A Good Ride on Good Horses

 Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of my fifth concussion, the big one--well, okay, the biggest one. I suppose any time you're transported to hospital by ambulance it counts as "big." It was the stupidest of my concussions, too--it was at the end of a foxhunt when we were heading back to the horse trailers, cantering easily across a mown hay field. My mare, Sarah, caught the back edge of her front shoe with her back hoof, and tripped, and I went over her shoulder. Shouldn't have been much, but either I was quite unlucky or my brain had had enough of being knocked around. I was unconscious for eight minutes. When I started to come to, I was surrounded by sniffing foxhounds. One of them started to squat, and I batted and him and growled, "Don't you pee on me," which made our huntsman say, "Oh, thank God."

The huntsman hadn't noticed that Sarah was missing a shoe. I'd been at the back of the very small field, and no one knew why on earth I'd ended up on the ground, let alone unconscious. He'd called the local emergency response, and, when they told him they couldn't send an ambulance to a hay field no matter how exactly he could tell them where it was, rode out to the closest road and found a mailbox with an address on it and gave them that. He also, when the ambulance arrived, convinced them to take me to my home hospital in Bristol instead of the closest, which I think was Greenville. I had an MRI and didn't have a brain bleed. My children were making their ways home for Christmas. My husband rushed to the hospital and held my hand. The ER doc suggested I not ride "for a week or two."

I took six months off, which was the recommended return-to-play from my sport, eventing, which unfortunately sees a fair number of concussions. It was a long slow recovery. For the first several weeks I slept 14 or more hours per day. I couldn't stand to have my head moving in three dimensions, so yoga, which I loved, was out. Worst of all, I had trouble writing--not with ideas or stringing words together, but with the appearance of print on a page or a screen. I couldn't switch between fonts, or between handwritten and typed words, so I had to quit my volunteer job entering data for Bristol Faith in Action. I was working on The War I Finally Won, and the only way I could keep the words from dancing on the screen was to turn down the brightness of my screen and make the font size bigger. And then I could only work for an hour or two before I needed a nap. 

It was a sucky winter, but by spring I was better. In the summer I took a Ride Safe clinic to reduce my chances of injury when coming off a horse. (I'd agreed to quit foxhunting and stay at the lower levels of eventing, but I still wanted to ride.) The Ride Safe clinic was fantastic; I highly recommend it. And I think it did teach me new muscle memory, as I've fallen off a few times since then and managed to protect my head. (It goes without saying that I always wear a helmet. In fact I've got a new one on order now that Virginia Tech just released their new research on concussion prevention.)

But I wasn't right. I was pretty close to right nearly everywhere but in the saddle. The rest of my life went on well. When I was riding I felt short of breath, sometimes dizzy; I couldn't do things I'd always done easily, and I sometimes did completely the wrong thing--little staccato blips of putting my hands or legs or upper body where they didn't belong. Once my trainer, and good friend, Cathy Wieschhoff roared at me, "WHERE IS YOUR MUSCLE MEMORY?" and the only thing I could say is, "I don't know."

My daughter was away at school. My books were doing well, I was more in demand as a speaker, I was traveling a lot. I was a little anxious in the saddle, I have severe asthma, I hadn't exercised in those six months of recovery--I had all the reasons, but no answers. 

Then the pandemic hit. I wasn't going anywhere. I had been riding consistently, but mostly just hacking around the fields, sometimes jumping small things. Now I set about fixing whatever was wrong. I worked on the anxiety and asthma. I worked on slowly becoming more fit. I rode every day. 

I rode poorly.

Sarah was injured in the field. I borrowed a friend's pony but didn't feel comfortable on him. I leased a saintly horse and got back into competition, sort of--I survived, but mainly due to the horse's goodness and care. I wasn't riding worth a nickel. 

It's very frustrating to lose competence in something you love. I really could not figure it out. 

My leased horse had to go back to his owners. Cathy found me a sweet intelligent mare with smooth paces and a broad back, perfect for me. I named her Rosie. I rode her every day and made almost no progress, all winter long.

Then I bought an Apple watch, for two features: its ability to tell me my blood oxygen percentage (a measure of how much my asthma is affecting me) and its fall alarm, which would alert my family if I fell off when riding alone. But I started noticing two things: my heart rate variability was always abnormally low--a sign my autonomic nervous system was running the show--and my heart rate itself soared whenever I rode. If I used the exercise bike in my basement, normal increase commensurate with the exertion. If I trotted around the field, my heart went above 140 bpm. If I cantered or jumped, 170 bpm. This is not remotely normal.

The kicker came when my friend Caroline and I went to Cathy's in May, and had a gymnastics lesson. I would trot into the gymnastic line, canter out. Then I'd wait while Caroline did the same. One hour. Heart rate between 155-170 bpm the entire time. 

My friend Kelly, a biology professor who also rides, suggested that this was all neurological, unhealed damage from my concussion. And it was. This post is already long enough without my going into medical detail, but I spent the summer making trips for treatment to a functional neurologist in Raleigh, and my poor brain is finally better 

Yesterday was cold and bleak. Katie and I haven't ridden much in the last few weeks of rain. We went out to our little ring on our filthy, shaggy horses, and we had the best rides--lovely moments of trot and canter, balance and harmony. It's all coming back now, and Rosie, who loves harmony, all but purred. 

It's been six years, and I'm finally reaching the end.

Happy Monday

 It's an odd day, isn't it? Around here the schools are closed, and I believe PenguinRandomHouse is shut down, too, for the regular two-week all-publishing-houses holiday. My son arrives from Chicago on Thursday. The post office just dropped off two Christmas gifts I'd ordered as well as Cookiepalooza, a box of assorted cookies my friend Rae sends us every year. We love Cookiepalooza; we all have our personal favs. (Meanwhile, Rae, if you get a book that doesn't look like it's from anyone, it's from me. Amazon didn't allow gift messages this year. And I KNOW I shouldn't be ordering from Amazon. Truth is that I'd bought six copies of my dear friend Betsy's new book, Reader I Murdered Him, all planned as gifts, and then I spontaneously gave two to Katherine Paterson and Stephanie Tolan when they were here, so I had to replace them, and of course I didn't think of it until last minute. So.

Our house is absolutely transformed by Christmas decorations, courtesy of my husband, who gets more artistic with every passing year. Our outdoor lights are lovely, too. Some of the trees we used to decorate have gotten too big for that, so last spring we planted a lot of new evergreens (really!) so that we still had plenty of appropriate light-bearing trees. The Santa Duck is up on Weaver Pike, with a new improved stand apparently sponsored by Lowe's. I love the Santa Duck. Everyone does. Also, I need to shout out to the person who lives in the house across from Tennessee High in one direction and Tennessee Middle in the other. They've got a Grinch in their yard and he's taking down the Christmas lights--there's a tree laying sideways on the lawn and another drooping from the edge of the porch. It's inspired.

Meanwhile, at ALI, we're giving out books for Christmas: 500 to Bristol, Virginia, schoolchildren; 75 to the YWCA after-care program; 77 to Bristol Faith in Action; 80 to children who came to the Holiday Open House on State Street; several dozen to an organization in Johnson City who needed last-minute donations for kids aged 0-16. Our regular program is for kids ages 9-12, but we were really lucky this year in that both Books-A-Million in Bristol and Barnes & Noble in Johnson City did book drives on our behalf, so we had absolutely beautiful books for all ages to share. We got a bunch of toys and stuffed animals, too--most of those went to Isaiah House, the transitional place for kids awaiting placement in foster care. If you gave a book this season, thank you so much. (If you didn't--there's still time!) This year we have so much to be grateful for, but tops on our list is the connections we've been able to foster with so many area organizations this year. 

Happy second night of Hannukah to my Jewish friends. I will be Team Sour Cream until I die.

Books Saves Lives--Bid on a Zoom With Me!

 

Hey all--

I think any of you who know me at all know how passionately against book-banning I am. I'm also a huge advocate for diversity of all types in children's literature, and as such have supported We Need Diverse Books from its inception. WNDB has just started an initiative against book banning called Books Save Lives. I know books save lives; I read my fanmail, and children write to me to tell me that it's true. 

Like most children's book authors, I do paid in-person classroom visits. I'm expensive, and I'm good. As a usual thing I don't do paid Zoom visits, but every year I make an exception in support of WNDB. Their annual auction opens today, and you can bid to have me speak to your classroom or organization via Zoom here. I hope you will! I'd love to talk with your students, and you'd be contributing to a cause very dear to me. 

Happy Birthday to Me!

 Today is my book-birthday: the publication date of my 19th book, She Persisted: Rosalind Franklin.

Here's the lovely cover:

Writing a biography of Rosalind Franklin was, oddly enough, a bucket-list item for me. Back when I first dared to think of myself as a writer (while I was, like Rosalind, working as a research chemist) I wrote a quick list of stories I wanted to write, and "Rosalind Franklin's story" was on that list. I think I was 24 then, so I wanted to write about Rosalind for over thirty years. Two years ago, when Philomel, the publisher, announced the first list of 12 "She Persisted" early chapter biographies, all about women who achieved remarkable things, I wrote my usual editor to find out who was editing the series. (Both Philomel and Dial, my usual publisher, are imprints of Penguin Random House.) I send that editor an email saying, essentially, I call dibs on Rosalind Franklin, and she wrote back that Rosalind was on their list for the second year of the series and that she was all mine. 

Writing her story was a delight. Rosalind was a brilliant and meticulous scientist who achieved remarkable x-ray crystallographic images given the limitations of the equipment she was using. One of these confirmed the structure of DNA, something many scientists were working hard to understand. Rosalind's assistant, Maurice Wilkins, shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA alongside the better-known Watson and Crick. Rosalind didn't, because Nobels can't be given posthumously. Rosalind died at age 37 from ovarian cancer very possibly caused by the radiation leaked from the early x-ray microscopes. When James Watson wrote his book about the discovery, The Double Helix, he deliberately downplayed and distorted Rosalind's role and character. Even Francis Crick called it fiction. I'm not sure how much of that was actual misogyny--I think Watson would have thrown Crick under the bus if he could have gotten away with it--but it helped hide the truth about Rosalind Franklin's contributions for a long time. People who study science are mostly aware of the real story--I was, back in my early 20s, and not through any extraordinary effort--but a lot of people aren't. I know, because I've been talking about this book for the past several weeks, and been surprised by the number of people who ask, "Who was Rosalind Franklin?"

Read the sweet little book, and you'll know. And to the real Rosalind Franklin, of blessed memory: I know they've named the Mars Rover after you, and a building at Oxford University, and a whole bunch of other things, but I've honored you in my own way. The sweet little mare I bought just after I signed the contract for the book? I call her Rosalind Franklin. xoxo

Thankful for Katherine Paterson

 Good morning. Happy Monday. Cyber Monday, if you're into online shopping, which I'm mostly not. I don't really in any way do the Black Friday thing either--I'm not sure if that's because I disdain modern commercialism or am just too privileged to need to spend the day after Thanksgiving shopping in order to afford the gifts I want to give. (Both?) Either way, I spent the day after Thanksgiving picking out a Christmas tree on a little North Carolina farm, then watching the USA play England to an unexpected tie in the World Cup. In terms of the pool standings the tie doesn't mean much, but it was really great to see the team play well. I'm invested in Team USA Soccer now that my son works for them. 

His Thanksgiving dinner sponsored by the US Embassy in Qatar turned out to have 600 guests and very long lines for food, but he did get turkey. I asked if the team ate there too, and he sounded shocked--apparently it's not the done thing to stuff yourself senseless the day before a big World Cup game.

I'm thankful for my lovely children, of course--always am, every day--but this year I was especially thankful for the technology that let me see my son in real time while I spoke to him on Thanksgiving, even though he was--checks Google Maps--7,202 miles away.

I'm also thankful for this Wednesday, November 30th, because I get to be with Katherine Paterson again. I'm appearing with her and fellow author Stephanie S. Tolan at 7:30 pm at Central Presbyterian Church (it's the one next to King, not the one across from St. Anne's.) Stephani is the winner of a 2003 Newbery Honor for her hilarious book, Surviving the Applewhites. (I just went onto Amazon to check the date of the award, and was informed that I bought the book in hardcover on March 23, 2003. Go me.) I've never met Stephanie but I admire her work, and she and Katherine are in town because their new play, Good King Wenceslas, is debuting at the Paramount by the King University theatre department, Thursday at 11 am and Friday at 7:30. I presume the public is invited. I know I'll be there, as well as to Katherine's 9:45 presentation on Thursday at the King University Memorial Chapel, and the 4:00 pm Thursday meet-and-greet at the Kegley room in the Bristol Public Library. 

Phew. Thursday is going to be a big day, and I for one am going to relish every moment.

I adore Katherine Paterson. I always have. I've said in public, several times, that her book The Great Gilly Hopkins (Newbery Honor, 1979) had a huge influence on me as a writer. It's funny, and spicy, and honest in a way that until then hadn't been done. Along with Beverly Cleary, Katherine Paterson changed the course of children's literature. Her work laid the foundation for the wonderful explosion of creative stories being written today. 

Also, she's funny, and kind, and I love her. She graduated from King University here in Bristol, back awhile ago, so she still returns here often. She's hale for 90 years old, but she is 90 years old. I cherish every moment I get to spend with her. I hope you'll come be with us. You'll cherish her, too.

Hello Again

 I've been wanting to get back to the blog for awhile now. In some way it's connected in my mind with moving on from the pandemic--I think because during the pandemic there was a lot I didn't want to talk about. My family were all safe, and things were tough, but not nearly as tough as they were for a lot of people. I don't think we'll ever get a straightforward ending to this thing, but I'm travelling again, and my kids are back to mostly normal lives. My Facebook memory today was from three years ago, NCTE, the very last book conference I attended (after a couple-year span when I went to a TON of conferences); in two weeks, I'm going to my first live school event since then. I'm pretty excited.

Meanwhile I just joined Hive Social, a group like Twitter but without Elon Musk. I enjoy Twitter because I get to interact with a lot of my fellow kidlit writers there, but I hate Elon Musk, and today I realized that "I hate Elon Musk" was sufficient reason to join a different community. I am friends with 3 people on Hive so far, all of them writers, so if you're there please friend me so I can find you. 

Yesterday in the World Cup, the United States tied Wales 1-1. Not a great showing, not an awful one. I watched hoping to get a glimpse of my son, who's a strategy manager for the US Soccer Federation--business strategy, not game strategy--and who is in Qatar to help run things for our team. We love a lot of sports in this country but soccer is the global game--just before the opening kick yesterday two men came to install my new dryer. They were speaking Spanish to each other. I showed them the photo my son had just texted, of himself and his fellow employees at field level, and the two men grinned and told me their team, Ecuador, had beat Qatar the day before. 

In other news: I have a book coming out in three weeks: She Persisted: Rosalind Franklin, about one of the co-discoverers of DNA. I'm working on the book that will come out in spring 2024. It's coming well but doesn't have a title yet--it did have one, but that's been scratched. It's about history and ghosts and I quite like it.

My horse threw a shoe on the opening day of deer season, colossally bad timing given that my redneck farrier takes the whole first week of deer season off. The horse--her name is Rosalind Franklin, after the scientist, I got her right after I signed the book deal--one thing that happened during the pandemic is that my horse Sarah sliced her leg open in the pasture and did survive, which was by no means certain, but isn't really rideable anymore--anyhow, Rosie, the horse (the real Rosalind Franklin HATED being called Rosie, but the mare rather likes it) is very attached to me and was very, very angry that I was gone most of November. When I came back we had one ride in which she was righteous and dramatic and wanted to run hard and jump big things, and I, who'd been mostly sitting on boats for two weeks, did not, and then she threw the shoe and now she's blaming me for it. 

I was in Peru. Peru is worth a lot of blog posts. I'll get to that. Meanwhile, good to see you all again.

Healing Through Narrative: A Gift from the Old Knitting Factory

 Wow, I had no idea I'd gone three months without writing a blog. I'll try not to do that again. I've been writing a lot of other stuff, and there's been some big changes since April 1st. Appalachian Literacy Initiative was awarded some lovely grants that are going to allow us to double the number of students we serve from last year (and that was doubled from the year before!) AND hire our first employee. Her name is Hannah Smith, we all adore her, and today is her first regular day.

If you live near Bristol and have been hankering to help out at ALI, you can now drop by to sticker books and help Hannah any day M-F from 9-3. This makes me practically giddy. Last school year the entire board were working about as hard as we could, given the limitations of our other commitments, so we'd never be able to expand like this without Hannah.

Oh, and if you're a teacher, grades 3-5, in an Appalachian region school that is greater than 50% free lunch, you'd be eligible for our program. Applications are on our website, readappalachian.org, and are open until August 31st.

The other big news is that I learned that some weird symptoms I'd been having, especially while riding, which I'd tried to fix by addressing asthma and anxiety and some other stuff, were actually still the result of brain damage from my TBI five and a half years ago. AND THEY WERE FIXABLE. My biologist friend Kelly steered me toward a functional neurologist in Raleigh, and I've been going for treatments a few days a month, plus doing eye movement exercises at home. The difference is astonishing.

Also I took my new little mare, Rosalind Franklin, to our first two starter horse trials. She was overwhelmed and anxious, screaming for my daughter's horse, the first one--and we finished on our lousy dressage score, in second place. She was brave and bold the second one (and my daughter's horse wasn't there) and we finished on our very good dressage score, in first place! It was wiener-level, but we were the best wiener level pair, and I was thrilled.

None of that is what I came to say today. I came to say that yesterday I took a lovely Healing Through Narrative mini writing retreat, on Zoom, from my friend Betsy Cornwell, and if you're interested in that sort of thing I think you should take one, too. I got a lot more out of it than I intended.

I don't mean that rudely at all. Betsy's a NYT bestselling author of YA fantasy novels. She's a graduate of both my college (Smith) and my husband's (Notre Dame); the Smith alum online boards is where I first got to know her. We've been friends for five years now. We've only met once, but that's because she lives in Ireland and there's been this pesky global pandemic. I'm going to go see her next year, and I can't wait.

Betsy's a single mom to a young son. She's renovating an old knitting factory in rural Ireland, a place built to teach young girls to knit as a cottage industry, into a home and a retreat center for writers. She also teaches writing at the University of Galway, and at Kylemore Abbey, which is run by Notre Dame. I'd love to join her teaching a writer's retreat there someday. I'm also lately getting to asked to teach writing workshops these days, so I thought it would be useful to hang out on the two-hour retreat Betsy had put together, and learn some teaching skills.

The truth is I learned a lot more. We started out writing three-sentence false autobiographies of ourselves, in which only our names and pronouns were true. Everyone shared. People claimed to be fossils, aliens, airplane pilots, and gardeners, among others. I'm not going to share mine with you, because while I started out in the spirit of the thing, write whatever amuses you, don't self-censor, what came out tells me more about myself than I expected. It's feeling rather private and precious to me now.

Everyone had been invited to bring any passage of writing that spoke to them, to share. Again, this was moving and meditative. We all typed the names and authors of the passages into the chat box, so we could read further if we wished, and I am, especially "Sometimes a Wild God" by Tom Hiron, and the poetry of Vicki Feaver.

I read part of "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Then Betsy taught story structure in a way I'd never heard before, including that there's one ideal story that all stories return to: "A person goes on a journey/a stranger comes to town" and they are of course the same thing from different points of view. I ended up making a bunch of notes thinking about how what Betsy said intersected with the manuscript I'm working on.

Then we did another writing exercise, about sensation and healing and a little bit of magic.

It was healing and a little bit magic.

I absolutely loved these two hours. Betsy's running two more of these mini-retreats, online, on August 21 and September 18. She's got private mentorship time available too, as well as a monthly one-hour writing class, and a book club in which no one has to read a particular book. It's all up on theoldknittingfactory.com.

Meanwhile, thanks, Bets. It was good to be a student again. Love you.