Phaedra Patrick follows her debut novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (an Indie Next selection that was published in over 20 languages worldwide), with the whimsical, poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck jeweler in Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone.

On a shelf in her pantry my mum keeps a round tin box full of beads, gemstones, buttons and buckles that she’s found or collected over the years. I’ve always been a fan of anything small, shiny or sparkly, and as a child, I spent many happy hours sifting through the box. I enjoyed examining and playing with the little bits and pieces, as did my son when he was a toddler. I suppose being a writer is a little like having a tin box in your head, where you store all your snippets of ideas to search through, and pick out, to write a novel.

When I got engaged to my now-husband, I knew that I wasn’t a diamond-ring wearer. The clear brilliant stone just isn’t me. Instead I wanted something different and visited a local jewelry shop where I found a wide silver band with a leaf design, set with a small round green peridot. I’ve worn it for 20 years and still love it. Peridot is my birthstone, for August. However, when I was younger, I felt rather envious that other months were represented by (what I thought were) more glamorous gemstones—ruby for July, or emerald for May. A peridot seemed kind of anonymous and pale in comparison.

When I initially thought of the idea for my second novel, Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone, I started to read more about gemstones. I learned that, even in ancient times, gems have different properties associated with them. Peridots are supposed to help you to let go of the past, lessen stress and anxiety, and enhance harmony in marriage—perfect attributes for an engagement ring! However, if you’re a dedicated diamond wearer, then you’ll be pleased to know that they signify honour and pure intention.

Through my research, I discovered that the ancient Greeks believed that coral was formed from the severed head of Medusa, and that jade changes color, often to shades of brown, when buried with the dead. Jasper was one of the most popular stones for making seals and amulets, and Mark Antony was reputed to own a red jasper seal ring with which he stamped his letters to Cleopatra.

And through these meaning of gemstones, my premise for my book developed and emerged. Indeed, each chapter starts with the name of a gem and its properties.

The book finds 40-something jeweler Benedict Stone stuck in a rut. In the small village of Noon Sun in England, his jewelry business is failing. He and his wife, Estelle, can’t have children, and she has moved out of their home. When Benedict’s American teenage niece, Gemma, crashes into his life, together they discover an old journal about gemstones in the attic. Gemma challenges Benedict to win Estelle back, and Benedict also begins to incorporate gemstones into his jewelry, which has a very surprising effect on the villagers of Noon Sun.

Throughout the book, we’re never quite sure whether it’s the gemstones or Gemma who helps to make Benedict’s life sparkle again, so I’ll leave that up to readers to decide. The button box still lives in my mum’s pantry. Sadly, my son has outgrown playing with it now. But if anyone in my family ever needs a spare button for a coat, or a bead for a necklace, we know exactly where to look.

Author photo credit Sam Ralph.

In Charlotte Nash’s The Paris Wedding, Rachael West heads to the City of Lights to attend her ex-boyfriend nuptials, intent on braving any ensuing heartbreak and enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. Like her heroine, Nash is an accomplished seamstress, and finds that her two creative outlets intersect in surprising ways. In this essay, Nash explores the power of process and how the act of ripping up a draft can lay the foundation for the work to come.

There’s a certain romanticism attached to the things we did as children. Childhood interests are windows to our truer selves, before the weight of worldly expectation fell on us and warped our sense of what we liked and valued (at least, this is the story told by many a life and career coach). The cliché of the writer often falls in this territory, too, with many claiming their interest in writing stems from childhood. I’m not really one of them (there’s times I wish I were), but it’s certainly true that interest or curiosity is at the centre of our human existence. My earliest interest was not writing, but sewing, and yet the two arts have some surprising similarities . . . and for me, one key difference.

I learned to sew before I have memories for learning things. I remember cutting patterns on our dining table (never actually used for dining), winding bobbins with a hunched ache between my shoulder blades and the smell of machine oil as I fed fabric through my mother’s Bernina (I still have it, over 40 years later).

I don’t actually remember the “learning”—the first time I threaded a needle, the first time I had to size a pattern and cut the fabric. All those firsts are lost in the far distance of my early childhood, as if I’m trying to look back on the start of the universe. Sewing is deep in my muscle memory. But there must have been something about it that captured my interest, because I kept on with it without any adult pushing, such that my first memories of sewing are when the craft of it was already established in me.

Until I entered home economics class in middle school, I assumed sewing was a universal skill. And then I learned it wasn’t. Having already completed the first garment, I watched the other girls struggling to hold a straight stitch line on the practice shapes photocopied onto white paper (sacrilege, I thought, for one should never ever blunt one’s needle by using it on paper). With the term not even half over, I had completed the second piece, which had been meant to occupy us until the holidays.

This isn’t to say that I was some kind of seamstress wunderkind; it was just that I had learned young, and so my skills looked amazing next to anyone who was just starting out.

I learned to write fiction in my late twenties, and the learning was a deliberate act. It had to be, because I was on the other side of the art in those classes. I was the one who couldn’t hold a straight stitch line with my words. I was full of enthusiasm, but not much skill. I didn’t have a long record of things I’d written back to childhood, and I remember all the learning—how to structure, how to conceive characters, how to finish a novel draft (or, most of the time, how not to do these things). Learning to sew, I imagine, was just as fraught, I just have the advantage of not remembering it. (Plus the breakage I inflicted on my memory while studying medicine had perhaps put my early writing education on the back foot).

The benefit of my early learning in the sewing department is that as an adult, I can still out-sew just about anyone I know. Again, this doesn’t make me the best; it’s just the power of deep memory. Also, it helps that sewing is a dying art (less competition), and most people didn’t learn from an unbroken chain of women who sewed because life depended on it.

I learned to sew because my mother sewed. And she learned because hers did. I assume this is a chain unbroken through generations in the stone farmhouses of the mid-east of England, where we claim our ancestry. My mother told me once how her mother would “side-to-middle” bed sheets—this is a process where sheets that have worn thin in the middle are cut down the centre and the still-thick outsides stitched together to make a new sheet. The process extends the life of a sheet that we would now, no doubt, throw away, and then drive straight out to Bed Bath & Beyond to replace without a second thought.

I’ve spent probably too long thinking about an appropriate writing analogy to this “side-to-middling”, but any direct comparisons are laboured points about recycling rejected pieces of writing (which I always tell myself I’ll do, and hence I keep all these old manuscripts and manuscript files that I never ever look at again).

It would be better, perhaps, to be less literal. The idea of recutting bedsheets speaks of great poverty, but also great resourcefulness. This is the Janus head of the writing life for most of us, too. Poverty comes to the writer in many guises; even if you are financially successful (including at your non-writing job), time itself often becomes a limited currency. Books are large commitments, regardless of vision and genre. But somehow, because we choose to act as though we write as if life depended on it (many of us haven’t tested whether that’s true or not), we can make it all work.

If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts.

Resourcefulness requires a lot of patience, mostly to put up with patch-job solutions for long periods. We have to tolerate writing in the wrangled time available to us, tolerate hearing (again and again) that the book industry/writing is dead (or at least drawing its last breath), tolerate sheer desperation at wanting to be better at this. Patience is also a virtue best deployed in sewing; even my early learning wasn’t enough to escape that requirement, which is, I think, ultimately my dressmaking undoing (all puns intended).

My mother always tells me that she is not as good a seamstress as her own mother, because she has no patience to press correctly (pressing is the dreadfully laborious process of ironing/steaming garments during their making). This flaw, I’m afraid, has manifested in me in worse ways, for I have no patience to press or indeed for many other slow steps that might make me a more skilful dressmaker (most notably for everyday clothes—I will take more time if I’ve paid a month’s grocery money for some lovely silk). It’s not that I’m bad. It’s just that I am always racing to finish the end product, even though I know that the process—the careful fitting, pattern adjusting, precise cutting, and stitching and finishing—is where the garment is really made.

This idea of the process being what makes the artwork is also true of writing.

Sewing is a more unforgiving mistress than writing, just by nature of form. Words can be cut and trimmed and re-seamed without leaving needle marks (at least, they can now, in the post-typewriter age . . . pause for nostalgia if longhand is your thing), and without having to waste ruined fabric. I’ve done a heap of this kind of unpicking with my words. Despite hopes that I would find writing easier the more I did, each book has been more trouble than the last. With some books, I think there is not a stitch of the first draft left.

A garment doesn’t usually allow such alteration—you are aiming for perfection on the first try. Or at least, I am, because I am impatient. Unpicking is going backwards, and I might not get away with such corrections. You might leave needle marks in the fabrics. Or there may simply be no fabric left to let out or adjust. You might just have to start again. The thing is, as with books, these mistakes, these re-makings, are where you truly learn the craft.

And this is the key difference between sewing and writing for me. With writing, unpicking is always going forwards. I have rescued many books with re-making, learned many a lesson. I enjoy the process itself. When a new box of my books arrives hot from the press (prepare yourself for the sacrilege to follow) I don’t feel
. . . really . . . anything. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But still, writing is the doing, not the end product. (This is helped perhaps that I don’t want to wear a book . . . and I certainly don’t want to read it once it’s set in print!).

Simply, I think, sewing is not my art—if I could enjoy the actual process of it more, perhaps that could change. In the meantime, I’d prefer to watch Project Runway rather than be sitting at my own machine. (My crueller inner critic also tells me that I have little eye for personal style with fashion, which really is a problem. At least I always know what books I’ll feel great reading.)

Writing is hard work, but I have the patience for it. Not patience with any grace, to be sure. If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts. I figure that’s the big difference between how I sew and how I write. I’m always impatient to be finished, but only with writing am I prepared to unpick. That’s why my childhood dedication to sewing has been overtaken by an adult life of books.

Left: Golden taupe embroidered silk bodice and black silk skirt (material from Hyena Productions), made for wedding and in typical fashion, not quite properly pressed.

Right: getting value out of the outfit at a romance writers event many years later . . .

Author photo © Jen Dainer, Industrial Arc Photography.

In The Lost Queen of Crocker County, Jane Willow, the former Corn Queen of Crocker County, returns to Iowa after a family tragedy—and finds a second chance in her Midwestern home. Author Elizabeth Leiknes imbues this tale with a breezy sense of humor and an abiding love of movies, and though her new novel proves that she knows how to tell a great story, she also has a serious bit of advice: Don’t become a novelist.

For those of you readers who are considering it, don’t become a novelist. Just don’t. I beg you. Because before you know it, years will evaporate. Your lofty dreams and Oprah-inspired vision boards will come and go. Your various muses will turn fickle. Then one day you’ll be sitting on the couch, balancing a hot-mess-of-a-manuscript on one knee and your own personal key lime pie on the other—and I mean the whole pie, not just a slice. That would be way too civilized. You will also have a can of whipped cream, so that each bite can act as a mere vehicle for the creamy clouds piled high, meant to sweeten the tartness of the often-sour, pride-swallowing work that is creating a novel.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sure, there are ups and downs to writing, but the process . . . the PROCESS! It’s so magical. What must it feel like to give birth to a full-length story complete with an engaging plot, riveting themes and satisfying narrative arcs? It feels like giving birth. That’s what it feels like. It is a great deal of work, at first terrifying and painful and then joyous beyond belief. What happens after the book-birth? Pretty much, you’ll worry yourself to death about it. You’ll imagine what could go sideways. You’ll invent ways it will fail. You’ll make deals with the universe in exchange for its triumph.

All of what I’ve said is true, which is why I consider the birth of The Lost Queen of Crocker County to be a bit of a miracle. Sometimes the right thing happens at just the right time in life, and it makes so much sense that you must consider it divine. Five years ago, I’d silently decided to give up writing. I’d published three novels that I was proud of, but my writing career hadn’t become what I’d hoped it would. I am an English teacher by day, so I decided I’d continue the privilege of teaching writing rather than doing it myself.

But then one day, shortly after my I’m-not-going-to-write-anymore realization, something strange happened on my way home from school. I heard a slight thump while driving. In retrospect, it was probably something inconsequential like a rock on the highway or maybe even just the way the car reacted to a bump in the road, but at the time, my initial reaction was a series of emotions alternating between panic and denial. Did I hit something? You’re just tired, it was nothing. Oh, my God, what if it was a kitten? Why would a kitten be on the highway? I even pulled the car over to peruse the area and make sure I didn’t see anything. Then, as I resumed my drive home, I was struck with this: Is it normal to have those kinds of thoughts (zero to prison) in reaction to a small incident like that? Do other people see headlines in their heads—LOCAL TEACHER CHARGED WITH HIT AND RUN INVOLVING SMALL ANIMAL IN FRONT OF DAIRY QUEEN—or is this, perhaps, strictly a Midwesterner’s reaction? Does where we come from shape who we are? Are Midwesterners somehow programmed for guilt? By the time I got home, a story had formed about a woman, transplanted in the West, who returns to her Midwestern home to face her sins, and after being involved in a crime, has to make things right.

So I wrote the book. I had to. This is how it is for writers, or for me at least. If you don’t feel compelled to write stories, go enjoy your life. Work out. Ride a unicycle. Learn to make fancy cakes. Walk into a bookstore and get lost. Worry about normal things, like your beautiful family or gluten or plagues, rather than if your novel accomplished all that you wanted it to. For me, I really, really hope that The Lost Queen of Crocker County does justice to Iowa, to movies, to love. I hope that it reminds readers of the beauty of home, family and second chances.

If I still haven’t convinced you not to write novels, you’ve passed the test. You are doomed to the roller-coaster ride that is being a writer. But you are also blessed with leaving a legacy of stories for your children long after you’ve gone. And you are able to hand your husband a novel that is dedicated to him, dedicated to the fact that his exceptional dad-and-husband skills have afforded you the luxury of time so that you can put your dreams on paper. Last but not least, you are able to create a piece of work that proposes an alternate storyline, a kind of better you’d like the world to be.