I am writing several books at once. I don’t know why I work this way - but I do. I have stopped arguing with myself about this, and started sharing the work.
I published this one on my other Substack: All the Books Im Writing
This is Chapter Two of The Wild Book — a book being written one chapter at a time, in the story way of things. It’s a book about learning to stay in your own color. About finding what you like, what you remember, what you are made of.
→ Find the Chapter Index and Overview here.
Iguana
It’s November 2017. I’ve driven to the Gulf Coast of Florida, parked my car and stepped onto a little white speedboat. I’ve been ferried out of a cove where pink flamingos lift and set down their feet. The water opens around us — crystal clear, and a sky so blue it’s almost purple. I am headed toward Little Gasparilla Island. I have no idea what it is. I have followed my teacher here.
The first thing I notice, once the speedboat has pulled away, is the silence. No cars. No trucks. My whole body exhales—I mean that my cells begin to release tension. My bones begin to release what they have been holding onto, for me, for years.
I hear the waves. The birds. A woman in shorts—beach-blond hair tucked under a baseball cap, her skin the red-gold leather of everyday sun—pulls up in a golf cart. She loads our luggage into the back and we three writers pile in to be ferried along sandy footpaths to the waterfront, where a house with a screened-in porch quietly waits.
There are no stores on Little Gasparilla and our supplies, I later learn, will be ferried to the island by the chef who’s been contracted to prepare all of our meals. I have no idea how this weekend will work because I don’t care. I am here for a different reason — because Joyce invited me, along with a hand-picked group of other writers, to participate in a special weekend workshop on memoir.
The workshop is led by Joyce Maynard. Best-selling author. Fierce, feeling truth-teller. Author of the controversial memoir of her time with JD Salinger, after her article “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” appeared in the New York Times. Later, when the Salinger affair was over and she was married with three small children, Joyce wrote the NYT column, Domestic Affairs, which is where I first encountered her, Sunday mornings over bagels and lox. Later still, after the column closed, Joyce launched a zine of the same name, continuing to tell her stories about parenting and marriage and life in a small New Hampshire town.
Her work made me think I might write about my life too, and when I was a young mother of toddlers, I sent her a brave letter. She wrote back — and she published my letter. My first byline — ever.
In those early years, Joyce and I exchanged many letters. I think we talked on the phone once — a few years later. When she called, asking about self-syndication, which I’d mentioned in a letter. By then, I had my own parenting column in Kids & Company, a local magazine and each month, after one of my stories was printed, I made copies and mailed them, in hand-addressed envelopes to all the parenting zines in the US. Somehow, I’d gotten a list.
Kids & Company was paying me $200. The other zines — $25 to $100 per publication. There were some essays that garnered me real money; on one of the more popular ones, I’d earned more than $600. All of this happened, I told Joyce, because she’d published that first piece in her zine.
Later still, when she started offering workshops, I saved up my nickels and finally attended one — on Star Island, off the coast of New Hampshire.
Now I’d followed her to the Gulf Coast of Florida. A little island with no cars or stores. A circle of women with writing to share.
Joyce stands beside a whiteboard, holding a dry erase pen, and turns to me.
“Amy, what do you like?”
The story continues over here with a realization about my own trauma story - which arrives with a memory of an iguana.
Learn more about The Wild Book here.
Learn about All the Books I’m Writing here.
