Here’s what you have to do: in the comments to this post on my blog, list your favorite short story and tell me why it’s your favorite. I will keep the comments open all month long and choose a random winner at the end of the month (but that person must have followed the rules in order to win).

Check back here at the end of the month to see who won and please do spread the word. Thank you and Happy Short Story Month!

Then, bright and early, tomorrow morning I have my two events:

At 9AM, I will be at the Newburyport Art Association, reading from I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND

At 11AM, I will on a panel, Sustaining Momentum: The Art of the Short Story, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Newburyport

The schedule is packed with author readings and panels. I hope if you live nearby, you will make the trip to Newburyport to enjoy the festival and our beautiful town.

Long a runner, I’ve never run a marathon. In fact, one of my dreams has been to run The Boston Marathon. None other than this one. During all my years living in the city of Boston, I watched from the sidelines. I cheered for the runners. I felt a kinship with those around me as we celebrated the accomplishments of those who started and finished (and even those who just started and didn’t finish) the race.

You didn’t have to know a runner personally to feel the swell of pride through the crowd as each person crossed the finish line. You would marvel at the capacity of the human body to rise above pain and fatigue. You would marvel at the strength of the human spirit.

A marathon is about what we can overcome and not about what breaks us. It is about how strong we are and not about how vulnerable. It is about heart.

In truth, I’m not committed enough to running to likely ever make it into the race, but even if my body never makes it into the Boston Marathon, my mind will forever run alongside my brothers and sisters, coming from all over the world to run this race and become one body pushing forward.

They become one. One body. One blood. Runners and spectators. Loved ones and acquaintances. Strangers on the street, exchanging breath.

When they bleed, so do we all. And because of them, we keep pace with each other in fellowship.

To those who are hurting, my heart is with you. Peace to us all.

I suppose I should be worried. Have my brain scanned or something. But I’m not going to because I’m okay with it. It’s okay if I talk. It’s okay if I am heard.

I don’t need to please you with my silence.

***

A few weeks ago my son’s kindergarten teacher put a call out to the parents of the children in her class: would one of us be willing to come and speak to the incoming parents on information night about why we chose the half-day option for our child?  I had specific reasons for why I had chosen this option and feel like it has worked out well for us and so I immediately volunteered.

I was not particularly nervous about getting up and speaking in front of this room of 50 or so people. I’m a happy public speaker. I enjoy it. I enjoy being on stage. It’s a familiar and comfortable place for me as that was my familial role as a child–the clown, the people pleaser.

But when it was my turn to speak, I lost my breath. My chest became hot. I choked out the words. I said what I needed to but my voice–the strong and confident one–was gone.

I was frightened.

It was back again. I had lost my voice.

***

Twelve years ago, my mother died. At the small outdoor service, I read a eulogy I had written for her. I read it strongly and confidently and with my own voice.

A week or so later, I was back at work. I was in a meeting that I had been in many times before when I was called upon to do what I had done many times before, get up and speak in front of the 50 or so engineers I worked with. They were friendly and familiar. They knew me and I knew them. But right there and then is when it happened: I froze. Choked out a few words. Sat down in utter humiliation.

In the five or so years that followed that, the fright clung to me whenever I was called upon to speak in front of a group. It wasn’t until after my son was born nearly six years ago, that I worked through my fright. I spent the time figuring out where it came from and why. I talked it down.

I practiced deep breathing. I told myself that I was having fun.

I let it go.

But then a few weeks ago, it was back again and there it was at the next thing I was called upon to do. It was there and there. It was there.

***

Last night, I had the honor of reading in front of an audience at Literary Firsts. I was going to read third and so I made sure I got there as early as I possibly could to give myself time to decompress from the drive and to give myself time to breathe.

In through the nose and out through the mouth.

In through the nose and out through the mouth.

In through the nose and out through the mouth.

In through the nose and out through the mouth.

In through the nose and out through the mouth.

Let go of the complexities of your fear and fall into the rhythm of breath.

When it came time for me to read, my fear was gone and I was able to read my words in my own voice. As I had in the past, I found the experience of sharing my words–in reading them aloud–entirely pleasurable. It was an opportunity to become one with the audience. We shared our breath.

It was intimate.

***

When you are dead, the thing that will first be forgotten will be the sound of your voice. When the person who loves you accidentally hears your voice in a video or on a forgotten voice mail, she will find herself very small and wishing to be in your arms. To be comforted by you. By your smell. By the sound of your voice.

***

A few months after my mother died, my husband and I were in Death Valley. We had just gotten back into the car after walking out onto the salt flats at Bad Water, the lowest places in the Western Hemisphere. It felt a holy place to me. I was right there down closest to the core. I was farther from the sky than I had been while still being able to see it. There were no caves walls around me. There were mountains. There was sky.

As we drove up out of that valley, our cellphone came back into reception. We had a voice mail from an unfamiliar number. I listened to the message. It was a woman’s voice I did not recognize. She said, “Hi. It’s me. I wanted to let you know that I’m okay.”

I knew that the message wasn’t meant for me but also that it was meant for me alone. I did not know that woman’s voice, but her voice knew me.  We were there together in that moment and she was okay.

She was okay.

I was not alone without her.

For the past week I’ve been working on making a visual on iMovie (which is too much fun) to go along with my reading of the title story for the book. Here’s what I came up with:

I cannot run away from myself.

Running away from yourself is exactly what you wish to do when you experience the dying of someone you love. And imagine if the one dying is your child? You will say to me (as people have said to Rapp), “I can’t imagine that.” But you can, Rapp would argue, and you do, which is why people like her, the mother of a dying (and now, sadly, dead) child make us so uncomfortable. They represent an inconvenient truth and that truth is that we are all of us dying as we live and that includes our children, too, though we dare not acknowledge that truth. We dare not.

Rapp had no choice but to acknowledge the truth of her son’s impending death. Indeed, she faced it head on. Still, she does not spill her tears on the page. She doesn’t ask for pity. She doesn’t want platitudes or euphemism  She doesn’t want hugs. And, most certainly, she does not want anyone to say to her, “I’m sorry.”

She just wants you to be present in your life and in the lives of those you love.

Reading this book brought up all kinds of complicated emotions in me. Mostly, though, what I felt was grief: for those I’ve lost, for those I will lose someday, for myself. I grieved for Ronan. I grieved for all of the children who have died and who are dying.

Grief is not necessarily a weeping thing, as Rapp shows us within this book. What it is is an animal thing. An animal thing like giving birth. Grief is uncontrollable, as is dying, as is giving birth.

My husband and I have always talked openly (in an age-appropriate way) about death with our son. We don’t say things like “passed away” or “gone to live with the angels” no matter how tempting they are. He is interested in my parents, his maternal grandparents. I show him pictures. We talk about them. Recently, I let him take out and examine several objects of my father’s that I have. A leather box. A leather key holder.

He wrote a note (with my help) to my father asking him to leave a sign if he was a friendly ghost. He placed is in the key holder and said he would go back the next day to check. The next morning, when there was no note, he was disappointed, but said it was what he expected. He did just as I have done countless times, asking for a sign from those I have loved who have died. Show me that you still exist. Show me that there is something more.

Even as he learns of these dead people, even as he falls in love with them, he also learns how to let them go. He learns how to grieve them just as his young mind begins to understand what sad means.

Yesterday, I found two photos in frames I’d forgotten about. One was of my mother as an infant and then other of a my father as a young boy. I handed these photos to my son and told him who they were and he said, “I love them so much.”

Beyond everyone I loved then–all those who broke my heart; beyond how much we talked about the art we would make someday; beyond the passion we felt for everything we believed: What that time in my life represents is a great, unfulfilled sadness. I knew I wanted to be a writer and I had written plenty before but then I stopped and I couldn’t get back started. I wrote privately in my journals. I squirreled it all away. Every separate emotion categorized. Even when I was happy then, I couldn’t stop feeling like I would never get to be where I wanted to be. I couldn’t help feeling like I would always be unfulfilled.

During all the years I lived in Boston, I passed by the Hynes Convention Center hundreds of times. Thousands. I worked conventions there. I passed through. I stood in its shadow.

20 years ago I never thought that I would be there again but this time with 12,000 other writers at AWP. I never thought I would be among them. Beyond that, I never could have imagined that I would be there because people had said yes to me. Because people had published my books and because people actually wanted to buy those books and read them.

20 years ago, this thought would have been incomprehensible.

It was a moment to stand among you and realize that I had circled back to just beyond my beginning. It was a moment to realize that even though it took me 20 years, I was there.

Normally, I would be packing my bags and stocking the fridge for my family. However, this week the conference is a mere 30 miles from my home. You would think this would make it easier for me to get to all of the panels and events. Instead, it makes it more difficult as I remain active and present in my daily life, which includes caring for my son.

As such, I’m not going to be much of a presence at the conference, but I’m sure you will all bravely carry on without me.

With that said, I will be at the bookfair on Saturday. In fact, I have two signings on Saturday, March 9th:

I will be signing Echolocation at the Engine Books table from 10-12ish

I will be signing I Am Holding Your Hand at the PANK table from 1-3ish

I really hope to see you there.

p.s. My advice from last year still holds: do NOT drink that shot of tequila when it is offered to you (this advice is especially true if you are over age 40).

Not so much for Ron Currie, the protagonist in Ron Currie Jr.’s latest novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. I’m spoiling nothing for you by telling you that Ron Currie attempts suicide in the book. He tells you the same from the get go, even though you won’t get to the actual attempt until well past the halfway mark.

What Ron discovers after his own self-resurrection is not that life is filled with wonder but that it remains flawed and the pain that brought him to his breaking point, still exists, much like a craving for nicotine is returned when one removes the patch that is supposed to take that craving away.

Basically, there is no cure for pain. There is no cure for grief. There is no cure for heartache. The only thing one can do is put one foot in front of the other and get through it. Getting through it might mean that you take yourself away from those people who love you. It might mean that you self-medicate. You might create a vision for the future based on the singularity. In this vision you give as a gift to yourself a world in which we are all machines and grief no longer exists. Death is no more.

Or it might mean that you don’t believe yourself capable of living through the pain and so you do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.

You might even write a book about pain and your process of grief. That book might be a fictional memoir or a memoiresque piece of fiction. In that book you might find a cross hatch of grief and heartache. A smear of regret. A smudge of self-loathing. You might find yourself rewriting your life as you believed it happened: Your sex always ended in orgasm. Or you might tell the truth: you believe you failed your dying father when he needed you most. Ultimately, the love story you might think you’re telling–the one about the one who got away–is really about how you raised yourself up from the dead and managed to model yourself after your father–war veteran, witnesser of horrors untold–who kept hoping to witness the cherry blossoms in the trees he planted even though he knew he’d die before spring ever came.

In the end, you can decide to live. Stick that nicotine patch back on. Listen for the bell ringing on the Christmas tree. Watch for the blossoms.

I am thrilled to bits and pieces to announce that my Young Adult novel, THE BOOK OF LANEY, is forthcoming from Lacewing Books in 2015.

Lacewing Books is an exciting new imprint of Engine Books. Andrew Scott, senior editor at Engine Books, is the editor of Lacewing Books and I am thrilled to be working with him on this project.