When old places and people become new again

Quick reminder about where to find me next. I would love to see/meet some of you in person!

Joint reading / conversation with Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest
Spring Writes Literary Festival
Saturday, May 13, 5:15–6:45 p.m.
The Downstairs, Ithaca, NY

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Hi friends,

I started off last week on Long Island, visiting family and friends and continuing the Endpapers book tour in Huntington, NY, with Vanessa Cuti, author of the new, unputdownable literary thriller The Tip Line.

I was downstate from Saturday through Tuesday, connecting with my in-laws, my sister’s family, my mom, and some old friends — and playing with lots of lovable animals, including my sister’s new Dachshund puppy Otto! Monday morning I had breakfast with two friends I haven’t seen in 30 years. On my way back home Tuesday, I stopped in Brooklyn to visit a friend I haven’t seen in about a decade.

My new best friend

Last month I did an event in NYC, and it went much the same — reuniting with old friends while making new ones. As much as this is a book tour, it’s also felt a bit like an extended episode of This Is Your Life. I head downstate fairly regularly, but my husband and I have a lot of family spread out down there so we need to strategize our visits around seeing them all. It doesn’t leave much time for seeing friends or places that aren’t in our usual path.

The book events have forced me to break this pattern, and as a result I’ve been experiencing my old home towns in a new way — revisiting old places and friends while discovering new ones.

It’s made me think about how sometimes I worry that I revisit the same themes too much in my work, that every story or book I write is not actually a new piece but a variation on something I’ve already written. I’ve heard a number of writers express this same concern over the years, so I’d come to believe it’s inescapable. But my recent trip gave me a new perspective on it.

Thirty years have gone by since I’ve seen my two high school friends, yet in many ways it was like no time had passed when we met for breakfast. They were still the same people I’d known and loved when we were kids. But new lines had been etched in all our faces — as well as in our mannerisms and hearts. Our years of living with partners (and divorcing) and raising families and working at jobs and nursing hopes and dreams were now squeezed into the booth along with us. Even though both my friends still live on Long Island, we all live in towns we didn’t grow up in and we met at a restaurant I’d never been to. It was the same old Long Island and it wasn’t. We were the same people and we weren’t. And it was beautiful.

Likewise, when I visited my friend in Brooklyn, we found it easy to pick up where we’d left off. We’d gotten very close when I lived a few blocks away from him in the late ’90s. Now he’s living in a new apartment in a new neighborhood. He’s gone through some major life changes. And we both have more than a few gray hairs. We ate in a new-to-me restaurant and talked about many of the things that have transpired for each of us over the past decade. In some ways, seeing him after all this time deepened my understanding of and love for him. And in other ways, it allowed me to see things about him I’d never seen before.

On my drive home, I thought about the ways in which writing is similar to life. When we revisit old or recurring themes, we’re never really going back to the same stories we’ve already told. It would be impossible. With every moment that passes, we gain new insights that shift our perspective, whether we’re aware of it or not. I can’t see the world or the people around me the same way I did yesterday, and therefore I can’t write the same story, at least not the same way.

As I think back to my previous work, I now see that I’m not simply repeating myself. I’m approaching my characters with more empathy, learning to forgive some things I couldn’t have before, or at least trying to understand them more deeply. I’m playing with new genres and imagining different futures. I’m building characters I wouldn’t have dared to write about. So, yes, the themes are the same, but they’re not. The stories are the same, but they’re not.

Also, if we ignore the things that call us to write because we think we should be writing about something different, then maybe we’ll simply repeat someone else’s stories instead of finding our way to our own.

What are you working on this week? Does it feel new? If not, how can you make it new?

Yours,

Jen