L.M. Poplin's Blog

(Originally published at https://www.bostonbookblog.com/articl... on July 16, 2019.) “Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls.” -David Brooks Writing is often assumed to be a solitary endeavor. Yet even the act of writing implies another person. Publishing, on the other hand, is never solitary, not even when independently done. And with current publishing practices requiring authors to hawk thei...

(Originally published at https://www.blackrosewriting.com/blog... on June 15, 2019.) When I was fifteen, my father diagnosed me as a “jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.” Although I didn’t enjoy having my mediocrity acknowledged by my paterfamilias, he wasn’t wrong. I can do many things well enough. I was a good enough volleyball player to have articles written about me in the local newspaper, but I did not earn any athletic scholarships. I was a good enough actress to be nomin...

I grew up in a family that was too poor to travel the world. Instead, we invited the world into our home and hosted exchange students who taught me that kindness was universal even if the words we used to describe kindness were not. I became fascinated by different languages and how unfamiliar sounds evolved into ideas once I understood their meaning. People tell me French is a beautiful language, but once my mind took over for my ears, I could no longer separate the sounds of syllables from their significance. Language became my passport to the world. Literally. I couldn’t afford to travel on my own, but I could participate in my university’s study abroad program. The French Department subsidized my summer in Paris, and I returned to the USA with an insatiable desire to leave it. I still don’t have enough money to travel the world. Not really. But I promised my broken-hearted eighteen-year-old self, crying gently, silently, while waiting in the passport line at SFO that I would do whatever it took to travel abroad at least once a year, every year, for the rest of my life. And I have kept that promise, once as a nanny, once as an interpreter, six times as a teacher, once as a volunteer, and now, thanks to AirBNB and Norwegian Air, as myself. So far I’ve been to Canada, Mexico, Martinique, St. Lucia, France, Belgium, Norway, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany. Next on my list are Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Turkey, Poland, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Sweden. And Denmark. And Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Senegal, and Nigeria. Nepal too. And India. I can keep going. And I will. One destination at a time. I cannot afford to go any faster, and even then, I’m only able to afford my yearly adventure because I don’t own a car, I live in a house the size of a shoebox, and I work two jobs while my kid is at school so I don’t have to pay for daycare. Knowing that I’ll soon be leaving the country keeps me sane living in this country. But the more I travel, the more I fall in love with the world, the more I want to see, and the more I want to revisit. Norway bewitched me with rivers and fjords and stories of women with hollow backs and tails like cows. I want to go back, especially now that I’ve discovered Norway is literally in my blood thanks to a great-grandfather I didn’t know existed. But I can’t revisit Norway AND Japan AND my first and forever love, France, AND explore someplace new. Maybe someday I’ll be able to travel the world indefinitely, but I’m not there yet. Funnily enough, I have the same problem with my writing. For the first time ever, I have the luxury of writing a sequel. A book that I won’t have to query. One where I can revisit beloved characters and locations as equally bewitching as Norway. But like my vacation time, my writing time is limited. After all, someone must pay my travel expenses. So how can I write a mystery AND a personal essay AND a collection of children’s stories AND still write my sequel? Until my finances dictate otherwise, I’m a one country/one book kind of girl. Monogamous by necessity, not by choice. But because I’m an optimistic monogamist, I’m hoping there’s some hidden benefit to exploring the world slowly, deliberately, or letting ideas incubate for a long, long time. Quality over quantity. And consistency! Perhaps consistency is the real reward of my slow but steady pace, because twenty-five years later, I’m still traveling. I’ve broken my travel promise only once, the year I had my son, and even then, I made sure to traverse the entire United States, twice, to compensate for not leaving it. The same goes for my writing. In the two decades since I set out to become a writer, I haven’t stopped. I don’t plan on ever stopping. I’m neither egg man, nor walrus. Instead, I am the tortoise, goo goo g’joob, that plods slowly forward one step at a time and somehow, to everyone’s surprise and especially her own, manages not only to finish the race, but outrun the faster, sleeker, wealthier, more powerful rabbit in the process. I hope I live for a very long time.

Nobody warned me when I set out to become a writer that the job would require self-promotion. Not even in grad school, when I first discovered the terrors of querying, did I realize how often I would need to put myself on display. Sharing my words, I was okay with. I knew that my thoughts would go out to the world to be met with scathing criticism or praise, but I didn’t yet understand that I would need to go with them. It doesn’t help that I abhor social media. I would blame my age, but there are literally millions of people older than I am who have taken to Facebook like the proverbial duck. Only it’s an ocean, not a pond, and I think they’re drowning. We all are. Me especially, because I only ever agreed to get my toes wet, but there’s a flock of people surrounding me, pushing me, pulling me, saying they won’t talk to me anymore or pay attention to my book unless I submerge myself. I don’t want to be on display. I became a writer because I loved to read. To engage in intimate conversations with the greatest minds of our world. I thought I could spend my days and nights siting at a desk or in a window seat, MUJI pen in hand, writing novels not to be famous or rich, but simply to be read. If I had wanted to learn about self-promotion, I would have majored in marketing communications or business, not French literature, and I would be making hundreds of thousands of dollars in a shiny corner office instead of schlepping my office on my back, cobbling together a six-course teaching load so I can afford to live in Boston on an adjunct’s salary. If I had known how hard self-promotion would be, I never would have chosen to become a writer. But that’s implying I had a choice. I don’t think I had a choice. I think writing chose me, which is why I’m drafting this blog post that most likely no one will read instead of sitting in a bath with a mask on my face to erase the wrinkles that insist on forming despite my best attempts to coax them into hiding. The comparison is an apt one, by the way. Tweeting my writerly angst (or faux brags depending) to the larger #WritingCommuity in the hopes of generating an expanded readership is not unlike wearing a cellulose sheet mask infused with plant collagen to combat the inevitability of time. It might feel good for a day. But the wrinkles still come. I’m not complaining. I like wrinkles. Not because I want to look old, but because I want the luxury of becoming old. And I really, truly don’t want the world to know my business. But writing is business, and I love writing, so I try to play the game regardless. The game is not all bad either. Books, especially undefined MG/YA hybrids like mine, need book trailers. Book trailers count as self-promotion. And so I’ve begun to wade voluntarily into the waters of filmmaking—welcoming, warm, Caribbean Sea waters—where storytelling becomes multidimensional and I can swim in all directions. Now, I storyboard with abandon and call it marketing. Now, I ride the T all over town, filming my favorite places in Boston and call it work. Now I listen obsessively to the music of Dexter Britain and call it research. Now, I ask my brilliant puppeteer friend, Bonnie Duncan, to teach me iMovie (because puppeteers must also become marketing gurus and filmmakers) and bask in a sense of accomplishment. I became a writer so I could hibernate within my comfort zone of books and ideas and words and solitude. And MUJI pens. Such was my idealism. Such was my ignorance. Becoming a writer has been the single most uncomfortable experience of my life—a life, incidentally, that includes nannying for four children under the age of ten in Belgium, and serving a Mormon mission in France. Oh, and birthing a child. Becoming a writer has stretched my understanding of the world, mostly through disillusionment. But as I am forced to expand, so does my capacity for living. I have traveled to distant places. I have engaged in real-life conversations with contemporary greatness. I have become a better, more complete version of myself. And so, even though I still would not have chosen to become a writer, I’m increasingly grateful I didn’t have a choice.

May 17, 2013 I have never really felt as though I belonged. At first I believed my sense of displacement was chronological, owing largely to my reading (and falling in love with) Little House in the Big Woods when I was six years old. A feeling confirmed by Anne of Green Gables shortly thereafter. But when a German exchange student came to live with my family the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I fell in love again, and became convinced that my displacement was geographical. By the time I left home for college at the age of seventeen, armed only with six years of public school French, I had developed a wanderlust so ferocious I refused to put down roots until after the birth of my son. Now, twenty-six residences, four countries, and five states later, I find myself in Boston, in love again, and content to remain still. My love affair with Boston began gradually, however. The plan was to earn my MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and leave. Fifteen years have passed, and now I’m the happy owner of a first floor apartment in a triple decker in JP. My home is a hundred years old. And while such a statement won’t raise any eyebrows in Boston, I grew up in 1980’s tract housing in a middle-class suburb of San Francisco, where our only claims to antiquity were the oak trees and the rolling hills that changed from kelly green to gold with the season. Sometimes I look at the dings in my hardwood floors and wonder who put them there, and when. My tub once washed soot from coal fires down the drain. I play a similar game with the pennies I find on the street. And there are a lot of them. I’ve even heard people admit with pride, that they despise the penny and willfully throw it away. I don’t understand this. Partly because I grew up in a predominantly blue-collar family, with one grandmother who carefully washed and folded her Ziploc bags, and another who ate gratefully the hearts of chickens. And partly because I love pennies, especially the old ones. I love reading their dates and holding them in my hand and imagining where they’ve been, and the people and places they’ve seen, and the serendipity of finding them in the first place. My forthcoming novel, Fatechanger, combines my sense of displacement with my love of Boston. And history. And pennies. It proves that we all belong somewhere, that nobody should be dismissed or discarded, our worth underestimated, our stories misunderstood.

February 3, 2016 If I had to choose between trying to sell a novel or writing a new one, I would choose writing a new one. Hands down. Every time. And yet the insecure part of me (the deep down critic that insists I’m not a real writer unless I’m published) and the practical part of me (the academic who knows I won’t get that tenure track position with my MFA unless I have a traditionally published novel) push me towards publication very much in spite of myself. This is where my L’ATELIER community comes in. Yes, I have instant, year-round access to insightful feedback on my work. Yes, I can ask for advice or names of agents and publishers and conferences and receive it. But what I treasure most about my friendships with the L’ATELIER Writers is the total assurance that I’m not alone in the world. That someone else has experienced the same insecurities and doubts that I experience every time I hit send on an email query. And because I deeply admire the work of these writers, I can harbor a secret hope that I’m a good writer too. That my increasing pile of rejections will result in an eventual acceptance. Because on some level, perhaps the most important level, I’ve already been accepted. In my everyday life, I like to think I’m a strong person. I’m a professor. A mother. A savvy city-dweller. I can deliver conference presentations at prestigious academic institutions. I can bandage a head wound and perform triage on a daily basis. I can cycle through downtown Boston with a six-year-old hanging on the back of my cargo bike for dear life. So after the unadulterated bliss of last year’s retreat, I had no idea how much I would crave the support and understanding of other writers. But the past year has taught me the importance of finding a group of like-minded people to motivate and console me when I am at my most vulnerable.  And somehow, I find the courage to keep submitting.

March, 28, 2015 Since I’m not interesting enough to write memoir, and not scholarly enough to write non-fiction, I’ve staked my claim in the fictional world, where any daydream I have can take root if I simply put in enough effort. Until I was twenty, I’d never written more than a handful of pages, which I would staple together and pronounce a short story. I love short stories. The best are carefully constructed masterpieces, more complex in their brevity than an epic novel with its thousand pages. I love the challenge of constructing a narrative with precision craft and limitation. And I especially love the somewhat democratic process of the un-agented and unsolicited literary magazine submission.  All of my successful publication stories have been short ones. But my real love is the novel. I would never claim that characters in short fiction are not as round as their longer-winded cousins, but I am a selfish writer. I want to spend as much time with my characters as possible. They become as real to me as my upstairs neighbor, or my twenty-fourth cousin or even a second self. My characters live the lives I’ve never dared. They can risk everything or nothing (a risk in and of itself) and I get to sit back and watch the world work on them without fear or consequence. Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that characters have minds of their own, and the most cantankerous will refuse to comply with any plot outline. Through my characters I can travel to places I’m too scared to go on my own. Because my characters will not abandon me. I carry them with me, like the memories of real-life loved ones I’ve left behind but refuse to part with. A writer is never lonely. What a writer is, however, is persistent. I honestly believe anyone can become a writer. Yes, talent varies. Yes, some vocabularies are more impressive than others. But I’ve seen the most skilled wordsmiths wither and die simply because they would not write. Writers need motivation and dedication as much as they need imagination. Writers have to tame their characters the way Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince tamed his fox, with time and attention and ritual. Our characters desperately need our rituals, because it’s the mind games we play with ourselves that puts pen to paper. Writers write. It’s not more complicated or pretentious than that.