Meera Lee Patel: gift upon gift

Not long ago I posted here about an extremely gifted artist, Meera Lee Patel, whose delicate and soulful renderings of atmospheric worlds grace tea towels and greeting cards, tote bags and journals, even slingy chairs. You can find her work on Etsy and in Free People. You can follow her musings over Twitter, her process sketches on Instagram, her hope for the world in every line she draws, and next year Perigree Books will be releasing her book Being Me (But Better). I can't actually imagine a better Meera Lee, but I'm eagerly anticipating her book.

Yesterday, as a cadre of painters and window caulkers and windowsill fixers and stucco men finished the rescue of my modest bungalow home, a gift arrived from Meera, a package of most precious things. Number 37 of 50 of her keepsake Elephant and Moon (her illustrated story of an elephant seeking his place in the world). A handmade card: Grateful. A postcard. Her long-lettered words to me. She is so utterly embrace-able, this Meera Lee. And I am enormously lucky to have her in my life.

For look, above, at what she makes.

Soon, here, you'll find another inimitable work of art from Meera Lee, for Chronicle Books had the extraordinary stroke of genius to hire her as the cover artist for One Thing Stolen, the Florence novel due out next April. I've not yet seen the final cover. I have seen the intricate, intelligent watercolor. I can't wait to hold this book in my hand, for Meera's reading of the novel was so astute; her discovery of the small details make her cover illustration sing.

One Thing Stolen, which has a rare neurological disease at its heart, was not an easy book to write; it was, in fact, heartbreaking as I imagined myself inside the mind of frightened young girl. It emerged out of many drafts and deep considering. I stumbled until at last I found the light, and then I waited. Before I'd even seen a glimpse of Meera's cover art, I'd heard from Meera—words from a reader that will always matter to me.

Gift upon gift upon gift. And then yesterday's package.

When the cover art is ready for sharing, you will find it along with an interview with Meera here. Between now and then, Meera, the atmosphere is, as you write in Elephant and Moon, "feelings and fabrics from lifetimes before."

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That Florence novel is also a West Philly novel

That Florence novel of which I have so often spoken is also (I now confess) a West Philadelphia novel—infused with the fringe beyond the campus where I work. Yesterday, the air finally warming, I returned to those old haunts and photographed this plot of land, where a pivotal scene takes place.

That Florence novel is also, thanks to the great (loving) patience of editor Tamra Tuller and the impeccable copy editing and exceptional kindness of one Debbie DeFord Minerva, done. Oh my goodness, it is done. The hardest book I ever wrote. The fear that it would not be "good enough," finally ebbed in full this weekend, as I took one last crack at the pages that had resisted me for many months. In the midst of that work, a note (and then more notes) from Debbie filtered in.

Sometimes the impossible is not finally impossible.

And we are rarely alone.

It's almost spring, or should be soon. The hard husks inside the earth are softening. The nests are wanting eggs.

My Florence novel is also a West Philadelphia novel.

That novel is finally done.

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I return (at very long last) to Florence

I'm not just teaching sixteen memoir makers this semester at Penn. I'm also working with the very talented Alice Ma, whom I selected from a strong field of applicants as the Bassini Writing Apprentice. Alice returns me to my novel-in-progress. We think together about what kind of research must fuel a novel like this one, what questions must be answered, and how truth becomes fiction of an engaging but authentic sort.

There's been one small problem with this arrangement. Too many consecutive twenty-hour work days have left me no time for the novel-in-progress. So there is Alice, pursuing questions. And here has been Beth, suggesting in theory.

I had promised myself and others that I would right that tilted ship this weekend, and today I honored the pledge. I had 30,000 words of the novel, banged out during a few weeks last fall. Today I printed those pages, sat beneath a blanket, and forced myself to sit and read. If there was some horrid stuff, and there was some horrid stuff, there was also a book that makes me happy. Happy to work on. Happy to pursue. Since the best part of the writing life is the writing, in my humble opinion, I better be happy to pursue.

Having spent this day righting the wrongs of my in-progress novel, I will spend tomorrow writing forward. I will be afraid, very afraid. And I will let the fear propel me.

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The Florence novel reaches its halfway mark

When you write as I do—in between things and only after everything else is done—you begin to wonder if this percolating creature is any good, if you will want it (someday) to belong to you.  I have been working at the oddest hours of night on Florence, then putting the novel aside, then returning. I have not been able to hold the whole in my hands.  I have been frustrated by fragments.

Last night, in the sweetest chocolate fold of 4 AM, I returned to Florence, read these first 120 pages through.  It coheres, I think, and it interests me deeply.  It is the book that I want to keep writing.

And so I send the first 25,000 words to Tamra Tuller, now at Chronicle Books.  I want the conversation we will have as this story and its people take me deeper into their strange and (to me) beautiful and abiding mystery.

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a first raw scene from the Florence novel, for Alice

Next semester at Penn I'll be teaching my memoir class and at the same time working with Alice Ma, whom I selected from a slate of talented students as my Bassini Writing Apprentice, a program hosted by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.  Alice will be working with me on the research of my next novel.  We'll be talking about how fact becomes fiction.

Now nearly 50 pages into the writing of this book, a novel mostly about Florence, I stop to post these few words for Alice.  There are scenes in this novel that flash back to the University of Pennsylvania campus, where my heroine grew up with her professor dad.  We're at the Frank Furness-designed Fisher Fine Arts Library with this small, raw, very new (written an hour ago) scene:

... I remember being five or six or seven.  I remember Mom saying, "Let's go surprise your father."  I remember her taking Jack in one hand and me in the other and walking us down the wide wood steps of our Spruce Street twin and through the leafy corridors of West Philadelphia until we reached the edge of the sleeping giant campus.  We were a parade of three.  We were young and smart, and the campus was silver and brick, moss and ivy, castles and courtyards, and at the far end of our forever journey sat the fine arts library, red and round and tall and chimneyed, fantastic as something from the Brothers Grimm.  That's where Dad would be—through the heavy notched doors and past the turnstile, in the massive reading room.  It was a courtyard space with a roof four stories high.  It was arches and arched southern sun.  It was big books with thin pages and the smell of old things, cracked pencils, eraser nubs.
    "Oh, my loves," Dad would say, "here you are."  As if we'd wakened him from something.  As if history were now.  And my mom would lean toward him and let her long hair fall, like a screen between their love and ours.
  My mother loves my father.  She's just forgotten why.

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we wait for the storm, we hunker down,

we pray for trees to stand tall, for safety for friends, for love in the dark pell mell of it all.

I am off to the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House to see my students and my friends, and to read, for the first official time, from Handling the Truth.

As I leave, I tuck forty-four pages of my new Florentine novel into a safe, dry place.  

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