Turning Medieval
by Sarah Woodbury
Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint those moments in your life
where everything is suddenly changed.
When you look across the room and say to yourself, I’m going to marry him.
Or stare down at those two pink lines on the pregnancy test, when
you’re only twenty-two and been married for a month and a half and are living
on only $800 a month because you’re both still in school and my God how is this going to work?
And sometimes it’s a bit harder to remember.
Until
I was eleven, my parents tell me they thought I was going to be a ‘hippy’. I wandered through the trees, swamp, and
fields of our 2 ½ acre lot, making up poetry and songs and singing them to
myself. I’m not sure what happened by
the time I’d turned twelve, whether family pressures or the realities of school
changed me, but it was like I put all that creativity and whimsicalness into a
box on a high shelf in my mind. By the
time I was in my late-teens, I routinely told people: ‘I haven’t a creative
bone in my body.’ It makes me sad to
think of all those years where I thought the creative side of me didn’t
exist.
When
I was in my twenties and a full-time mother of two, my husband and I took our
family to a picnic with his graduate school department. I was pleased at how friendly and accepting
everyone seemed.
And
then one of the other graduate students turned to me out of the blue and said,
‘do you really think you can jump back into a job after staying home with your
kids for five or ten years?’
I
remember staring at him, not knowing what to say. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it, but
that it didn’t matter—it couldn’t matter—because I had this job to do and the consequences of staying home with my kids
were something I’d just have to face when the time came.
Fast
forward ten years and it was clear that this friend had been right in his
incredulity. I was earning $15/hr. as a
contract anthropologist, trying to supplement our income while at the same time
holding down the fort at home. I
remember the day it became clear that this wasn’t working. I was simultaneously folding laundry, cooking
dinner, and slogging through a report I didn’t want to write, trying to get it
all in before the baby (number four, by now) woke up. I put my head down, right there on the dryer,
and cried.
It
was time to seek another path. Time to
follow my heart and do what I’d wanted to do for a long time, but hadn’t had
the courage, or the belief in myself to make it happen.
At
the age of thirty-seven, I started my first novel, just to see if I could. I wrote it in six weeks and it was bad in a
way that all first books are bad. It was
about elves and magic stones and will never see the light of day. But it taught me, I can do this!
My
husband told me, ‘give it five years,’ and in the five years that followed, I
experienced rejection along my newfound path.
A lot of it. Over seventy agents,
and then dozens and dozens of editors (once I found an agent), read my books
and passed them over. Again and again.
Meanwhile,
I just wrote. A whole series. Then more books, for a total of eight, seven
of which I published in 2011.
And
I’m happy to report that, even though I still think of myself as staid, my
extended family apparently has already decided that those years where I showed
little creativity were just a phase. The
other day, my husband told me of several conversations he had, either with them
or overheard, in which it became clear they thought I was so alternative and creative—so far off
the map—that I didn’t even remember there was
a map.
I’m almost more pleased about that than anything else. Almost. Through writing, I’ve found a community of
other writers, support and friendship from people I hadn’t known existed a few
years ago, and best of all, thousands of readers have found my books in the
last year. Here’s to thousands more in
the years to come . . .
Links:
My web page: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/
My Twitter code is: http://twitter.com/#!/SarahWoodbury
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahwoodburybooks
