I Like Weird People

by Samantha Wilde

Here I am. Riding a bike.

When I pick up a book in the bookstore or the library and look it over, deciding if I want to read it, I hope for an interesting character. In fact, I prefer a novel filled with eccentric folk, and by that I mean creative, interesting unusual, complex (not simply a a character who has more sex or happens upon more dead bodies than I do).

One of the masters of creating this kind of character is the incomparable Elinor Lipman. The only problem with her is that she doesn't write fast enough for my book a week habit.

And really what is the difference between a character who is experiencing an interesting or unique challenge and an interesting character? For me, it's the difference between buying a book and leaving it on the shelf-- because a unique, richly complicated character holds my attention even when she's doing the laundry, but an ordinary character requires an elaborate plot to prop her up and give her substance.

My book is SO interesting, cats read it.

Unfortunately, most readers don't want unique characters. One of the readers of my second novel, I'll Take What She Has, wrote about the book and gave me one of the most confusing compliments I've ever gotten. She wrote: "I loved the book and didn't like a single one of the characters." Apparently, my characters were too life-like.  I can still remember my editor looking at an early draft of the novel and erasing a number of scenes in their totality. The trouble with the scenes? They were too close to the truth. I think she wrote something in her notes along the lines of, "no one wants it to feel like their real life."

Most real people are weird in one way or another. Life is mixed-up and crooked in a beautiful, unpredictable way. The stories I've been writing since I was a child come from a desire to understand people in all their infinite, imperfect variety.

This past weekend my family and I went camping. We had many neighbors--and quite close--at this particular campground. I got to engage in some harmless people watching (it was unavoidable). What intrigued me the most? Not the people whose stories I could guess at, but the campers next to us whose story I just could not figure out. It appeared to be a woman camping by herself with her dog. She didn't make any noise. Her dog didn't bark. She spent a lot of time in her camper. I couldn't figure out why she was there. Who would go camping if they didn't like being outside? Her behavior was so curious to me that when I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep, I speculated on her circumstances and then I gave her an imaginary life I invented. That day at the campground with her could open a novel. Would she be running from something? Going towards something? Challenging herself with the trip? Escaping a situation?

Of course, this is my failure as a novelist. I don't get a plot then write a book. I get a character and then hang our with her. When my agent sent out my first novel to a series of editors, she forwarded me a few of the rejections (before I ultimately landed an editor and a two-book deal). I still remember one of the rejection emails she passed along to me. It read: "This is good writing looking for a plot."

Hmmm.

I guess I'll take that criticism. It sure beats, "a plot looking for good writing." Although I know that plot sells commercial novels. And weird people don't. Which is too bad, since most of us are pretty weird.

It begs a question: do we read/love the books that showcase the characters we are, or do we only read the books with characters who reflect what we wish we were (or imagine ourselves to be? In other words, pretty, successful, in love, rich, living an exciting, action-packed life, etc.)?

What do you think?

Samantha Wilde is the author of I'll Take What She Has and This Little Mommy Stayed Home. She is an ordained minister, hosts a radio show called You Are Loved, has taught Kripalu yoga for 14 years, and authored a book of spiritual essays, Strange Gifts. But in her real-life, she is the stay-at-home mother to three young children with a fourth on the way. And yes, that does sound very ordinary. But she assures you that, despite the domesticity of her daily life, she is actually quite interesting. Find her and like her on Facebook.

Don’t Kill The Mother

By Samantha Wilde 

In celebration of my fourth pregnancy (!), a little, fierce, no-holding-back piece I've been working on about mothers, fiction and life....

As my daughter writes, "the famole."

Our age may read like a time of crumbling walls of prejudice, women emerging from the rubble of all the political—and conceptual—wars of the past century to dust off their hands, wipe the soot off their faces and claim their share of freedom (or Facebook), but one bias sticks to us like jam left on a toddler’s face: we don’t like our stay-at-home mothers, in fiction or life. Quick, name one esteemed novel about a satisfied stay-at-home mother. Can’t do it? How about giving me the title of one acclaimed book about motherhood that isn’t also about (choose at least one): depression, suicide, kidnapping, mental illness, abduction or drugs? No, take your time. I can wait.

The articles, arguments, books, conversations, and consensus of the past decade seem to conclude that the much over-wrought issue of working versus staying-at-home motherhood has already enjoyed its five minutes in the sunlight of public awareness. That might be true if the country’s literature didn’t fall heavily on the side of the liberated working mother with an intellectual elitism that continues to diminish the contributions of at-home mothers, the vitality of the role and the absolute possibility that feminism and at-home mothering can peacefully, productively coexist.

I have written two novels about motherhood and my second one, I’ll Take What She Has, made some people angry. Of course any person writing about staying-at-home in fiction must endure the disregard of the greater literary community. Nothing could be more boring or less legitimate as a topic—unless the mother kills herself. Scandalously, I wrote a novel about an ambivalent stay-at-home mother who decides to keep staying home and believes she has made the better choice. Also, she lives.

 The progressive, working mothers—feminists, liberals, reinventing modern motherhood with their incredibly hard labor—stand fervently in literature against the folly (ailment?) of a mother's own full-time care of her children. As Judith Newman wrote in her New York Times review of Anne Enright’s memoir about motherhood, Making Babies: “To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.”

It seems that all people of any importance can agree on this matter. Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Ten Year Nap, received immense critical attention and it did nothing so strongly as point out that only one world matters, only one world exists: the world of business, commerce, economy, government. The world of a mother and child is a dream-state, a state of sleep and unconsciousness. It has no consequence, no redemptive value, no worth. That means the five million at-home mothers in this country are sleep-walking. (And is Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, who launching her working-mommy manifesto Lean In not so long ago, the one to save them from this condition?)

I have angered a few people for asserting, in a comic novel, that an intelligent woman would recommit to staying with her children—and that for some of us this is the best choice. If, in her misery, I had led her to the kitchen stove to turn on the gas, I would have a bestseller on my hands. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening springs to mind (it should, I wrote my English honors thesis on it), but yes, of course, let’s think of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar and her protagonist whose road to healing from mental illness begins with a prescription for a diaphragm.

The prevailing assumption that the tedium of childcare drives us insane only stands to reason if we lie to ourselves and say no other profession regularly assaults us with boredom. Then what of filing? Committee meetings? Government paper work?! Is it impossible that an intelligent person could enjoy spending time with children, could find it interesting, creative, rich? Unfortunately, women do write books about the compelling work of mothering, but you have to cross a political divide to get there. The literature coming out of the Right, from conservative, religious women, encompasses a few of these ideas. But no one is paying attention to that stuff. The important novels, past and present, literary and commercial, love to kill (or at least torture) the mother. The happy at-home mother is a source of disparagement and embarrassment—she has wasted her good education on a long, useless and dreary nap.

I’ve been wasting my Smith and Yale education for years on my children, not to mention the waste of writing comedies about motherhood (during nap times, no less). The only people who agree with my personal (I-don’t-care-what-anyone-else-does) stance on motherhood, cancel out my vote on every important political issue. This pro-choice, wildly liberal, feminist enjoyed Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s In Praise of Stay-At-Home Moms, and I’m the only one I know who read it.

Here’s what I think true intelligence delivers: the ability to hold together seemingly oppositional elements and see how brilliantly they can co-exist. Black and white is for the dogs. There isn’t only one world that matters. Happiness in at-homeness is not a form of stupidity (and that still doesn’t mean everyone needs to do it). Good books can have living mothers. Good books can even have joyful mothers. In literature and in life, you don’t need to kill the mother just because she’s the one folding laundry and changing diapers and singing lullabies. Make her happy. Let her live. I dare you.

Samantha Wilde is the at-home mother of three children, the author of This Little Mommy Stayed Home and I'll Take What She Has, an ordained minister and the author of Strange Gifts,a book about love and faith, a Kripalu yoga teacher, creator of the You Are Loved online radio show, the daughter of bestselling novelist Nancy Thayer, and clearly, quite often, a very tired (but happy) person. She loves to be liked on Facebook.

You Aren't One Person, Anyway (Writing IS Reinvention)

by Samantha Wilde

Once upon a time, I had an incredible career as a ballerina. But then, the teachers at my dance school measured my bones and decided I simply did not have the genetic connective tissue to hit the big time. I was thirteen.

Once upon a time, I worked at factory in Indiana pressing RV decals onto their backings. Except I kept coming in late for my five a.m. shift and they fired me. I was nineteen.

In the middle, I worked as a chamber maid, a babysitter, a cashier at the pharmacy, at a chocolate store, at a bookstore, at a music store, for a cleaning company, as a personal assistant to an elderly professor, in end-of-life care, at a flower farm, as as staff writer for a newspaper, as an ad exec for a newspaper, (as a babysitter again, as a cleaner, again), as a hostess at Chi Chi's, at a florist, as a nanny, for a Jewish newspaper, as an exotic dancer (just kidding. I wanted to see if you were still reading).

But I wrote my first book at age six and never stopped. I wrote books through each of my jobs, I kept writing through seminary and my yoga training, writing what I learned, what I cared about, what I didn't understand, my best ideas, my worst ideas.

In my unpublished life, I am a poet and a short story writer, a memoirist as well as a novelist. I'm an incredible essayist. And I can even craft a sexy Zen koan.

How does anyone do just one thing? Or write one thing? I have so many hats, my family chipped in and bought me a few more heads so I wouldn't have to keep changing them. When my husband and I argue, he hopes I'm wearing the minister hat (she's super loving and patient and if you get mad at you, she'll say, "Let's pray about this!). When my kids mess up, they hope I'm wearing my yoga teacher hat. "Breathe, relax, feel, watch, allow." They like that last one best.

I ALWAYS wanted to be a mother.

Sometimes I think I should have been a stand-up comedian. And when I don't feel that way, I'm absolutely convinced I ought to have become a nun (Episcopal until I became Buddhist). I would so long to join the Amish and spend my life in anonymity, farming, birthing children and wearing an apron. But then I'd also like to be the world's most famous liberal TV evangelist. If I could sing, I'd be a folk singer. If I was rich, I'd adopt a hundred children.If I was famous, I'd have my own talk show.

For the record, I've never wanted to be a hairdresser. (But see, I never said, I'm every woman.)

Choosing to become a minister and choosing to become a yoga teacher and choosing to become a full-time at-home mother and choosing to become the writer of humorous women's fiction drew me into a constant and fluid dance of reinvention. In yoga, every breath is a new beginning! In ministry, you get to be born again! You can;t find anything more reinvented than that. As a mother, every morning with my children presents a chance to try anew, with fresh ideas I learned about while reading another parenting book at night. As a humorous women's fiction writer...

Well, here is the smallest box I live in. Why do writers have to change names to become new again? Our we so attached to our novelists that we don't recognize how nobody is only one person, anyway? Every writer I know, without exception, can write in several genres, has secret books in them different than their working "voice." The scandal is not the drive and desire to reinvent (or the necessity), but the surprise it generates from others.

One of the best things about writing is the infinity of directions any sentence can take you, how with a word, the plot changes. Writing is reinvention. Sometimes we reinvent ourselves when we write. Sometimes we reinvent our pasts. Sometimes we reinvent an old story. Sometimes we reinvent an old idea.

Sometimes, I sit at my computer with that wanting to write like a song on my lips and it doesn't matter one bit what comes out. It's the writing that urges me on. When I slip into it, I have a hundred careers and I am all those people--and it is freeing to at once be me and not me. Well, I'm not one person, anyway. Are you?

You really get reinvented when you let your four year old choose your outfit!

Samantha Wilde is the author of I'll Take What She Has and This Little Mommy Stayed Home. She is an ordained minister and a yoga teacher, and the at-home mother of three young children. She really wants you to like her--or one version of her anyhow. You can also check out her Wilde Mama blog or follow her on Twitter: @whatshehas.

You Said The One Thing That Made All The Difference

by Samantha Wilde

I was on vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts, many years ago, by myself, feeling depleted and disconnected when I walked into town and into one of the candy stores to buy a favorite comfort food: fudge. The man who served me seemed more like the owner than an employee. He was older, gray-haired, with an air of being in charge. He rang up my purchase. It came to about $2.84 (I did say this was a long time ago!). I gave him two dollars and rooted around for the change. It wasn't small change, either, adding up to the greater part of another dollar. "Don't worry about it," he said, passing me the bag. "Enjoy."

Now I'm sure I haven't blown your mind with this tiny, insignificant story. Maybe you barely even made it through that paragraph and are still waiting for something exciting to happen. With our wonderful addiction to drama, tiny stories don't often arouse big responses. But I had a big response that day. Since I was feeling so down, and since feeling down often makes us feel isolated, separated, uncared for or unloved, this man's small act of kindness and generosity, his few words of spaciousness and grace, well, they made all the difference in the world. He gave me much more than an eight four cent gift. I walked out of the store lighter, like a chosen, lucky person.

I know many people who have experienced similar tiny moments when the right words were spoken at just the right time. Has this happened to you? Sometimes, a few words change the course of a life or even many lives. Our words have such power and promise. And writers deal in words. Most writers hope very much that their words will effect the readers, touch them, change them, uplift them, inform them, connect them. It was E.M. Forester who said: "Only connect."

In one of the early of my mother, Nancy Thayer's, 23 novels, she wrote the line, "It's never to late, in fiction or life, to revise." This sentence has leaped so far off the page that she once opened a catalog and found it had been used on a plaque! It's in books and on calendars. There is something strong and true and resonant about the statement and that is why it's taken on a life of its own.

I love how language and ideas can become a force in the world--independent of the author. A friend told me this: "There was a part of I'll Take Where She Has that meant so much to me I folded over the corner." Could there be sweeter words to a writer's ears? I have always wanted to write words in a book worthy of the corner fold. What about having some of your sentences underlined? Used in casual conversation? Spoken aloud? Kept in someone's mind as a talisman that strengthens them?

I had the opportunity to speak aloud some of my words to a large audience in support of an amazing local organization MotherWoman. I worked with another spoken word artists, Alysia Cosby, and we performed my Motherhood Is Meaningful Manifesto live for 450 people. Many people told me that our words inspired them. One of the mothers present said to me many days later, "Your words did so much for me that I left that day thinking YAY! That was exactly what I needed to hear. I felt changed when I left."

I am always giving people words. Sometimes, it's all I have! One way I do this is to share books that have made a difference in my life. If I have a friend going through a trial, I try to put my hands on just the right book and pass it along or recommend it. The ideas I've discovered in reading have healed me many times over. And so have the few simple words from friends and strangers, many of whom will never know the effect of their right words at the right time.

Isn't it incredible to think we all have that power--to use for the good? Here are some of my favorite words: "Thank you." "I love you." "I'm so glad to see you." "You are beautiful." "You are a good mother." "You are doing a good job." "You can do it!" "I'm here if you need me."

When have the words of someone else made all the difference in your life--words you've either heard or read? And what tiny event, almost insignificant, has words spoken in it that made a difference you've never forgotten?

Samantha Wilde is the author of the recently released I'll Take What She Has and This Little Mommy Stayed Home. She is an ordained minister, a yoga teacher, and the full-time, at-home mother of three small children who often say just the thing she needs to hear. She really appreciates it when people like her on Facebook (and is happy to return the favor), follow her on twitter, check out her mothering blog, purchase vast quantities of her novel, or make a movie out of one of her novels that becomes a blockbuster. "Here's a million, honey!" Those are some right words at the right time!

Let's go for a Sleigh Ride!

by Malena Lott

I'll confess: I'm a holiday junkie. I love so many things about October through January 2nd that I couldn't even list them all here, but what they have in common is tradition and that magical romantic quality about the season as a whole. It gets cold. We get closer. Don't we call more, hug more, make more of an effort to connect? The world doesn't slow down, but it does feel more in focus.

Sleigh Ride: A Winter Anthology is definitely my homage to the season and how something as simple as a sleigh ride can have such meaning in our lives. I invited fellow Girlfriend Authors Maggie Marr, Maria Geraci and Samantha Wilde to be a part of it and they graciously accepted. You'll also be introduced to debut authors Dani Stone, Jenny Peterson and Megan Barlog, who are great writers you're going to be seeing a lot more from.

To celebrate our launch, we're doing several great contests including the 7 Sleighs/7 Days of Giveaways contest (now on day 4) as well as the Big Stuffed Sleigh Contest that ends Nov. 30th ($150 value.)

The book is available in trade paperback and ebook. For a chance to win a print galley of Sleigh Ride, leave a comment on WHO YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE A SLEIGH RIDE WITH IF YOU COULD INVITE ANYONE IN THE WORLD. What would you talk about? Or would you not be talking? :) Thanks for reading, and happy holidays! 

In order of appearance:

In Samantha Wilde's "Monks and Musicians," a family sleigh ride turns a mother's life upside down, leaving her to decide the fate of her future and family.

In the romantic comedy "Noche Beuna," Maria Geraci shares what happens when a woman breaks tradition and takes the holidays into her own hands.

Jenny Peterson explores the powerful bond of sisters with a painful past in "Fairy Lights."

A phone call out of the blue from the former great love of her life causes a pharmacist to question her past and whether or not a second chance is worth the risk in Dani Stone's humorous, "No Place Like Home."

In Megan Barlog's story, "The Escape," a stable owner with a hover sleigh is drawn to a troubled young woman who needs his help to avoid the bleak future planned out for her.

When her dog jumps out of the car in a snowstorm in Vermont, the California girl has the wildest night of her life on her journey to find her dog and heal her heart in Maggie Marr's, "Dashing Through the Snow."

A grieving mother returns home at the holidays to face the family she walked away from after tragedy in Malena Lott's, "Snowflakes and Stones." 

Called "beautiful" and "touching," this collection is a Good Read/Good Deed project with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the domestic violence prevention cause through the Alpha Chi Omega foundation.  

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