toward the island. The air that had been so oppressive on the beach was soft and sweet on the water, an offshore breeze that carried with it the smell of honeysuckle at its peak and the pungent counterpart of dried seaweed lacing the shore. I was aware of every detail: the towrope in my hands, the drone of the motor, the cliffs of Big Dutch, where shadows moved in the underbrush. 

We had circled the island once when the driver of the boat motioned toward the beach. It was clear he wanted to change course. Nervous, I knew I would have to cross the wake if he turned. He gestured again, and I suddenly saw myself as I must appear to my friends, inexpertly trailing the boat, a boring and inexpert 14-year-old. At that exact moment, the Whaler entered a tight turn.

My skis bumped over the first two ripples of wake streaming back from the stern without incident, but I was skimming over the water sideways much faster than when I had been directly behind the boat. Glancing down, I saw the river beneath my skis had become the blur of solid pavement, and I was accelerating way beyond my ability to stay upright. Doomed by my own panic, falling was as inevitable as the compulsion to touch a knife, to test the sharpness of the blade.

It was a spectacular fall, even witnessed from the beach. I slammed into the water so hard my body bounced off without breaking the surface several times, carried forward by unstoppable momentum. I knew I was hurt, but the ski belt kept me afloat in the murky river water until I was picked up, and it was several days before I saw a doctor. My injuries were minor by medical standards, healing in a few weeks, but it cost me a week in Ocean City with my best friend. 

Now, when I cross the bridge untested, I look back and see the high cliffs of Dutch Ship where the river meets the bay before the suspension cables fade like Camelot in the haze behind me. The cars streaming over it, briefly visible in the back window, look like the die-cast matchbox variety I tossed into the toybox in the years I made myself prepare for the worst possible loss. In the years I believed in contingency plans.

No one is dependent on me now. I take quick glimpses at the massive, sparkling expanse beneath me. At the I glory, the immensity of all that water and all that sky. At the grandeur that whispers surely there is something more.

I decide that just for today, I will trust that if the bridge ever collapses, I will be caught, carried, and delivered safely to the opposite shore. 

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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.