Lost in the Dream of the Thing, and Rescued

a love note to copy editors

“April,” Beth Kephart, Collage

To write, to really write, is to get lost in the dream of the thing. Or: This has been my way. Adrift in sense and sound. In bend. In blur. In some outrageous faith in the sneak of the sentence, the symphony of story, the inherent compassion of embedded rhythms. I want my sentences to feel like I felt when I wrote them (Uplifted. Or broken. Or peaceable. Or questing.) I want my words to float. Maybe pound. Maybe dawdle.

Never only words on a page (or screen). Shucking off flatness. Desperate for the roundness of dimension.

Imagine, then, what it is to be my copy editor. Imagine, in particular, Jessie Williams Burns and S.J. Williams of Tursulowe Press, who said yes to my Philadelphia story, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News (April 1), a book that is, as I have said, part imagining, part remembering, part finding out, part knowing. It is, to put it differently, a liquid novel, but also a container for lost things, but also a container fracturing. It is language that roves and contracts and endures through yarn, war, hustle, hurt, loss, and love. It is the celebration of the proper noun—Horn & Hardart, Reading Terminal Market, Willow Grove Park, Hotel DuPont, Fleisher’s, Camp Meade, Charcoal Pit, Liberty Loans, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Philadelphia—and the invention of lowercase somethings and abbreviated forms where such things are needed.

It is what my heart made it. It is my heart, in words.

My editors have read this novel an embarrassing (to me) number of times. They have discovered, through each reading, places where my intent is obscured, where my commas get lost, where what I meant to say is not precisely what I said, where I got a fact or a spelling wrong. With uncommon grace, they have inquired, set the record straight, taught me a little something about old-time wrestlers, the names of knitting mills, or the failure of my concoctions. Perhaps, and have you considered, and look again. Over and over, with kindness, they have asked me. Not to abandon the book I sought to make, but to hold on to its thrust and ideals ever more securely.

I endanger myself, writing as I do. I risk privileging my own process over clarity, or soundness. We live at a time when so much feels as if it’s crumbling, twisted, shattered and shattering. Jessie and S.J. uncrumble and unshatter me. They are proof of the goodness even now abounding, of the pleasures and the possibilities of better than, better yet, and (look again) better still.