Why am I writing a book?

I’m currently sitting under the waving green leaves of a silver maple tree trying to think of why I love to write and why I am writing this book at all.

This perfect fall day in my sweet little backyard is a great place to consider what the heck I’m doing here with this book.

I’ve been working on a book since January of 2020.
I’d signed up for a course at the Loft Literary Center, an expensive one in which a cohort of students were meant to gather once a week for most of the year to write out a book length manuscript. Our cohorts were separated into genres which meant I’d be in the nonfiction cohort because I wanted to write out what it was like to come out when I was 24 in the year 2009. 2009 was the first year of the Obama administration and the square middle of a recession. I came out to my best friend and then my parents three days before I left for Peace Corps in Armenia.
I was the only person who identified as male in that cohort at the Loft and one of two students in our thirties. The cohort met in person for a month before the world shut down in March of 2020. We wrote for the rest of the year together, meeting on Zoom once a week, something that was new to all of us, including the facilitators at the Loft.
I wrote 130,000 words that year. I had been freelancing which had to end as folks tightened their belts for the unknown. I was jobless and writing up a storm waiting, as we all were, for whatever would come.
I ended the year with all those words but totally unsure of what to do with them. Should I edit them? I had no idea how to do that. Do they actually make a book? I was pretty sure they wouldn’t. Not yet. My writing in 2020 felt to me like gathering bricks to make a house, those bricks strewn about in a forest of memory only to stacked into a neat pile at my feet.
I didn’t touch any of those words for the entirety of 2021. I had a new job, the kids had a new schedule, Charlie’s work was changing and growing into the new normal of the world according to Covid. I was proud of the lives we were building in this new world order, but I went to bed most nights with a phantom pain, a book unmade, haunting like a benevolent specter.
In late 2021, Paula, a friend from my Loft cohort, recommended a writing program connected to a publisher. She explained the kind of support she’d received and wrote that at the end of the three month program, your manuscript may be accepted by New Degree Press for publishing. She connected me to the founder of the Creator Institute who described the program, the support and the writing track that could get you in front of the acquisition team at New Degree Press.
I joined this past January. I’ve since worked with an editor and been greenlit. I chopped the original manuscript in half and started writing again. I dug through old journals and old emails to find my memories of two years I spent living in Armenia, the very beginning of a life out of the closet, a new life that I’m living now.
I have spent now more hours writing this book than I can mentally conceptualize. The book has been with me every day of this year. I wake up early in the morning to write and write again after the kids go to bed. My husband takes over our life admin often so that I can sit in our attic and find the words for things I didn’t know I’d forgotten. (I’d completely forgotten, for instance, a night at the very beginning of my Peace Corps service, before I could speak Armenian, when Geghetsik, the aunt of the family I lived with, came into my room with her family photo album and spoke words I couldn’t understand to me about people I’d never know. She knew them. She wanted me to know them. And though I’ve never forgotten how much Geghetsik meant to me, I’d forgotten that moment, her invitation to share her humanity with me, to bring me into her memories, her family, her world.)
It has been one of the heaviest, longest lifts of my life to get this book out of me and into the world of books. The word count has climbed again, now to near 150,000 words. The Grapes of Wrath, I looked up, is around 170,000 words. I have wanted to give up on it so many, many times. I have asked myself to stop, overwhelmed with the responsibilities of a demanding job, building a family, and committing time to my two beautiful kids. This time with kids, to be honest, I do without a shred of resistance and with complete clarity of purpose.
This effort to write does not have the same clarity of purpose. This effort to write this book is, though, a decision I made now some years ago. I will sit in my attic. I will put words to the page. I will do this every day until it is done even though I’m still not totally certain how it will all get done in time.
And if I give myself a moment to question the discipline I’ve exercised to write this book, I come up with a couple of reasons why.
I write because my own littler inner kid wanted to. Whenever I was asked in school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “I want to be a writer.” Sure, now I’ve added a few things to my list of What I Want To Be. But I want to help that little kid live his dream. He gets to be a writer because I write.
And I write because I want to add to the world of stories about LGBTQ people living on this rock that’s flying through space. When I was growing up in my small hometown in Texas, there wasn’t a single person I could think of to talk to about my sexuality, a sexuality that could get you killed according to stories I heard on the news, a sexuality that would destroy my life and my family according to the stories I heard in church. But, on TV, and eventually in movies and books I began reading in college, I learned new stories – stories of survival, of impact, of joy, of understanding, of belonging. I saw candles lit through the streets of San Francisco for a man who changed the world. I saw understanding turn into belonging between two men who convention said should have never belonged together. I read about joy and survival and defiance through existence. I saw bravery in the act of living authentically and in that living, inviting others to join in the glorious act of celebrating every corner of your soul.
I write to add to that legacy, even to simply share that legacy with you.
And I write, most of all I think, to simply feel whole. I had forgotten Geghestik and her family photo album. I had forgotten the night I was sick and gargled salt water under the stars on my host familiy’s porch, droplets of water bouncing onto my chin and cheeks, thinking about my grandmother and this remedy passed down from mother to mother to mother to mother to me. I had forgotten simple truths of my life and found anew some big truths I’d never seen, like how my mother never stopped trying to connect to me in her way even though she didn’t accept at the time that I would probably, someday fall in love with and marry a man and not a woman. I’ve returned to those memories and seen the love that made its way through so many invasive weeds trying to choke out the light between us. And as I write, I return to my mother, to my host families, to my friends in Armenia almost like time travel, all of us still there together, becoming part of who we are now.
So, I write. I keep writing. When will I hold this book in my hands and pass it on to you? Soon, I think. But not yet. There’s still a long, beautiful, winding road ahead.