Shame, Shame, Shame:

on Acknowledging Failure and Learning to Take the Red Taxi

Friends! Egads! I claim my newsletter comes out “occasionally” (and because it’s free I can be fast and loose—or slow and loose—with my definition of “occasionally.”) But The Bethannigan last appeared on Dec. 17, over three months ago. Between then and now my mother with severe Alzheimer’s fell AGAIN and broker her OTHER hip. Life has been very difficult since then because my mom’s Alzheimer’s is so bad that she can’t remember she fell and broke her hip, which means she keeps trying to get out of her wheelchair and walking, which could REBREAK THE BROKEN HIP, ARGH. So I’ve been sitting my her side, or getting help from my sons and husband, or hiring a $itter. But on 4/1 at her follow-up the ortho surgeon says her hip is heeling well and gave the green light for her to start using a walker, so she won’t be limited to a wheelchair. In celebration of her freedom, and kinda my own, I’m taking a little time to do some fun things, like letting the Bethannigan wing into your mailboxes!

Happy National Poetry Month! Welcome to new subscribers—maybe you found me through AWP, where I did a panel on Out-Loud Storytelling (and talked about telling my story for The Moth) or the panel I did on hybrid lit (where I talked about micro-memoirs). Glad you’re here! Let’s Gooooooo!

Where’s My NPR Geeks At?

Ok, if you are a fellow NPR listener, you know how you can’t help but do that thing where the familiarity of the voices makes you feel like the reporters are kinds sorta friends? And while you don’t mean to, you end up assigning them physical qualities? And you end up knowing exactly what they look like from their timbre and pitch?

Well I’m here to tell you that, based on my very small sample of one, you’re wrong. You’ve heard the resonant voice of NPR white house correspondent Don Gonyea? I met him at a party! He looks like this:

ADORABLE but incorrect! He got himself all wrong! But he was so fun I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

We were at an INCREDIBLE art-filled house in Taylor, MS, and my only regret of being in this photo is that I’m blocking a for-real Jeff Koons sculpture. At least I was (note the jumpsuit, please) looking foxy.

On Failure

Friends, if you read my last issue of The Bethannigan, you know (YAY!) I have a new book coming out in February from W.W. Norton, called The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. If I’m particularly excited, it’s because it’s been SO LONG since my last book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, which came out in 2017. Part of the reason for what will be a 9 year gap is because of the aforementioned mother. And part of it is also because I spent four years writing a novel that failed. And so, beside my announcement that I have this book coming out, I want to talk about talking about failure.

First, to catch you up, a screenshot of a Facebook post I made in 2021, with a photo of the box I used to finally shelve forever the failed novel, and below I’ll include the words I wrote in that post—

This is what I wrote:

As 2021 drew to a close, many of my writing friends posted their year’s publications. I enjoyed reading of their accomplishments, I did.

This is not that kind of post.

2021 wasn’t the year in which I published a shiny new book. It was the year in which I admitted, at last, that the novel I’d spent four years writing was a dud. It was the year I labeled it a failure.

I’ve always believed that I might not be the smartest or most talented person in the room, but I’m often the hardest worker, and I’ve trusted that hard work could save me. But hard work couldn’t save my novel, or make it publishable. I have the best agent in the world, and she tried to sell it and wasn’t able to and I revised and we repeated the process again, again. Finally it became clear to all that I needed to move on, an incredibly painful decision, which, frankly, remains so.

On Christmas, I make a bearnaise sauce that calls for five egg yolks (I know, I know, but, well, Christmas). So I also make meringue cookies, because the recipe calls for five egg whites. I love the tidy pleasure of maximizing that efficient aerodynamic egg: the yolks, the whites, the shells into compost, nothing thrown away. So imagine how I felt throwing away four years.

There are breezy condolences you could offer—trust me, I offer them to myself: the time wasn’t wasted, the struggle will make me a better writer, I might come back to this novel down the road and solve it, perhaps I couldn’t write the next book without having learned from this one. Who knows, some of these sweet lies might prove true. But I’m wondering how it will feel to acknowledge this failure (and my sense of shame, I’m a good ex-Catholic) in a medium that doesn’t normally make room for failure and shame. And I also want this confession visible to my students. Writing teachers are supposed to model the writer’s life. If my students only see my shelf with six published books, they are seeing only part of that life. There’s another shelf. It holds a box that holds many labored versions of a manuscript, many hundreds of thousands of words, and no one but the ghosts will read them.

Back to now: I’d like to tell you some cheerful update about that novel—that actually it was discovered! And it’s going to be a movie! And it’s winning awards! And I’ve got to go because, like, Oprah is calling and Kate Winslet wants to play me in the movie version!

But that’s the not case. Despite myself, I still feel shame for failing. But I’m still committed to bringing it up, especially in front of my students, so they can know that even a very dark failure is part of the writing life, metabolized and moved past. If you look on the photo above, you’ll see it was “liked” by almost 1k people, shared almost 60 times—a “popular” post, even though I try not to pay too much attention to that type of thing.

Even more interesting that those numbers is how many people messaged me privately to say they’d also a similar box, a big stinking pile of failure in a closet or drawer. And some of these people who messages me are pretty famous writers! They felt moved to tell me they’d shared a failure as well, but still didn’t want anyone else to know in any public way.

So here, nudging up against my last Bethannigan with its happy announcement of a book deal with my dream press, I remind you of this box I’ve been carrying, shifting it around, never quite putting it down. So if you ever find yourself with a similar box, you’ll know you have company. Maybe knowing that will make your box a little lighter, a little easier to shoulder.

Remember How I Almost Lost My Shirt (And Everything Else) In an Internet Scam??

Also, if you read my last Bethanningan, you’ll know that I came veeeeerrrrrry close to having my identity stolen by a sophisticated crew of scammers who managed to get their number listed as the phone number for the Apple Support hotline. I called the number in order to get help with a faulty Airpod and learned that my account had been hacked—supposedly—and I was transferred to my local bank to “verify my account number.” I was dangerously close to giving the hacker all my info when my husband brought some common sense to the situation by demanding I ask the banker (obstensibly at my local branch) what he could see out the window—which made him go ballistic on me—only then I knew it was indeed a scam. I shared this info (despite feeling shame—again! A theme!—at being gullible) to save others from the scam.

Someone who read that post then alerted me to this blog entry by David Krebs, a security researcher, crews conducting Apple ID password frauds. You’d think I’d take comfort from learning how common these scams are, but there’s no comfort in the idea that these people are incredibly sophisticated and gunning for the likes of us little folk.

Also, remember me posting about the $6.17 I made in royalties from the Korean translation of the novel I wrote with my husband? I asked for suggestions on the best way to spend it. The winner is Frances Flautt Zook, who wrote: “I would take the $6.18, buy some cool paper and write your husband a love letter.” Frances: done.

It’s BASEBALL Season!

I have a sentimental attachment to Wrigley Field. My dad took me there frequently in my girhood. Later, Tommy and I had out rehearsal dinnet at Wrigley, which was great because our very different families shared a love of baseball, so we all had something to talk about together. A few years ago in 2021, we took my mom (who’d we’d had to move into an Assisted Living near us in MS) back for a game—here we are with my two sons on the right and brother-in-law next to them:

And here is a poem from my first book, so a very old poem, but a baseball poetry website just posted it here.

In Honor of National Poetry Month: One Minute of Me Reading a Very Sad* Poem

(*trigger alert for miscarriage)

Here it is—filmed at AWP by the editor of Smartish Pace, a dude good with a smartphone: One Line Shy of a Sonnet

smartishpace

A post shared by @smartishpace

Be My Maine Squeeze

Wanna learn more about short form nonfiction? Join me July 28-August 1 for a workshop called Build Me a Hummingbird of Words, How to Distill Your Life in a Flash, in beautiful Rockport, Maine!

Some of the most useful writing advice I’ve ever received

When I was a girl, I was a girl scout, simply because I wanted to earn all the patches and wear a sash crammed with them. I craved outward signs of merit and approval. Which is actually not the best interior orientation for a writer. I carried this same attitude later into my writing—I wanted to SOLVE my poems, I wanted to direct them toward an ending. If a digression appeared, I tried to clutch the steering wheel, look the other way, scared of getting diverted from my goal.

During my first year in grad school, I had a conference with the poet Jack Gilbert, and he read a sheaf of my poems, which were pretty over-determined and directed, as you might imagine. Instead of critiquing my poems, he told me a story. He said that in the 1970s, the city of Amsterdam had a taxi shortage, due to the fact that so many tourists were swamping the city. There’s a rigorous licensing for taxi drivers in the city, due to its numerous bridges and one-way roads, and becoming a licensed taxi driver can take up to nine months. The city solved the taxi deficit problem by initiating a new kind of taxi. Instead of taking the full-fare, licensed, traditional black taxi, one could instead take one of the new, red, half-priced taxis, BUT the drivers were still in training so the ride might be less direct, might incorporate a detour or two. He paused, handed my poems back to me, and said, “Beth Ann, take the red taxi.” He meant that I should take detours, take my hands off the wheel and be open to the mystery and surprise of writing. It’s advice I’ve taken to heart ever since. I hope it might be useful to you.

Remember:

And Finally Remember:

The Bethannigan is free! The Bethannigan doesn’t want your money. The Bethannigan only wants your love. Praise me, pet me, share me, feed me. Take me home and tell your friends. Apparently if you like or comment below, it helps other people find The Bethannigan? Or if you have a Substack, recommend me? Do the thing! Point the way! Thanks, pals!