Tracy Seeley is a bay area writer-pal, whose memoir, My Ruby Slippers (released this spring from University of Nebraska’s Bison Books), was called “elegiac, gorgeous, understated” by The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. I’ve been watching how Tracy has supported her book with great fascination and awe. It’s quite a story. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it here and on her blog. – Meg
By the end of 2011, nearly 300,000 new books will have hit the shelves this year. My Ruby Slippers is one of them.
You might find this daunting. How, in that ocean of books, can one small paperback set its tiny sail and hope to make the crossing from the Shoals of Obscurity to the Isle of Readers’ Delight? But it doesn’t feel daunting to me. It feels like a miracle. You mean I actually get a sailboat?
When My Ruby Slippers debuted on March 1, I debuted as a writer. Oh, I’d been writing for years, but didn’t call it writing. I called it scholarship. I’m a literature professor, and that’s what I’d been trained for. I did research on novelists and poets and essayists from 1850-1940, wrote articles filled with footnotes, and got published in journals that maybe 30 people would read. Can I say that I love it? I do.
But when I look back over my life in footnotes, I was also always headed toward My Ruby Slippers. First, I grew weary of academic prose. So passive, so lifeless, so reader-unfriendly. Why couldn’t it be lovely and clear? I steered my prose in a new direction. And then in the course of my research, I fell in love with Virginia Woolf’s prose. And the fierceness of her thinking, the complexities and layers of her stories and essays, the digressions and meanderings of her sentences and mind. Her metaphors, lyricism, insights and humor–even her semi-colons floored me. My god, what could she not do? And living inside Woolf’s essays—for I fell in love with those more than anything else—I also began to read and love Didion and E. B. White, Annie Dillard, Capote, Montaigne. The things one could do in nonfiction!
I wanted to do it, too.
And so, forsaking the footnotes I should have been writing, I began in secret to write something else. My filing cabinet hides some of the most hideous prose experiments you’re ever likely to see. (And believe me, you won’t). But I knew I had to serve my apprenticeship, trying, failing, and trying again. I would have to teach myself how to do it.
When I was seven, I taught myself to ride a bike. I knew not to wait for my father’s help. He was rarely home. So on a hot summer day in my Kansas back yard, I gripped the handles of my sister’s bike, straddled the center bar, stood up on one pedal, then the other, and promptly fell off. I got up again, pedaled once, fell over. I got up, pedaled twice, fell off, tried again. Again, and again, and again, and again. By late that afternoon, scraped, bruised, and beaming, I could do it. I could ride. Wobbling, veering wildly, nearly crashing to be sure, but I stood upright on the pedals, riding like the wind.
That little girl sat beside me when I set out to learn how to write literary nonfiction. I knew by then I would write a book. I just would. I could feel it—that same determination to ride. Meanwhile, I went to writing conferences, listened to the pros. Asked for help. Asked for mentors. Studied writers I admired. Read every great essayists and memoirist I could find. I started sending out essays, collecting rejections. Rejections! Even that seemed great to me. It meant I was a writer.
An editor at The Missouri Review almost liked something well enough to publish it. “Try again,” he said. That, I knew how to do. I tried and my writing got better, I became more courageous, took more risks. Then one day, I wrote an essay that after many drafts, caught the eye of the Iowa Review. The Florida Review. Water-Stone Review. They all wanted to know, was it still available for their nonfiction prize? Then Prairie Schooner chimed in. They wanted it for sure. I said yes. I sent The Florida Review something else I had written, and they said yes, too.
Buoyed by yeses, I toiled away on what I’d begun to call my “book project.” I got a residency at Edward Albee’s artist colony on Long Island, “The Barn.” And one July day in Montauk, I sat at my writing table in a garret of the renovated Barn. I’d been reading, writing, hacking through the underbrush of whatever the book had started to be. And while I stared out at the buzzing summer lawn, the title of my book rose up from the deeps. My Ruby Slippers.
I finished it. I queried agents and heard a great, yawning silence. I finished it again (better this time). I sent it to a few publishers. I got a few rejections. I tried again. I had the usual doubts and fears, so common they’re almost comic. Or boring. I can’t write. This book is no good. If it is good, it’s a fluke. I’ll never be able to write another one. Blah, blah, blah. I rewrote the damn thing. I restructured it. I cut out three chapters. I cried. But I never stopped inching forward. I revised my book proposal. And then a publisher said yes.
Yes! I decided that for one year, I would give all my love and attention to sailing this book into the wind. I would do it with joy. I hired a former student to be my web designer. I tweeted and blogged. My husband, who makes films, made me a gorgeous book trailer. A photographer came to my garden and took my photo. Lovely, kind strangers wrote lovely, kind blurbs, the book jacket (glorious!) came. And in March, My Ruby Slippers joined 300,000 new sailboats all venturing into the waves, some out toward the shipping lanes, some the choppy seas, all praying to avoid the doom of the doldrums. Call me crazy, but what part of a regatta isn’t exciting?
I’ve just come home from a ten-week, self-created book tour that took me and my beloved filmmaker to twenty-two libraries and bookstores in twelve western states. We traveled in an RV, which had its own kind of comedy. And I had the time of my life. (You can read some of the hijinks on my blog).
Of course, I wanted to sell books. But I didn’t think of success in terms of sales or numbers of people who showed up for my events. I decided early to think of my book as a gift, which I would share with whoever came to receive it. Sometimes fifty people came to a reading. Sometimes five. One Saturday afternoon in July, it was 108 degrees in Hays, Kansas and the wheat harvest had just ended. It’s the season when High Plains folks go in from the fields to rest. Plus, who on earth would come out in that heat?
Still, I’d arranged a reading at the public library there, my triumphant return to the place I’d spent the happiest hours of my second grade year. The librarian who’d organized my event showed up in t-shirt and shorts, boyfriend in tow, and asked if I’d mind introducing myself to the audience. Then the two of them went on their merry way. The audience arrived. One whole person. Only one. But what a conversation we had! She was fascinating, interested, a retired librarian, and full of Kansas stories.
For some writers that would have been a low point. But for me, it was grand. My one-woman audience and I traded tales and addresses, she bought a book, which I signed, and we’re still in touch. She’s invited me to bring My Ruby Slippers to her winter home in New Mexico.
Still sailing, I also went on a blog tour (god bless book bloggers), wrote 15 guest blogs, did online interviews with half-a-dozen bloggers or more. A publicist who loved my book volunteered to help. And she has.
The reviews have been good. At a time when reviews are hard to come by, I never forget to be grateful. Even better, though, strangers send me thoughtful, personal, hand-written notes. They grew up in Brooklyn, Florida, California, Missouri. They moved a lot. They never moved. Yet again and again, their letters read, “Your story is so much like mine.” They write, “I’ve never been to Kansas, but loved seeing it through your eyes.” Sometimes, they write simply, “Thank you.” To me, that still feels like a miracle. My sailboat has reached the other shore.
And right on cue, I feel another book coming. I’m making some notes, thinking some thoughts, writing some pages that I know aren’t the thing itself. But I know they’ll get me there.
Sure, I have moments of doubt. I reckon every writer does. Can I really do it again? In those moments, I do think of that little girl on the bicycle. But I don’t really need her anymore. For I also have beside me the woman who wrote My Ruby Slippers. She did it. And so can I. —Tracy
