Whewwwwwwwww!!!
Yellow's on the Path & Dragon Back
Apologies, dear vibe tribe, for dropping the Substack ball. I’ve been occupied with…well not aliens… but something even more daunting: promoting my book.
It all started slowly: In early March, my novel Yellow soft-launched at AWP in Baltimore. In early April, I stood outside on the lunar-like landscape of Arabia Mountain in front of eight people, having arrived just in time from an earlier (slightly more populated) reading across town.
The thought occurred: Would Yellow be like some of my poetry readings from the past— when you look around and realize there will be four people in the audience, you know them, and they’ve already bought the book?
My friend Heather reminded me of the poem “Poetry Reading” by Wislawa Szymborska with this first stanza:
To be a boxer, or not to be there at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare it's time to start this cultural affair. Half came inside because it started raining, the rest are relatives. O Muse.
But, these days, at least they were real people.
Seriously, I loved the Arabia Mountain reading for the actual audience: dedicated hikers and the exemplary staff at Arabia Mountain who would come on a Saturday to hear words on the mountain. And also, from Sasha, one of the staff, news that the actual Yellow, the physarum polycephalum, was just then making their appearance a few miles away. Unfortunately, at that time, a few miles was too far for me to walk that day.
A month earlier at the AWP conference, I wasn’t sure the whole thing would come off at all! I’d had an injection for a back problem, but they never quite work for me, and I was still on medication to get by.
As I sat on the flight, I worried not solely about the challenges of overcoming severe wallflowerism (made more manifest after leaving full-time work three years ago), but about getting around in a lithe midlife-looking way (and not just leaning against walls).
Would I be able to walk all the miles across cavernous, circuitous event spaces? Would I be able to talk coherently to well-published poets and writers when the medication wiped words from my brain and robbed me of energy? Did my trepidation create the back problem or did the back problem create the trepidation? Would I be able to do this thing?
Ultimately, the answer was yes. I could do it. After years of reading, study, and writing, writing, and more writing, Yellow, with so much help from friends, my agent, and Red Hen Press, had magically arrived.
Yellow, the journey, the book, and the destination, in many ways, has exceeded my non-existent expectations.
Twelve readings, two workshops on craft, three podcasts, and three interviews later, my back is strong and I’m off the meds. I wrote four articles that were Yellow-adjacent in three and half weeks. At AWP, I talked on stage with other Red Hen authors as it was live-recorded, but the dissociation was real, so don’t ask me what I said!
Maybe it was Yellow that infused me with strength. But most of all, I think, it was the love Yellow received. A lot of it unexpected. At the Fayetteville launch, my brother Scott came from out of town with his family, including my niece who had contributed an illustration of the physarum! In Fayetteville, my partner’s stunt-buddy friends lined up for the signing. One stunt guy told me he had been out of town and left his copy of Yellow at home, so he had his son—who had also come to the reading—read a chapter aloud over the phone!
At Pace Academy, during our talk to faculty and students, Yellow’s illustrator Teah Charkawi illuminated the audience, but especially me, on her process for making the illustrations. We were only talking specifics when she and I communicated— but her responses to questions showed me how she’d truly taken Yellow to heart to produce Z’s doodles. That filled me with awe and wonder.
In Buffalo, my family gathered as well as my best friend who couldn’t have made it to Atlanta among a wonderful crowd— this time the bookseller ran out of books!
My agent, Malaga Baldi, suggested I wear yellow to my events. I really hadn’t thought about it, but even painting my toenails cheered me up. Many others wore the color yellow along my route:
Finally, I leave you with a poem about taming the dragon back:
Dragon Back
By Khadijah Queen
After my limbs retreat into their sockets
again, my spine slips its discs
back into pain’s fist until all I can do is double,
cry, or call for help to move. Residue lines up
under compression. To distract myself I watch
travel shows—countries I’ve already explored,
learning more about the contexts of my Côte d’Azur
memories. Feels like hitting refresh, like keeping good
thoughts crisp despite the reek of bad thoughts
crowding in. YouTube suggests Qigong—
I click a video I saved for later, thinking ahead
about pushing through. I convince my feet
they do belong on the ground, tell my knees
I do remember how to breathe, bend,
my hopes up
as I undulate gently, intending to
soften, not show off
how snakelike a loose spine can be. No fire-spitting,
more like upright slither, pelvis to cervical
juncture at the base of the skull, degenerative ease
I liken to dance—me & my pain,
awkward partners in forced proximity. I listen
finally to what she tells me—to rest
all seven ways—social, physical, emotional,
mental, sensory, spiritual, creative—and remember
my disappearing mother’s quick-sung Gotta get some rest
gotta get some rest hey!—to fall in love with healing,
guard as gold, a treasure, what holds
all the shattering parts of me in place.
I’ve fallen “in love with healing” and I thank Yellow and you!
I so hate that I missed your soft kick off right here in B'more! It sounds like Yellow was actually magically healing you as you toured. I only hope that our paths do cross one day soon! Take care!