{"id":5171,"date":"2013-12-27T18:01:42","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T23:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5171"},"modified":"2014-01-05T21:28:40","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T02:28:40","slug":"new-again-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5171","title":{"rendered":"New Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 27, 2013
\nFriday <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Don’t throw the past away,<\/em><\/span>
\n You might need it some rainy day.<\/em><\/span>
\n Dreams can come true again,<\/em><\/span>
\n When everything old is new again.<\/em><\/span>
\n — Peter Allen, 1944-1992<\/span>
\n Australian songwriter and entertainer<\/span><\/p>\n

\"holi13badge-snowflake\"<\/a>I have written about Julie Hayden and her single published work, the story collection The Lists of the Past<\/em>, three times. In 2008<\/span><\/a>, the title of the book floated into my mind when I chose to write off a prompt about “lists.” That’s when I did some research and discovered that Julie Hayden had died in 1981 without having published the novel she was said to be working on. In 2010<\/span><\/a>, I had the book with me during a sojourn at the Vermont Studio Center, where I was working exclusively on revision.\u00c2\u00a0Six months later<\/span><\/a>, I took the theme of the six connected stories that comprise the book’s second half to write about the thirty-fifth anniversary of my coming to the house that I have lived in now more than half my life, that I will almost certainly die in.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first piece led to a brief correspondence with Patsy Blake, Julie Hayden’s sister, who wrote to thank me for my kind words. I would learn that they were the daughters of Phyllis McGinley and Charles Hayden. Phyllis McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. I knew her work as a teenager. She published frequently in The Saturday Evening Post<\/em>, which came to our house. She was also a Catholic poet who wrote often about “suburbia and sainthood,” so there is not a doubt in my mind that she was represented in the small anthologies of work by Catholic writers that were used in my parish elementary school.<\/span><\/p>\n

A week ago, I received an email with the subject line “The Lists of the Past.” It was from Harry Kirchner, the publisher of Pharos Editions<\/span><\/a>, a house “dedicated to bringing to light out-of-print, lost or rare books of distinction.” They are re-issuing The Lists of the Past<\/em> in May. He found my 2011 piece about Julie Hayden while doing research for the jacket copy, and thought I would be interested in the news. The new edition was selected and will have an introduction by Cheryl Strayed, a writer of my acquaintance whose work I greatly admire. So even though I have a first edition of Julie Hayden’s book, which Mr. Kirchner calls “so fresh and honest it takes your breath away,” I am excited to acquire the new edition as well.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This good news comes as I am getting ready to ease out of “holiday mind” and back into “fiction writer’s mind.” I have not written any fiction since December 15. That’s the day I sent off some new work I prepared for a fellowship application. I knew then that my next effort would be deep revision of a manuscript I had recently shown to my mentor. It’s been knocking around in my files for more than ten years, and I regard it as my strongest work. She thinks it is, too, and sees many possibilities as I bring to it the more advanced craft skills I continue to acquire.<\/span><\/p>\n

As it happens, it’s the story I worked on in Vermont in 2010, when I re-read Julie Hayden’s work yet again as a way to fall into fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n


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