The garden of ‘wordly’ delights is flourishing at Christmas Lake Creative, and we’re nurturing many projects for a rich harvest of books to come. The work of editing involves intense devotion to the growth of a book from a first draft’s tender shoots—or in some cases the seed of an idea—all the way through to the beauty of full bloom. While there is some science to streamlining sentences and perfecting paragraphs, there is also an art to letting the story unfold, and to envisioning the flower with its bud still tightly wrapped or the invisible seedling underground. The latest episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being features a conversation with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written that “Science polishes the gift of seeing; Indigenous traditions work with the gifts of listening and language.” The best editors go beyond examining—and rearranging—words on the page and, in concert with the author, listen to the story that is often beneath the surface, waiting, and eager to be told.
If you’re interested in exploring more deeply the kinship between gardening and writing, you might enjoy this long piece on The Marginalian, “200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening.”
It begins:
Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.
Peonies in waiting
Editing is also a slow, thoughtful process requiring patience, knowing when to pause and when to keep moving, and always keeping the final destination in mind.
The Christmas Lake resident turtle
In a nod to the deep wisdom of Indigenous peoples, we’re devoting a portion of this edition to an excerpt (which includes a passage on gardening) from our upcoming Native American thriller, Sidanela, by first-time novelist David Long.
Secrets are strange and wily creatures, binding together unstable groups while tearing apart the individuals who bear them. Red Willow carried a secret that weighed heavily on her shoulders, as if she were toting a black bear cub on her back. She desperately wanted to be free of the burden, but she simultaneously dreaded that freedom, knowing it would cause her entire world to crumble. Memories of “the horrible event”—the only words she could find to describe it—seeped into her mind, the way darkness slips in to overtake day, creating a mental fog that made it hard for her to focus. But she had to find a way to press through and ground herself. It was spring, and there was critical work to be done. Her family was relying on her to help keep them fed.
Red Willow and her family were part of the Pee Dee Tribe, a close-knit group of some five hundred villagers. The tribe was over two hundred years old. She lived on the outskirts of the Town Creek ceremonial center—in what is now known as North Carolina—with her mother, Grey Dove, and her brother, Running Wolf. The enormous wave of European immigration was still over three centuries away, and the Vikings were the only Europeans who had ever set foot on Red Willow’s continent.
A large temple, where the priests conducted worship and the Leadership Council made essential decisions of the tribe, dominated Town Creek. The temple sat high upon a mound, and the people could only gain access by climbing a tall set of stairs—as if they were walking straight to the heavens. The temple’s base was a large and open court, where the tribe would gather for their seasonal and ritual ceremonies. A spiked barrier bordered the court on one side, a river touched it on another. Together, these two boundaries provided vital security against neighboring hostiles, chief among them the fierce Tuscaroras.
The political situation of the village was surprisingly complex, given the relatively small population. There were four distinct clans within the larger tribe: the bear, the deer, the wolf, and the beaver. Red Willow and her family were members of the bear clan. Each group lived in separate enclaves surrounding the ceremonial center, and each elected its own leaders. The leaders of the four clans met together as a council regularly to discuss matters of importance to the tribe.
Though Red Willow was only seventeen, she was mature beyond her years and even beyond the her tribe’s wisest elders. Since the death of her father, her family had experienced many hardships, forcing her to take on adult responsibilities. Her father’s absence also required her to do things not customary for women. She hunted as well as or better than all of the men. But despite being highly skilled at this typically masculine pursuit, she maintained a robust feminine nature. She had long, jet-black hair tied into a single braid that hung to one side and deep, brown eyes that revealed a depth in her soul that seemed to stretch to infinity.
One of Red Willow’s primary responsibilities was maintaining her family’s garden, and she used the traditional Pee Dee method referred to as the ‘three sisters’. The three sisters of the plot were corn, bean, and squash—planted together in a mutually beneficial way to create an abundant harvest. The sustenance the plants provided for each other reminded Red Willow of the strength her tiny family of three took from their closeness. The first seed to be planted was sister corn. Her job in the garden family was to provide a tall and solid support system for the beans to climb when they started to grow, much like her mother’s stability aided the growth of Red Willow and her brother. Red Willow’s first task was to mound several planting hills and plant four corn seeds in the center of each mound. She set out to get this done early one morning and worked tirelessly throughout the day, sending thoughts of the horrible event to the far reaches of her mind. She wished she could pull these thoughts out, like weeds, but by now they had deep roots. The best she could do was snap off the tops and hope they wouldn’t return too soon.
Skunk cabbage
We’re also honored that Christmas Lake Creative was featured in a local writeup by Westport’s HamletHub on small businesses. We can’t say we’ve made the big time yet, but we’re definitely getting air time.
Spring sky
What we’re working on…
Rather than update again on our four exciting books in progress, we’d like to expand a bit more on the magic of editing. If you have a cat, you already know that cats see things that are not there. But you might not know that the phenomenon of intuiting the presence of what you don’t see, or hear, or perceive with one of your physical senses, is called amodal completion. We recently encountered it in an article in Psychology Today, and the passage below is the best description we’ve found of how one moves a narrative forward as a writer. Our perceptual system engages in amodal completion, seeing what isn’t there—yet—but makes perfect sense being there once it appears.
Every time we see an object occluded by another object (which means every time we see anything in real life, barring odd cases of fully translucent visual scenes or very simple visual displays), we use amodal completion of the occluded parts of perceived objects. We can't understand perception without understanding amodal completion.
It also echoes something Tom wrote a while back about the emotion evoked by great writing.
The best creators of content don't just provide words and images. They offer us an experience. It's not what we read or saw, but how we feel while reading or seeing, and how we felt afterwards, that we remember most vividly. And when we share content, it's that experience—the epiphany, the swell of joy, the fresh determination, the feeling in the pit of our stomach, the tears, the stab of regret—that we want our friends to experience with us so we can connect through it, so we can say to each other, "Yes, I felt that, too."
This faith in our second sight or sixth sense is truly, in the words of poet Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Red azalea, wet
What we’re looking for…
Bring us your seeds and seedlings, your creative plants in need of nourishment. We’ll take good care of them, we promise.
Red maple samara
What we’re reading…
As you can see from the plethora of photographs in this edition, our eyes are mostly on the wonders of this glorious New England spring. More on what we’re reading next time.
Lilac blossoms
What we’re listening to…
The songs of the birds enlivening the meadow when we wake up in the morning.
Japanese mazus
What we’re cooking up…
A pop-up Zoom workshop for some time in May or June.
As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!