Stamina

Facing Fear is (almost) here! (Yes, I know that rhymes.)

The books didn't arrive in time for yesterday's event at the Wisconsin Book Festival, but they will be shipped from the printer this Friday. You can pre-order now on Amazon--just search for "Strasser Facing Fear"--or, if you'd like a signed copy, send me a check for $20 and I'll mail one to you. My address is 511 Sheldon Street, Madison 53711. I imagine that local (Madison) bookstores will have copies in a couple of weeks. Those of you who live elsewhere can order copies through your favorite bookseller.

Whew. Seeing this book through to publication has taken stamina, for sure. I started work on it in the late fall of 2004, after Bush's reelection campaign, and wrote the first draft in the spring and summer of 2005, while I was recovering from surgery and undergoing the first rounds of chemotherapy for stomach cancer. Without the friendly urging and deadlines set by my writing buddy Anne-Marie Cusac (who was working on her own book on the history of punishment in America, due out in the spring from Yale University Press), Facing Fear might never have happened.

And then there was the revising, the search for a publisher, the anxiety about whether I would live long enough to see the book into print.... Not to mention the question of how someone without a speaking voice or the ability to travel very far for very long can schedule and perform the readings essential to marketing a book these days. (For my memoir, Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life, I organized one- or two-week book tours to both the east and west coasts.) Any of you who have marketing ideas for Facing Fear, please send them along! And if you can somehow help by spreading the word via blogs, email, Facebook, or anything else, bless you!

I hadn't planned to write so much about what it took to get a book out into the world, but yesterday evening, thanks to introductions by Anne-Marie, I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Reginald Gibbons, a poet who teaches at Northwestern University. Gibbons' latest collection of poetry, Creatures of a Day, has just been named a finalist for the National Book Award. Like an earlier book, this one was published by Louisiana State University Press--but Gibbons has had to seek out a different publisher for each of his other five poetry collections. (He's also the author of a terrific novel, Sweetbitter, and many scholarly works.) And even after a distinguished career as a poet, Gibbons spent five or six years and fielded rejections from eight or nine publishers before finding a home for Creatures of a Day.

I asked him what he told his students about publishing their work, given this experience of the brutal reality of the American poetry scene. He said that he quoted his own teacher, Stanley Kunitz, who died in 2006 at the age of 100, after a 76-year career as an active and widely-published poet. What it takes to be a published poet, Kunitz said, is "stamina."

Actually, I think that's what it takes to be anything. It takes stamina to be alive. As someone has said, the key to success in life is showing up. (I don't have the stamina to chase down the source of this bit of wisdom.)

So although this post may seem to be about writing, or poetry, or publishing, it really is a metaphor. As I head farther and farther out on the tail of the gastric cancer survivorship distribution, some days I feel as though I'm crawling on all fours, hanging on for dear life; other days (the really good days, like today) I feel as though I'm balancing gracefully on a high wire without a net. But always, it's about showing up. About stamina--mental and, as much as possible, physical.

Thanks, Reg, for the reminder.