The One Book I Never Thought I Would Write

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Here's Leslie. This is the story of a book. Really, it's the story of writing a book I never wanted to write. It's the story of surviving the writing of a book I never wanted to write. But it changed my life in every way.

Let me back up. I've always believed in the power of story. I was a voracious reader from a young age, and as soon as I could write, I began creating poems and stories. I grew up in a time in culture when quiet children were the best children, and thinking you were special in any way was the pinnacle of pride, and pride was the worst sin of them all. So when I grew up and became a writer, my main interest was other people's stories.

Who would care about me or my life? Yes, my life was not a typical American life. I lived in Alaska mostly. In the summers, I commercial fished with my new husband and his family on a tiny island in the wilderness with no roads or cars.

It was an island with eight people on it, just us. We lived through days and nights of such drama and stories, but even then, other people's stories were much better than mine, so I wrote about other people. By age 40, I had published two collections of stories about fishermen and women. And then I began a third book.

This one was different. It was about my own experiences living in the wilderness with my husband, digging a well by hand, hauling water in buckets, building our own house with very few tools, doing the laundry outside in the winter in an old ringer washing machine, prying frozen laundry off the line, and stacking the towels stiff in my arms into the house like a stack of wood. Stories like that. I sent it to my agent. Yes, I had an agent. Somehow, earlier that year, I had landed a hot New York literary agent, but she didn't like it.

Here's how our first phone call went. Leslie, I really like these essays, but there's one problem. You're not in them.

I know, I replied, that's the point. This is about topics much bigger than me, about water, about food, about the ethical dilemmas of killing animals, about our wasteful culture. So many important things. It's about universals.

Yes, but we don't care about universals unless we care about you. You're completely absent, and nobody wants essay collections now. This has to be your story. You're going to have to turn this into a memoir. A memoir? I gulped. Memoir was a dirty word to me. I equated it with first-person tell-all stories by strippers and smoky bars and with supermarket tabloids of disgraced politicians and ravaged movie stars. Memoir felt indulgent and just a little scandalous. I couldn't do it.

And besides, no one would be interested in my life. No, Kate, I can't do that. And I hope. But the next week, while teaching a creative writing class, I heard myself say to my students, if you want to grow as a person, as a writer, you have to take on new challenges. And then I stopped for a moment to listen to myself. I decided to try. It took a month to get another phone appointment with Kate. The next call went like this.

Kate's phone went off. Remember, Kate, you asked me to turn those essays into a memoir and to make it about my life? Yes, of course.

Okay, I'll do it. Good. I knew you would. Then I got brave. So, how do you write a memoir? She laughed or something equally unhelpful.

You'll figure it out. It wasn't easy to invite that I into my house. I so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, I wanted to stay invisible. But I started with scenes the cornerstone of good memoir. Scenes that take the reader straight into the action.

Scenes that show a life rather than tell about a life. I wrote about the first day when I officially became a fisherwoman. I remember the process of getting dressed with layer upon layer of sweatshirts, hit boots, rain pants, finally layered so thick and heavy I could hardly walk. I wrote about my first snack and bathroom break on the water in the boat.

Talk about basic. We worked in 18 foot open boats with no cabin and of course no toilet. This day I was out with my new husband Duncan and my father-in-law DeWitt.

That scene went like this. It's almost noon now. We've been fishing for four hours. I sit wearily on the wooden seat looking at the fish on the floor of the skiff.

There must be 500 of them, all fat and shiny. The waves slap and slosh our skiff from side to side. I'm hungry and I need a bathroom break, but how does this happen in an 18 foot boat? There's no cabin on our little wooden peapod.

It's just a glorified rowboat afloat on a great Alaska sea. DeWitt sits heavily in the bow, his black-green raincoat mirroring the dark water below. Well, I guess I gotta shake the dew off my lily, DeWitt intones in a gravelly voice. I can hear his Oklahoma accent, though he left 40 years before, during the Dust Bowl.

He grew up poor, picking cotton and working the land. Now he works the seas, but he moves awkwardly in the boats and never seems at home on moving water, except now. I smile at Duncan and DeWitt and turn around. When they're done, it's my turn. Let me off on that rock over there, Duncan. I point to a cove with a shelf of rock jutting out. In a moment we are there, the skiff rising and plunging in the water swirling around the rocks. I'm nervously perched in the bow, ready to spring overboard at just the right second. My hands twitch as they grip the rail, I'm motionless, but breathing hard. Jump, Duncan yells as the nose of the skiff rises in the foaming surge. You're not close enough, I shoot behind me.

I see DeWitt sitting calmly beside Duncan as if we've done this a hundred times. I can't get any closer, jump, he shouts as the boat gurgles and sinks now in the trough. I can't leap that distance in all this fishing gear, and if I miss, how did a simple bathroom break become a life and death endeavor? I wrote scenes from my life all summer long, but first we created a writing studio on our island. My husband and I cleaned out a tiny shed on a dock over the ocean. It was filled to the rafters with decades of junk and old tools. We dragged in two sawhorses, dropped a four by eight sheet of plywood on top, and there it was, my desk, my office.

The shed wasn't insulated or heated, so even in the summer, with the temperature in the forties, I sat in a winter coat, hunched over my legal pad or old computer, writing, remembering. As I wrote, the fishing boats rumbled as they passed, the crows and bald eagles screeched overhead. I wrote and I wrote, then I sent the chapters to Kate. And you're listening to Leslie Leland Fields and the story of writing a book that she said she never wanted to write. In fact, as she put it, it's the story of surviving writing a book that she never wanted to write. Before we come back, more of the story of Leslie Leland Fields, a regular contributor here on this show, her story about writing her memoir here on Our American Story. Thank you.

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It requires credit qualification and 36 month phone financing agreement. Hey, this is Lance Bass from Frosted Tips. So my husband Michael and I just took an amazing road trip to the iHeart Radio Music Festival in Vegas. And thanks to Hyundai, we were able to record a special episode just for you guys along the way. We're so excited to take you on this journey with us. You're not going to want to miss this one, right, babe?

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This episode is brought to you by the all electric Hyundai IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6. And we continue with our American stories and we've been listening to author, speaker and teacher, Leslie Leland Fields. She lives in Alaska and has been brilliantly telling the story of how she came to write her first memoir. Let's return to Leslie. I'm on the phone again now with Kate. Leslie, good scenes here. Graphic, compelling.

Her voice is clipped, hurried as usual. The book feels closer, but there's something crucial missing. What is it? I asked with dread wondering if she's going to tell me to scrap the whole thing and start over. Why did you stay? I understand why you went into the Alaska wilderness, all that, but what kept you after all that happened?

And how were you changed at the end? Without that arc, there's no story. Yeah, okay.

I say, heart sinking. I know Kate is talking about the inner story. Haven't I taught this to my students? Every story has at least those two layers, the outer story. What happens in the out there world. The inner story, the deeper story, the psychic, emotional, spiritual story. I knew this before I began the memoir. This was what scared me most about life stories and memoir.

But how could I say no to this now? I had signed the book contract and I knew that if I was going to grow as a writer and as a human being, I needed to take this next step. There were hard questions I needed to ask.

Who was that 20-year-old girl just married, standing in a skiff, trying to keep her balance in the new waters of marriage, living with her in-laws on a remote island in Alaska? Was there something there we all might see about finding and making home in a strange land? I started writing inside each of the significant events of those first years. Whenever I had the chance, I scribbled, digging down layer by layer. I wrote myself back to those days in the skiff, the long hours, the storms, getting sick and still needing to work, to the icy silences between my husband and me. I wrote about the day I jammed clothes and food into a backpack and escaped the island the only way possible by waiting until low tide and marching off down to an empty shack four miles down the beach, gun over my shoulder for bears.

I wrote myself back to that near disastrous day when I almost didn't make it home. I insisted on taking the skiff out on an important errand. It was going to be a four-hour trip.

I insisted on going alone. It was a long way to go, on the ocean, in the winter. A snowstorm came up. I got lost in the total whiteout, and then the engine broke down. I wrote about it, describing how scared I was when it started snowing, when the engine died, when I knew I had drifted out onto the open ocean, when I thought I might die. But the inner story, I didn't know it yet. I was learning again what I thought I already knew, our stories about so much more than what happened.

It's just as important to know why those things happened, to know what moves and motivates us, and how those moments, large and small, change us, and how they might change our readers too. I began to write more deeply into those two stories, and it slowly came clear, word by word, what I was doing. In both of those events, I was escaping a place that wasn't mine, an ocean, an island, a life that belonged to my new husband and his family, but it didn't belong to me, yet. It wasn't mine, except by marriage, by proxy. My life was borrowed, shoehorned into whatever cracks I could fit in. Even where we lived those first three summers, we lived in a tiny loft atop a rickety ladder and an old building, a loft just big enough to hold a bed and a wood stove.

We could only stand up in the middle. As I wrote, I realized so much about my life I hadn't seen before. I felt compassion for the young woman I was, and for my husband, for the two of us trying to make a marriage work on a wilderness island with endless nets, ocean, and fish we couldn't control. I realized that both those escapes helped make that island and that place mine, too, in some way.

My fingers on the keyboard showed me yet more. There were so many rescues and second chances. I began to see that these chapters from my life were indeed about survival, but it was also a story of grace, not easy grace, hard grace, the kind you pray you'll survive.

And there it was, the title and the paradox that came to shape the final story, Surviving the Island of Grace. Six months later, I finished the book. My stomach quivered.

My index finger hovered over attached file. No one would publish it, I was sure, but I had learned so much in writing it page by page. I punched send, and it was done. What would Kate think? I soon found out. Kate sent it out into the world immediately after receiving it, and then it began, a steady stream of rejections from the major New York publishers over the next two months. But then there was a yes from one of the New York Big Ten publishers. It was a hearty yes. Suddenly Kate was great, and she said I was, too. My first memoir, and surely my last, would soon be in bookstores around the country.

But that's not the true happy ending to this story. When I began writing the memoir, reluctantly, I did not even know what I was looking for. The writing showed me, in the midst of roaring seas, the claustrophobia of an island with no escape, doubts of my own ability as a writer. Words saved my life. Words carved out a space between land and sea where maybe I could hold fast. Writing, surviving the island of grace, brought me here, to this moment. One morning, I sat on a distant beach on our island. I was alone, except for the two ravens on a cliff above me, spatting. Was I sorry I had chosen Duncan and this place and this very particular life that came with it?

No. How could anything be other than it was? But when I chose all of this back in 1977, I did not know what I was choosing.

I came here with Duncan at 20, running from a difficult childhood. I was certain I would find wholeness and freedom in him and in this island world. I looked around. It was still as wild and clean and vast a place as when I first came, but I hadn't known what to measure then. I know now that what I was looking for is not something that can be found, not in a place or in a person. Freedom and wholeness must be made, and it is made out of whatever is around you. It is made out of whatever is given to you, like the barnacles on the rocks around me. I looked at them closely. They were anchored to a massive rock, but they were moving.

In each of them, the beak, like a tiny telescope, was rounding the perimeter of its own shell. There, halfway between land and water, was a creature that literally grows its own cliffed walls. His own form entraps him. It is his prison, his island. He cannot escape.

But then I saw. It is also his mountain fortress, the very grace that sustains his life. When I finished writing Surviving the Island of Grace, I was hooked. Once I started writing the truest words from my life that I could find, such clarity, discovery, and consolations have come to me.

I don't ever want to stop. When we steward the beautiful burdens and difficult passages we've been given in our lives, we have another chance to reclaim and heal those burdens. I've seen it thousands of times, in my own life and others. This is my work now, teaching others to do the same. And in all our stories, we who are stranded on islands and in strange places have found the words and the grace to write ourselves home. And a special thanks to Leslie Leland-Fields.

To find out more about her work and also her teaching, go to LeslieLelandFields.com. I didn't know what I was looking for. The writing showed me. Words saved my life. Leslie Leland-Fields' story, here on Our American Stories.

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