Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
by Dawn Newton
When you daydream at a young age about being a writer, you anticipate rewards. Book publication, certainly, and a clear validation of your efforts. The brilliant accompaniment – the spotlight, the limelight, the footlights, YOUR NAME in lights. Yet winning an award for the writing you do in junior high, high school, or even college is not indicative of whether book publication will be on your horizon as a writer.
Although I was a first-generation college student of limited means, I determined at Michigan State University that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in writing. I was overjoyed to receive in my senior year an offer of admission to Johns Hopkins University, along with a teaching fellowship and tuition waiver. The year I spent pursing my degree brought thought-provoking lessons from professors, opportunities to share ideas with my colleagues in the fiction workshop each semester, the experience gained from serving as an instructor of writing and literature at a young age, and lasting friendships with people from across the country. I met literary greats John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, all notable for their distinctive and innovative prose styles.
My return to Michigan a year later was less exciting from an educational perspective. I worked a day job at a stock brokerage firm while still writing in my “spare” time. I perseverated over how I might ignite my writing career, knowing that I needed to keep getting to the page while determining what my next day job might be. And though the pace of my writing was slow, it did keep moving. At one point I relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was able to drive to the University of Wisconsin’s campus to discover a copy of my first published short story in the reading room of the college library. As I viewed the magazines on the shelves, my story in a special supplement with its own illustration, the hush of the room and the subtle hum of the lights overhead spun me into a moment of wonder.
In another search for the perfect day job, I joined my significant other in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I pursued a Masters in English Education. I continued writing while finishing the degree, learning new writing prompts in my classes. George Garrett allowed me to take his writing workshop for two semesters, and I once again had the privilege of learning from a gifted writer and workshopping stories with other students in addition to hearing readings from Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown, and others.
During my time in Virginia, I wrote a short story collection, which I sent out to literary publishing houses. I came home one day to a blinking light on the answering machine. I’d landed an agent I’d read about in Poets and Writers and queried. In the subsequent year, she tried to place a few of my stories in major glossies. After several months, she suggested that I keep working on the novel I’d begun so we could eventually pursue a two-book deal. Her approach made sense. I was pregnant with my first child, and my husband and I were returning to Michigan. Hope filled the air.
Yet a few years later, my parents had died of unrelated causes just thirty-six days apart. I carried another child. Grief and parenting consumed me. When I finally completed that novel in early 2001, the market for fiction had changed. The work was too quiet. I dumped the manuscript pages into a tub in my basement and started another novel. I’d landed a job at the local junior college teaching composition and a class on “Writing the Novel.” Even though writing wasn’t my bread-winning job, it was always the project I turned to next.
During this period, I signed up for an afternoon workshop offered by the University of Chicago. Stuart Dybek, a Chicago native with Michigan ties would select up to four stories to use in a discussion of craft. Before I made the trip to Chicago, I learned that my story had been selected. Would the story and I withstand the scrutiny?
On the day of the workshop, I sat in the large lecture hall. When my story was up, Dybek pointed out several positives. He asked me to identify myself and talk a bit about the story. Then he led the class through a discussion of why the story worked. When my husband met me to celebrate at an Italian restaurant later, I was exuberant as I recalled the moments under the lecture hall lights talking about my story.
After I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2012, I had to make much more strategic decisions about my writing, and I was able to do so with the help of two women writers. During a weekend writing workshop with the University of Michigan’s Bear River Writers Conference, I talked with Valerie Laken, a writer I’d studied with the previous summer. When she learned about my diagnosis, she offered to sharpen the first twenty pages of my old novel, to make it more marketable, and she gave me a list of a dozen small presses to which I could submit it. Her willingness to help provided me with energy to move forward on more submissions as well as a new project in memoir. The following summer I worked with Anne-Marie Oomen at the Interlochen Writers Retreat, transforming the journal entries I’d logged during my first few years of cancer treatment into linked essays for a memoir. I published Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages in 2019.
At the age of twenty-one, I’d begun a Master’s degree in Fiction Writing at a prestigious university. At the age of sixty-one, forty years later, I published my first novel, The Remnants of Summer. While I have not made any money from my writing or garnered long-term critical acclaim, I’ve earned my own rewards: moments of success, albeit small, intellectually challenging conversations, perceptive students, compassionate colleagues, mentors, and friends. Mesmerizing poems, stories, and essays to think about and explore with others.
The past eighteen months have demonstrated how bleak the world can become, but there are still sparks and flashes – even the sputtering flame of a recycled Mickey Mouse birthday candle my family saves for celebrations, melted near its base, black iconic shoes nibbled by hot wax – brings some measure of triumph. It’s not perfect, this world of the long-haul woman writer, but it’s as real as anything else out there.
Dawn Newton wanted to be a writer when she was younger and aimed during elementary school days to write a book about asthma. During summers, her mother drove her to the branch library in Waterford every two weeks and waited an eternity in the car without ever complaining, smoking Tareytons while Dawn filled out library slips inside for a stack of books.