MEMOIR WRITING CAN BRING CLOSURE

 Dread of writing The Orchard was a cloud that hung over my head for fifteen years.  I knew I had to write it, but I kept putting it off. I didn't want to go through it, revisit it, but I felt a certain duty to tell the story since I'd lived it and I was a writer. I felt an obligation to document farming culture in an anthropological way. But I didn't want to write it. I suppose I could say it was on my bucket list if the bucket list contained things I didn't really want to do.  But now that all of my appearances and talks and events are over (except for two in April of next year), I've been rewarded with something unexpected.

Closure. 

I was never after closure. I never considered closure, and I've never heard memoir writers mention it. Some people have asked if writing The Orchard was cathartic, and I have to say not in the least. Quite the opposite. It was horrible and it was torture and it was awful in every way. And once it was published, I had to go around and talk about it. More torture.  I can now admit that while making public appearances I often regretted writing the book because I had to keep reliving it at each event.  I was like a cutter who traveled place to place and cut myself in front of an audience. Oh, that's so melodramatic.

But now... NOW, it's like a door has slammed on that old world. It's over over over for me. I did my job. I no longer have to remember and hold it in my head because I've written it down. I no longer have it looming before me, this book I have to write, this life I have to revisit.  This duty. I never expected to get anything out of writing it, nothing for myself, so the closure has been such a surprise.  Right now I'm wondering if closure ever uncloses. I suppose it does, and I still have those two gigs next year, but I don't know... I feel that it's truly behind me.

Maybe.

PICKING THE SCAB

I'm retiring.

Because I was a writer who'd lived through this uniquely American experience, I felt an obligation to write The Orchard. My goal in writing the book was to document and capture a farming era in an anthropological yet personal way. At the same time, I didn't want the book to be about me, or about one family. I wanted it to feel like every farm, and every family. I wanted it to be a parable. Which is why I used my name but once in the book. I didn’t want to intrude upon a story that I didn’t feel was my story, but was rather everybody’s story. Maybe America's story.

The Orchard is a book about one farm, but it’s also a book about every farm. It’s a story about our children and our children’s children.  It’s a story about a young girl who falls in love, marries an apple farmer, and never sees the world in the same way again.  And it’s a story about one of the deepest and most profound loves of all: the love of a parent for a child.

My hope is that people will still be reading The Orchard in fifty years, or even a hundred years. That it will become a doorway to the past. That people a hundred years from now will pick up the book, or more likely download the book, and say, "This is what life was like on a farm in the 1980s.  And this explains why the world is the way it is today."

But right now I can't talk about it anymore. I wrote it. I didn't want to write it, but I forced myself to do it because I thought it was important.  And I'm grateful to all of the independent booksellers who embraced and hand-sold the book. I'm grateful to the people at Grand Central Publishing who embraced the book, who felt it was important. I'm grateful to my agent, who felt the same way. I'm grateful to the reviewers and the book bloggers and  and the people I will never know who passed the book to a friend or relative.  But now that the release of the paperback has come and gone, I have to move on.

Every time I talk about the story…it's like opening a wound that's just begun to heal. It's not too bad when the events are one on top of the other, but once there is a gap of a few weeks… that's when it's tough. That's when I have to go back there all over again after starting to feel like myself again.

 I really thought I would get used to talking about The Orchard.  But it doesn't get any easier. I think the reopening of the wound over and over and over…that's not healthy.  

So for now, I'm retiring. I've committed to some events in April of next year, but at this time I'm not accepting any new speaking invitations.  I feel bad about that, because it's  such an honor to be invited to speak, but I'm retiring from public speaking, at least public speaking about The Orchard. Of course, like so many people who retire…  Well, we know how that goes. 

CELEBRATION DINNER SEPTEMBER 25

Indie booksellers design beautiful displays for books they believe in. They suggest books they love.  They help build a sense of community. Every month, indie booksellers pick their favorite books and vote on them, creating the Indie Next list. (The Orchard was number two on their list last September.) I can't imagine a world without independent bookstores.


 I came here planning to post information on an upcoming book event, but then my brain took off in the direction of indie love.

Indie booksellers have been a powerful force behind the success of The Orchard.  I know of independent booksellers who've hand sold hundreds of copies. They've LOANED the book to customers who said it sounded boring.  They've tied customers up and made them sit in chairs while reading the book to them. Wait. I think that last one was just a dream. But you know...

But anyway, back to my post.

I will be in Winona, Minnesota, September 25 to help celebrate the ten-year anniversary of The Book Shelf.  They have a lovely dinner planned.  Here is a bit from

The Book Shelf website:

 09/25/2012 6:30 pm
In celebration of our ten year anniversary, we are having an author dinner with Theresa Weir on Tuesday, September 25 at 6:30pm. The Blue Heron Coffeehouse will be providing a multi-course fine dining experience, where Theresa Weir will be reading from her book, The Orchard. Dinner is $35.00, $50.00 with wine.

You can find more information about it on their Facebook page

SEPTEMBER 19 EVENT

A friend recently pointed out that September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. 
Not sure how this will impact my event at the Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview, Minnesota, where I will be reading short stories, along with an excerpt or two from The Orchard.

Rural America Writers' Center

AUTHORS FEAST

Have you heard of an authors feast, but had no idea what it was? Same here. But now that I've been to one, I can tell you all about it. Authors lie naked across a banquet table, and booksellers eat food from your body while you tell them about your current book.

Wait a darn minute.

I'm not sure that's right. I think that was a dream. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a dream. Okay, scratch the naked on the table part. Now I'm sitting fully clothed at the table. Booksellers around me. They eat while I talk about my book. (All attending authors are fed before the event. One author to every table.) After ten or fifteen minutes, we're told to change tables. An escort leads us to the next table where we are surrounded by booksellers and we tell them about our book. After ten or fifteen minutes, we're told to change tables and we do it all over again. I'm guessing there were twenty to thirty tables at the event I attended in Detroit (GLIBA, Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association). Each writer visits three tables in all. It took me one table to really get into the groove. Sorry, first table. I couldn't quite grasp that I was supposed to do almost all of the talking all of the time. That seemed rude, but by my second table I understood that this is all about sharing my book with booksellers. It sounds weird, but it was actually very nice.

DEWEY FOREVER

If you happen to read The Orchard, you’ll know that I lived just outside the town of Burlington, Iowa, before moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. My place was located four miles out of town, up a steep and rutty dead-end road. At the bottom of the hill, before the challenging road, was a farm owned by a strange little man who wore nothing but brown jockey shorts that had once been white, striped tube socks, and tennis shoes. His name was Dewey, and I never saw him in anything but the shorts, although I assume he wore more clothing in the winter.


Dewey’s style of undress wasn’t unlike that of the Naked Bookseller immortalized by Lee Goldberg back in 2006.

Lee is the one wearing clothes.


Dewey sold ear corn out of his barn. A person could just drive into the barn, put a bag in her car, and leave money in a wooden box. I never ran into Dewey while buying corn to feed the squirrels. There were times I was sure he was in the house, and times I could tell he’d just been there. Like a bowl of milk left for the cats. The best way to get a halfway decent look at him was when he was walking his dog along the road, or when he was in the field on his tractor. I was told he wore the underwear to town, and that he’d been escorted out of the mall on more than one occasion. I was told the only person he liked was his mother, and she was dead.

He and I were both antisocial misfits, but I liked to think mine was temporary. I was healing, and I knew that one day I would emerge from my self-imposed exile ready to reconnect with the world. For Dewey, it wasn’t a phase. And I imagine when he was kicked out of stores, he didn’t see himself as the one who needed to conform.

One day I notice a lot of activity just across the road from his house, on the edge of a cornfield.

Dewey was building something.

Every time I passed, he was working away. Digging and prepping the ground with an end loader. Pouring cement. Tractoring in huge cement crosses that eventually made a fence. He painted them white. It took weeks. A monument? It looked like he was building a monument of some kind.

And then one day a metal archway arrived.

Dewey Byar Farms Forever.

I still wasn’t sure just what I was looking at. A monument to his farm?

A few weeks later, I drove by and saw something new inside the square of white cement crosses. A fresh mound of dirt. A grave. Flowers. And I realized Dewey had built a cemetery for himself. At home, I checked the obituaries and found that he'd died of cancer.

The evening before I moved from Iowa to St. Paul, I thought about the cemetery and rushed down the hill to take some photos before it got too dark.

Isn't it equal parts sad and fantastic?
And aren't people weird and wonderful?