SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED...

....And this fall....it's yours! 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

I did it.  Ta-daa!  My first novel, “Those We Love Most” will be out September 11, 2012.  It’s my wedding anniversary, among other important milestones.

And as I put the edited manuscript in a big padded envelope and filled out the UPS label (too scary to trust to regular mail) I thought I’d feel a total kick-up-my-heels sense of joy.  A kind of Sound of Music, bodice-heaving, running over the hills with glee kind of approach.  It wasn’t exactly like that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Finishing a book is a big old dealy-bop.  Stapling that envelope shut is the culmination of a lot of hours, creation, frustration, editing, re-writes, self–doubt, deleting and erasure chewing, although frankly few writers I know still use erasers.

 

I’ve always been a sporadic writer.  My huckleberry pie life is cut up into lots of different slices, drawn and quartered on any given day; mom, wife, journalist, writer, advocate for injured service members, public speaker.  I’m a daughter as well and right now that involves a measure of caretaking and coordinating as my parents fail and falter in different degrees and disparate ways.  And somewhere in there I’m a girl friend too.  And I’ve always valued my female friendships, even as we all lamented how much work and family often came between more than a few plans to do lunch or grab a drink.  So many of my posse have been just as absorbed in the rat-a-tat-tat of the child rearing years as I have been. We are only now, most of us, poking our heads out of the foxhole and blinking in the coming dawn of the empty nest.

 

But I digress.  This is about my book.  The book I always wanted to write and the writing process.  Oh geez, you say.  Boring.  The writing process?  ZZZZZZZZZ.  I’m going to delete.   And you may.  But for any of you who have struggled to realize a dream or long held the notion that there is a finite time line for what you want to accomplish, hang on a tick.  Stay with me.   I am here to say that anything, really, is possible. But this is also about realizing dreams.  It’s about second acts.  And if you want it badly enough, you WILL find a way to get it done. Whether it’s getting your pilot’s license or doing your first stand-up gig or composing a song.  I’m living proof.  And I’m certifiably over 50.  Fabulous freaking fifty.

The truth is I stopped and started this novel a number of different times.  There were points I didn’t believe in my ability to weave a tale that any of you would want to read.  This is a round-about way of telling you that at one point I thought the book sucked.  But then all of a sudden it didn’t.  Last summer I found myself with a stretch of time and I got busy.  Instead of writing in the corners of my life, on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and occasional early weekend mornings, I got a little serious.  I wrote whatever was coming out, and out it poured, rushing head-long into a decent story, with characters I’d come to care about.

 

(the desk where I love to write..)

And while the result still required some shaping and pruning, my friends at Hyperion publishing saw the possibilities.  And so we shaped, we pruned.  And we clipped a little more.  One whole characters voice was scalpeled out.  This is where you trust your editor like a lover.  This is where you become partners and go to couples counseling.  

 

But turning in the manuscript was only the beginning.  The galleys will be out soon and they will go into the hands of illustrious book reviewers and journalists, other writers and bookstore influencers, bloggers and indie owners and the people who place the advance orders.  This will feel a bit like my pre-pubescent self standing naked in front of the mirror after middle school school gym class.  I will be a harsh chronicler of all my flaws.  Art is, after all, a subjective thing. 

 

But then the real work begins.  The marketing and the talking it up, the book selling and the chatting. There will be tweeting and blogging, the readings and signings.  I am an author who kind of likes being out on the road.  I really do mean it when I say it’s the people.  But then again I’m still a relative virgin on book number three, the accomplished and prolific ones will tell me.   

 

Will readers turn out to hear my fiction the way they turned out for the first and second non-fiction books to hear about our family’s journey through injury and then recovery?  “In an Instant” was a bird’s eye view of the bleached bones of a disaster and a marriage.  Everyone slows down on the highway to eyeball a roadside wreck.  But will they care as much about this fictional family I have created and blown life into? I hope so.

 

Writing a book for me was a lot like giving birth to a baby after 40.  In fact, in some ways it’s much harder. First you mess around a little, hunt and peck and see what you’ve got.   And then when the stick hasn’t turned blue, when nothing much is happening on the pages, you get serious.  You come up with a plan.

 

Suddenly the writing process needs to be plodding and methodical, a bit like taking temperatures for ovulation and shot for hormones and doctor’s appointments and monitoring and… well, you get the drift. Writing a book is a lot like that.  But there are moments of unbridled joy.  You can feel it occasionally when the story is coming, when a line or a paragraph sings out to you like the buzz of a zip line.  Every writer has experienced those tracts of time, those beloved fugue states, so much better than a chemical high.  If only we truly knew how to conjure them up on demand.

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

 

Indulge me the tired old “giving birth” analogy as a writer.  I’ve finished a damn book.  I’m elated and cautious all at the same time.  And as I move past the moment without celebration, without popping the sparkling apple juice at the dinner table or crowing too loudly on Facebook or tweeting, (OK, I posted it once) I am conscious the whole time that this process is a marathon, not a sprint.

 

I am still struck by something the writer Anthony Horowitz told me.  He is the officially sanctioned British author for all future Sherlock Holmes novels and the beloved Alex Ryder series for kids.  When I asked him what he did to celebrate completing a book he answered, “I take one full day off before I begin the next.” 

 

And so forgive me, dear reader, if I return to the next book, which is already tugging at my sleeve.  I hope to meet you in the fall on the road, in a book store, at a forum or library or Skyping into your book group from my cramped home office.  I thank you for reading and caring, for wanting to hold books in your hands or devour them digitally on a tablet.  I hope you always have an appetite for stories. Stories, after all, are the things that connect us.

 

“Those We Love Most “ – published By Voice – on sale September 11, 2012

 

Happy Valentine's Day

Recipes are the currency by which generations of women define and distinguish themselves from other families.  These sometimes secret formulas, handed down from mother to daughter, are inscriptions of endearment, the personal stamp encrypted in each dish like DNA.  For my husband’s family, it’s the rutabaga recipe at Thanksgiving and the corn and oysters stuffing.  On my side, it’s the secret ingredient of buttermilk in which to cook lima beans, Snickerdoodle cookies and a simple homemade teriyaki marinade for flank steak that tenderizes meat as if it were a five-star chop house.

 

And if cooking is a physical manifestation of love, then it was a heart-felt gift this past summer to receive my grandmother’s well-worn 1943 original  Joy of Cooking.  Like a butterfly working it’s way out of the cocoon, my mother has begun wriggling free of her possessions.  It’s an almost compulsive need to shed herself of her earthly weight before she is incapable of doing so, although thankfully there are no signs that she is flagging.  She is a methodical person, a plotter and list maker like me, and she is determined to hand her three girls the physical pieces of our legacy in person.

When I eyeballed the cracked spine and no-nonsense pale blue and white cloth cover, I hesitated.  True confession: I’m a sloppy cook book chef.  I like to improvise too much and I’m lazy when it comes to precise directions.  Blanching, poaching, measuring, sifting, these are all too fussy.  I like to experiment a little, break the rules.  Besides, I thought, I had already lovingly transcribed my favorite family dishes onto index cards in a recipe holder I‘d made as a kid in 4-H.   The book was delicate, the pages yellowed.

Inside the front cover was a notation in pencil from my grandfather.  And then in my grandmother’s alternatively loopy and cramped handwriting was a poem she had clearly copied as a younger wife, presumably to remind herself that the way to her young husband’s heart was ultimately through his stomach.

“Crestfallen bride, you labored long

To bake that lovely cake
And heard your husband’s
“Not so good as my mother used to make”

Before you shed your angry tears
Or hang your head in shame, 
Remember – not too long ago
His father said the same”

I smiled when I read this anachronistically docile and sentimental ditty.  Nana Stokes was anything but a blushing bride.  She was a grand, strong, southern woman, a concert pianist who moved north when she married a Yankee.  She had her funny eccentricities, her fur coat, her French words, her guided tours to foreign countries.   But almost above all of that, she was a consummate cook whose love for us all manifested itself in her giant Sunday suppers.  Long before people anguished over clogged arteries, gluten-free diets and veganism, she was a cooker of lard, that southern staple that made for feather-light fried chicken and pie crusts that flaked like croissants.   She boiled okras and used bacon grease liberally.  She salted watermelon and made berry sherbets and pound cakes with dairy cases of butter. She would have laughed in the face of canola oil or scoffed at Mrs. Dash.

My grandfather, a much quieter soul, was probably stunned into submission by her cooking.  I imagine that it was her ability in the kitchen that held him at times, that endeared her to him, that smoothed out her rough, bossy edges and her strident voice.  I wonder now, how he viewed her when she was hard at work, her tongue  clucking, arms flailing around the timing of her roast, a shock of curly hair wilted onto her forehead by the blast of oven heat. 

Even in the later years of their marriage, where habit and familiarity had frayed their patience, made them snappish and outwardly less considerate, her cooking brought all parties to the table on a Sunday after church.  Food was the great equalizer.  Being called to the table meant children washed their hands and grown-ups laid down their discussions before pulling up a chair and smoothing a napkin on their laps. Heads bowed, lips murmured, silverware clattered.   Family time. 

Flipping through the middle pages of The Joy of Cooking, a yellowed newspaper clipping fell out, and I reached to pick it up.  Now this was more like the feisty grandmother I knew. 

“Remember Christopher Morley’s little stanza – 

 “The man who never in his life
 Has washed the dishes with his wife
 Or polished up the silver plate –
 He is still largely celibate.”

And there it was, I smiled to myself.  The bookends of a bride’s life captured in this best-selling bible of domesticity.  She had left her father’s house to marry with the unbridled hopefulness of a young woman. And she had evolved, like all of us, into a more realistic and gimlet-eyed wife.  Her chosen stanza reflected the shrewder woman who had come to terms with a rich, mellowing love amidst the servitude and routine of real life.  It was this wife who had wisely learned to barter a little nookie in the bedroom for some help in the kitchen.

Because lets face it, when all else fails, a cook can always withhold the dessert.

Healing Amongst Black & White Photographs

Guest Blog by Cathrine White
Photos By: Cathrine White © All rights reserved 

Life offers us so much through blessing us with gifts both seen and unseen.  After dropping my kids off at school, I sit in silence on a chilly winter morning.  I cherish the time spent in my sunroom where I am surrounded by photographs and memories from where I have come.  For this, I hold extreme appreciation and gratitude.

When I was asked to share my journey with the Woodruff family, I wondered how I would possibly describe what it has meant, taught and given me. It is all so very personal, as I hold so dear the unique bonds that I feel fortunate to have around me.  However, I can say this, sometimes in life we are given opportunities to open our hearts and show our kindness with what we know best.

Photography was born within me from a very young age.  I don't have a memory when it was not a part of me.  I never had professional schooling, it just became a voice of expression and energy.  Today it continues to bear witness to my joy, happiness, growth and hardship. For within every picture I have taken, there resides a story, a human soul that I aim to capture in all its truth and grace.

'Documenting' the story of Lee and Bob was given as a gift of friendship and celebration after Bob's devastating trauma that almost tore their family apart. Almost.  But the story I captured did not end in sadness and despair.  Instead it was about the resilience of not only the human body, but the human spirit.  It told the echoing tale of family ties, the power of love and the simplicity of prayer as the only plan that comes to mind.  Their family, their marriage, is bound deeply by faith, strength and determination. Their spirit is so easily seen in those initial photos I took, and that same spirit was a catalyst for the friendship that has blossomed into what it is today.

In hard times, all we want is to find usefulness and to help in any way that we can. For me, offering my photography was the only way I knew how to be useful.   That day, there was an awareness and gratitude that I imagine can only be felt after you have come so close to loss, experienced darkness and felt such uncertainty.  When asked how I capture the moments the way I do, my answer is this - it's a combination of energy and joy within me, a tremendous connection to what is right in front of me. When I pick up my camera, I absorb that connection in a way that is beyond seeing it - it is feeling it, becoming one with it.  It is as healing for my own soul as it can be for the subjects I shoot, a moment of pure synchronicity.   The word 'namaste' seems so fitting  - I honor the space within you that is most like that space within me.

That morning with those first moments of captured energy, became the beginning of many amazing moments of black and white photographs.  The years have gone by and we have grown a beautiful friendship. To me, and so many others, the photographs truly reflect their time of healing.

It continues to be a very special experience to grow with Lee and Bob. Their family's transformation has been a force of its own. They are a true testament to strength and humility. I hope my photographs will always be a memory for what once was and how far they have come and continue to move forward in their personal lives, as well as their efforts to raise awareness with Remind.org.

With Gratitude,
-Cathrine White

Cathrine lives in New York with her husband and three children and their pug Biggie. She travels between L.A and New York for her passion.  To connect and view more of Cathrine's work please go to her website and blog:

http://cathrinewhitephotography.com/www/blog/New York  Los Angeles
917.721.7604