In her book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron wrote that every artist has their own idea of True North. That's their "I have arrived" moment. Seeing my writing between two covers with a spine has been my True North since third grade.
That's the year my teacher tasked us with writing a report on a country. Ugh. Tedious. Then she said our reports had to be bound in a hardcover binder. The uphill assignment suddenly took on the wonder of a trip to Disneyland.
I could hardly wait to get home, choose a country, pull out my brother's World Book Encyclopedia and get down to some shameless cribbing.
Okay, I cared a little about
the content of my report. First, I wanted a country no other eight-year-old Glen Cove student would pick to write about. Second, the nation had to be
manageable in scope. Switzerland and Germany were out.
My choice was Ruanda-Burundi, a photo
of which I'd seen in a National Geographic.
In nineteen-fifty-eight, kids used
two-hole ruled paper and printed neatly on sheets of it in pencil. My
teacher asked for the reports to be sectioned into Customs, Culture, Social
Groups, Arts, Clothing, and History. Luckily, Volume R of the World Book
had those bases covered.
But I was working toward that
cover. For the blissful moment when I'd place my penciled pages of paragraphs into the black hardcover binder my mother let me purchase from the
school supply section of Newberry’s (yesterday's Dollar Tree).
I glued a large red and
white paper label (used by Mom to mail packages) on the front cover and boldly
wrote on it with red pen:
RUANDA-BURUNDI
by Judy Fowler
I sat cross-legged on the floor and held that covered beauty in my hands. I peeked inside to look at those penciled
pages snuggled up inside it. True North.
Holiday card-making exposed the same compulsive urge to cover the "Roses are Red" dreck I'd written for my parents and grandparents. It wasn’t a card until I'd nestled it inside a
homemade envelope, even if the card never saw a mailbox and only had to go
upstairs on a tray.
A few months ago, a story of mine
became downloadable in an anthology titled Rock, Roll, and Ruin,
edited by Karen Pullen of North Carolina’s Triangle Chapter of Sisters in
Crime. The stories are fantastic, but what I wanted to see most? The e-book cover.
Most manuscripts I read to my colleagues
leave me less than thrilled until I get them covered. I love the magic of Fiver. They take
my ideas and in two days a cover appears. I can even tweak it and
get it back again in a few hours. It's an itch my discretionary income allows.
So, whether my story appears alone or last or
eighth in a manuscript's batting order, I’m just happy to know it's inside something. I judge a book once it's covered.
