A funny thing happened on the Facebooks today.
When I opened my email this morning, a whole string of notifications greeted me. A long list of folks responding to one of my photos. That’s weird, I thought. I haven’t posted anything new.
Even odder: the image inspiring so much response was from last December – ancient by social media standards.
December 5, 2011: My first attempt at shopping my book proposal.
Turned out a new friend had given that old photo a second life. With her enthusiastic comment, it began appearing on other friends’ walls. One after another, folks chimed in with their support. “Can’t wait for you to sign my first edition at Old Harbor Books,” one wrote. Said another, “I’m not at all concerned over the fate of this book. I’m more worried about the effects of wealth and fame on your life.”
With every new congratulatory response, I felt a bit more embarrassed. More like a fraud.
Then Marlin called. “Hey, Sis! Congratulations on getting your proposal out. That’s really exciting!”
I interrupted his praise. “That’s an old picture of the proposal I submitted last winter. It totally got rejected – that’s okay, it deserved to be rejected because I submitted it before it – or I – was ready – but nobody commenting now knows that and I feel silly.”
Marlin’s laughter swept me up in his good humor. I chuckled with him, then considered, “The timing’s funny, though. I got good feedback from an agent and have been revising so it’s in better shape. I think it’s almost there. My goal is to submit it to her the first week of January.”
“Sounds like all of those sudden comments are the universe’s way of giving you that final push, telling you not to give up,” Marlin observed. “Maybe this was the best time for you to hear all of that encouragement.”
Ah. How can I be so lucky, that one of my oldest friends is also one of the wisest people I know? And how good Sitka’s docks have been to me: both my “brother” and my sweetheart, two of my life’s greatest gifts, are fellow boat kids I met on the breakwater over 25 years ago.
*****
If you’ve wondered why Hooked’s been such a quiet little place lately, that’s why. You’ve been on my mind, but everything (and everyone) has taken a back seat to having this second attempt ready to submit next week. After way too many slow, discouraging days, today feels better. The 25 pages of book overview, bio, chapter summaries, marketing strategies, and comparative titles seem like they’re in good shape. The sample chapters still need work – not so much that they’re overwritten, like dough that’s been kneaded too long, but just enough that they sing in the right places and murmur pleasantly in the rest. Though I may feel differently tomorrow, today this feels do-able.
It’d feel even better with your participation, sweeties.
I’m a fan of epigraphs – relevant quotes providing a touchstone for each chapter’s takeaway message – and need your suggestions. What’s relevant? Hooked: a memoir of love, sex and salmon is a story of fidelity, as I struggle to define what it means to be true to a partner… a place… a life… and myself, over the course of a season aboard the Nerka. The voices I’ve gathered so far include Barbara Kingsolver on forgiveness, Cheryl Strayed on fear, Dan Savage on the myths of monogamy and “The One,” James Baldwin and Lynn Schooler on home, and Rumi on human imperfection.
I’d love to hear your favorite reflections on home, the sea, love, trust, forgiveness, belonging. Actually, I’d love to hear your favorite reflections on anything. A beloved quotation, poem, or song lyric – who knows what might strike just the right chord? Whose words have spoken so deeply to you?
Because you’re all wonderful and I’m grateful for your support, everyone who comments with a suggestion over the next three days gets their name in the hat. (Boot, actually – an old Xtra Tuf.) I’ll draw two names at the end of New Year’s Day, two lucky participants who’ll receive care packages of local-made Sitka goodies and Cap’n J’s newly printed photo cards. Random gift-giving aside, my big appreciation and love to all for your contributions.
Update: Congratulations, Scott and EBW! Thanks to all for playing.
Hooked 
“Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet” I grew up in Sitka but have been away for quite a while. I never expected to miss the rain but I do so I am not one of the “others” any more. I love the way it sounds, I love the way it feels and I love the way it leaves everything feeling so fresh and new.
Lovely, raindrop, and very relatable! A friend’s daughter recently left Sitka, her lifelong home, to go to college Down South. In her first month, she was baffled by the total absence of rain; I think that ended up being a source of her homesickness. I’d be right there with you both, but spend my non-Sitka time in an equally damp place, so that works out okay. 🙂
Your name’s in the boot, new friend – thanks for being the first to chime in here!
On the eve of the 13th full moon of 2012…………”Say what you mean, and mean what you Say” Be Well Tele…..
Excellent, Ms. Vicky – didn’t you win the last one of these giveaways? Let’s see if your luck holds! Hugs to you and yours this new year.
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do we, as children of men, as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Helen Keller
“Choice is an illusion cherished by the smaller self and used to momentarily limit the infinite.”
David LaChapelle
A couple of my favorites for you Tele. I am kind of a quote freak so it was hard to stop there. Good luck with your proposal!
Nice, Debi – I’d only heard the last sentence of that Helen Keller quote; didn’t know the preceding bits. Thanks for these, and best new year wishes for you!
If you can dream it, you can do it.
Well said, fellow dreamer.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you different. -Kurt Vonnegut
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. -Kurt Vonnegut
Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria! -“Calvin” (Bill Watterson)
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde
Have a look at my What They Said page, perhaps one will speak to you, I choose a new quote each time I write a post, but they have so many possibilities, Murakami on the storm is a good one too.
Sometimes when trying to relate with others and nothing you do seems to work, It can often be a case of trying to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
“Cheating is easy. There’s no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
“Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
(Suggestions from a bunch of you on FB, that I’m pasting over here so I don’t forget to get your names in the boot.)
From Suezy P: “The Joy of Writing, By Wislawa Szymborska (winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, born in Poland 1923) Why does this written doe bound through these written woods? for a drink of written water from a spring Whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle? Why does she lift her head; does she hear something? Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth, she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips. Silence – this word also rustles the page and parts the boughs. Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page, are letters up to no good, clutches of clauses so subordinate they’ll never let her get away. Each drop of ink contains a fair supply of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights, prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment, surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns. They forget that what’s here isn’t life. Other laws, black on white, obtain. The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I can say, and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities, full of bullets stopped in mid-flight. Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so. Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall, not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop. Is there then a world where I can rule absolutely on fate? A time I bind with chains of signs? An existence become endless at my bidding? The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.”
Also from Suezy P:
“All fishermen are liars…Linda Greenlaw http://www.lindagreenlawbooks.com/books/liars.asp“
From JuneauTek (http://juneautek.com/):
The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday! F/V Harvestor
From Cedar:
Pema Chödrön:
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
Which reminds me of another Pema Chodron quote:
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
From Kari S:
There is some gorgeous poetry that has come from the Aran islands about solitude at sea. I can’t recall the exact poems but if you google “Aran Islands poetry” I bet you will find some beauties.
From Karla:
Eevery time you ask this (about sharing quotes), all I can seem to think about is being on the back deck and listening to song lyrics. things are so distilled on the water. so I haven’t wanted to post this for fear of distracting from the quest, yet I wonder if many in the fleet experience this same reaction? this song reminds me of the troll fleet, and love and fidelity (or the lack therein) and, of course, has to be played to every time we tack by F/V “Southern Cross” . It reminds me of artists and songwriters, and you Tele. Spirits are moving you, larger voices calling…
Crosby Stills Nash – Southern Cross
oh, also sing out loud (really loudly over the deck speakers) and change the names in the songs so they are relevant to anywhere fishing Ex. “got out of town on a boat goin’ to Lazaria Island (or Farallon Islands or…) – “spirits are using me, larger voices calling” (the siren song of the sea), this is our quote on F/V Saint Jude.
along with “And my love is an anchor tied to you
Tied with a silver chain”.
Another from Cedar:
“When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for. -Clarissa Pinkola Estes (from you were made for this)
Totally cutting and pasting from my own Facebook quotes. At least one is totally irrelevant, but it makes me smile every time:
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” ~Groucho Marx
“You did then what you knew how to do. And when you knew better, you did better.” ~Maya Angelou
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ~Leonard Cohen
“The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.” ~Oscar Wilde
And from Karla:
“Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is love which sets us free. A brave and startling truth.” – Maya Angelou
From MJ:
Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn’t breaking. It hurts because it’s getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.
(Rita Mae Brown)
[…] you’d like your name to go into the boot for tomorrow’s drawing (gifts! for 2 of you!), you’ve still got time. I’d love to hear your favorite […]
Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget your perfect offering.
There’s a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
From Scott:
Humility unlocks the closed mind, and an open mind is wisdom’s only portal.
From Betsy:
No Trespassing
4/17 of a haiku
-Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America
(excerpt from a re-written Roll On, Columbia, Roll On)
These same mighty dams killed the great salmon runs
Turned the planet’s best fishery into barge routes an’ lawns
Now your June hogs ‘n’ sockeyes ‘n’ coho are gone
But roll on, Columbia, roll on
Rain on Mountain makes River–that’s the Law on this Earth
The wild waters’ll keep comin’ till that law is reversed,
An’ dams can be unbuilt to show folks the worth
Of a land where free rivers flow on
-David James Duncan, My Story As Told By Water
“I call hellfire a threat,” Natasha said, “ and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.”
-David James Duncan, The Brothers K
What needs to be counted on to have a voice? Courage. Anger. Love. Something to say, someone to speak to, someone to listen. I have talked to myself for years in the privacy of my journals. The only things I’ve done religiously in my life are keep a journal and use birth control.
Can you be inside and outside at the same time?
I think this is where I live.
I think this is where most women live.
I know this is where writers live.
Inside to write. Outside to glean.
-Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
-Wallace Stevens
A person can therefore no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and of his love.
-Ellen Key
More from Karla:
“O, God, Thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small” – Breton Fishermen’s Prayer (a quote displayed aboard our family boat, F/V Kay Angela, when Kyne – my sis – & I were “boat kids”).
“Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is love which sets us free. A brave and startling truth.” – Maya Angelou
If it’s important you’ll make it happen. If it isn’t you’ll make excuses.
-Zero Dean
From “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden:
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
From Yearning Wild by R. Glendon Brunk:
“She gets it, gets how this north country can enter a person and take hold, won’t let go, even when you want it to” (pg 4).
“Perhaps, also, the only way to write about yearning is to be feeling it” (pg 8).
“A place that pushes you. That says, Stay alert. Pay attention. This is your life” (pg 10).