General

I learned a new word this morning. A search for a synonym of ‘hibernate’ introduced me to the verb ‘overwinter’. To keep something alive through the cold season – yes, how useful.

Bears apparently prepare ahead of time for their winter inactivity. When it came to this author’s need to overwinter, though, I didn’t see it coming.

I’d expected long before now to post about how last fall’s book signings went, and to sum up the exciting year that culminated in the publishing of Rivers. And it wasn’t exactly inactivity that kept me from doing so – just non-author contingencies that had to take precedence for a while.

In that time, I’ve experienced the vacillating waves of satisfaction and self-doubt that creatives are sometimes warned to expect in the wake of a project going public. When I first conceived of the Rivers project, I thought of it simply as a worthwhile record for myself and loved ones. Along the way, I became persuaded that the old adventure could be of interest to strangers too. Jump-cut five years to an actual book actually in people’s hands.

In the process of shopping out the manuscript, one piece of feedback I received urged me to scrap my idea for the book’s structure and instead tell the story by alternating between Thomas’s inner perspective and mine. That would necessarily have made it fiction rather than memoir.

If it’s true writers in any genre (or artists of any kind) identify their work with their self, it must be all the more so with memoir. Here, it seems to me, we find the least distance between persona and product, between story and author. In offering it to an audience, then, we set ourselves up for both to feel unaffirmed. If we’re concerned we’ve misjudged the story’s appeal beyond our close circle, we think our author-talk sounds like playacting.

Thoughts such as those brought me back to a statement I made before I even wrote the book: it’ll be enough for me just to get it written. From the outset, its two-part design and the determination not to fictionalize were fundamental to the vision – leaving me unswayed by one potential publisher’s suggestions to the contrary.

Now, the cusp of the spring season has brought with it some affirming reviews and an upcoming author event to prepare for. Who knows what Rivers’ coming year may hold?

(March 27, 2026)