Mayan Numeral, by Joanna Wiebe, an illustration from Wild and Precious Life

I am almost done copy-editing my book, Wild and Precious Life.  I’ve been doing this task for about half a year. It is amazing how much time it takes to copy-edit 60,000 words.  Of course, as I edit, I keep re-writing parts, too, and that doesn’t make it go any faster. Not that there is any rush, except for my desire to be done with the project and move onto another book.

For I have decided to write a detective story! When we were on holiday in Jamaica this past September, the blonde Brooklynite and I were reading detective stories poolside at the Negril, Jamaica Rockhouse Hotel.  I was poring over the activities of Mma Precious Ramotswe, the first female private investigator in Botswana.   The blonde Brooklynite was reading classic detective fiction.  I had lots of time on my hands, there in that poolside deck chair, between reading bits about Precious from Alexander McCall Smith’s The Full Cupboard of Life, and waiting for Richie the bartender to bring me more lime slushies.  In that plethora of free time I began mentally playing with my theory that almost anyone is capable of crime, given the right circumstances.  Later, I realized that one of my friends would make the perfect model for an interesting and unusual detective. I announced my interest to the blonde Brooklynite who then proceeded to give me for Christmas an array of classic detective fiction in paperback, as well as a nice hard-backed copy of The Classic Era of Crime Fiction, all from her own library. The die was cast.

reach their fullness, and pass.

Blood flows to its silent thrones of power and authority.

The radiant gods

measure out our hours of celebration;

our days under the benevolent sun,

our nights under the stars.

And until time ends,

in vigilance,

these gods we have trapped within the stars,

look down us, our suns, and all our structures.

from the Chilam Balam de Chumayel, translated from Spanish versions, by Joanna Wiebe

Today on the train on the way to work I addressed the issue of this translation again, and came up with the version shown above. This is the poem which I intend to appear at the beginning of my book, wild and precious life, as a dedication.

I am much happier with this version than anything I have done previously. It’s shorter, for one thing, and flows a little better. Most of all, I think I have done a better job of capturing the thought in the last sentence.  Here are these batch of gods, supreme beings, all powerful and authoritative, whom we have drawn to us by our neediness. So they are attached to us and our stars, trapped in a way, by their ceaseless caring for us, but at the same time, they are above and beyond us, our suns, and our every concept of every thing.

Mom also sent me a link to a Mennonite Weekly Review review of Rhoda’s book, mennonite in a little black dress, and my friend Ruth gave me a link to the review in the New York Times.

It gives me pause to read the reviews. When my memoir, wild and precious life is published, how am I going to handle the comments about me and my life, my mother, my Mennonite Brethren childhood, my writing, my friends, my choices? I have written my truth with as much integrity as I can muster. Very early in this process, when the idea of speaking the truth about my life seemed overwhelmingly scary, my friend and doctor Paul Epstein gave me this sentence from Thomas Paine, which I still have in my kitchen:  “But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” But then what?

The other day I went into Waldenbooks and stood for a long time in front of the rack of best-selling books, imagining what it would be like to have MY book on the shelf along with The Lost Symbol and Going Rogue. I felt kind of panicky, to tell the truth.

Nonetheless, I am looking for an agent.

Eat your heart out, Joanna Wiebe, 1977

All moons, all years, all winds, reach their completion and pass.

Just as blood flows to its place of silence,

it also achieves its thrones of power and authority.

The radiant gods

measure out our time of celebration;

measure out the time we know the benevolence of the sun

measure out the time when the stars look down on us.

And until the end, in vigilance, these gods we have ensnared inside the stars,

also look down on the cosmos from outside time and place.

Chilam Balam de Chumayel, translated from Spanish versions, by Joanna Wiebe

The Mayan Chilam Balam books are named after towns in the Yucatec area of Mexico and usually a mishmash of Mayan and Spanish traditions. The Yucatec Mayas ascribed these to a legendary author called Chilam Balam, a chilam being a prophet.  The topics include history, calendrics, astrology and herbal medicine. Originally written in the Yucatec Maya language, in European script, the manuscripts date to the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier.  There are many Spanish translations, including those of Barrera Vásquez & Rendón, Reifler Bricker & Miram, and Roys.

This translation is a work in progress. I have been working on it since 1976.

NOTE: I have a more recent (and better) translation, which can be found at: http://joannawiebe.com/2009/12/15/all-moons-redux/

The night before  Beverly’s  Celebrating the Arts salon, my son suggested that my husband read the male voices in the chapter. So Tim was the voice of Earl Grey, Baudillio, the owner of the Guatemala City Ford garage, and the Transcendental Meditation teacher. My friend Deborah volunteered to be the voice of Bruce, a full-blooded Choctaw in a pink Chanel jacket. It worked very well It was definitely more dramatic than had I read the chapter by myself.

I truly enjoyed being in front of an audience which appeared to be listening with interest as the chapter unfolded. When I read a word or a phrase that didn’t ring true to the story, I felt it in my bones.  Also, reading the chapter helped me uncover a section which needed obviously needed more exposition, as some people in the audience just didn’t get the depth of despair which led my main character to start to bawl out loud, in the middle of a dusty market full of Guatemalan shoppers.  There are some sentences which I excised from that passage quite awhile ago, which might just do the trick in establishing a greater degree of audience empathy, and I am going to dig them out and see if they might work — or else I’ll just write some new sentences.

So now I am a big fan of reading aloud. Who else wants to hear a chapter?

The art is from the program cover, designed by Beverly’s friend Twisha.

Finally today I decided which chapter to read: Chapter 11, which is entitled “Poem”, and which begins by quoting Adrienne Rich: “The moment of change is the only poem.”

Ah — I just had an idea. I’ll make cards with that quote on them and hand them out to everyone!

Chapter 11 is about my soul’s moment of bankruptcy.  In Chapter 11, I have a juicy, never-ending cold.  Chapter 11 is as a tough as Guatemala City Kentucky Fried Chicken. And it’s in the chapter — Guatemalan KFC, that is– nasty dark thighs with not enough of the salty, crispy bits with their special blend of herbs and spices that drives me mad with desire to poke around in the bottom of the tub to see if there isn’t just one more morsel of crunchy goodness clinging to the grease there. Hardly any of that stuff, just stringy brown over-fried meat with some kind of almost-burned cracker crumbs on it.

How do you do a literary reading, anyway?  Just stand up and start reading?  Should I stop and ask if anyone has any questions? How dramatic should I be?

I guess I’ll just wing it.

mennonite in a little black dress, by Rhoda Janzen.

(That’s how her title appears, all lower case. Is it a reflection of prototypical Mennonite reserve? An acknowledgement that all letters of the alphabet should be accorded equal rank no matter where they happen to fall in a sentence? Just something that the designer did to be trendy?)

Ruth opened Rhoda’s new book and excitedly pointed out the Mennonite History Primer on the last pages.

This is what my husband has always said about me, Ruth exclaimed, reading happily:

“On the other hand, Mennonites happily endorse the following: ‘The scrupulous consumption, on principle, of any and every moldy leftover in the fridge.’ And she’s made a list of all the things that Mennonites do not endorse! Look!  ‘Drinking. Dancing (though let’s not forget ‘liturgical movement,’ which is sort of allowed. Smoking. Sex outside of marriage. Sex inside of marriage. Sex on television. Sex in movies….’”

Ruth was raised Mennonite. And Hutterite and Bruderhof. But that’s her story to tell.

I was raised Mennonite Brethren. I married Ruth’s double second cousin.

Family trees that embrace

That’s another feature of being a Mennonite: family trees that embrace one another. At my husband’s maternal grandmother’s funeral this past weekend (her name also was Ruth — that’s another Mennonite feature, the reuse of a small universe of monikers, mostly Biblical), I was singled out by a handsome, grandparent-y couple, David and Alice, who let me know that they used to sit with my little brother James when we attended the Kitchener Mennonite Brethren Church, because they also had a son of James’ age. This is when those boys were below pew height and I was about twelve. A few sentences into our conversation, we uncovered the inevitable family relationships just begging to be revealed in any encounter between two persons of Mennonite origin: my Uncle John was David’s cousin and Tim’s recently deceased grandmother was Alice’s sister. Appropriate exclamations of surprise and delight were made by all.

But I digress. Now that I have taken the plane trip, and have read mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen (passing up an opportunity to squint at Jules and Julia through my new trifocals at a distance of ten feet, at an angle, on an eight-inch monitor hanging from the ceiling, absorbing a flat, jerky version of the soundtrack through my iTouch headphones), I am excited.

Rhoda was brought up as a Mennonite, as I was, and she writes truly and with humor.  Her work inspires me to continue polishing the draft of my book, Wild and Precious Life, because I want to contribute to the dialog.

Oh, but should I alter my orthographic treatment to a mildly ironic wild and precious life?

Some time I’ll write about Miriam Toews, too, because she’s another one of our tribe of Mennonite writers.

Christmas 1975 - Love Joy Peace Hope

Twenty-six cent gas! Our full tank of gas had cost nine dollars and thirty cents. We left Wichita nine days before Christmas, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 1975. For winter break, my boyfriend, two friends and I were flinging ourselves at Mexico, hoping for salvation of one kind or another.

Four months later I returned to Wichita, alone.  I had lost a bit of weight.  I was still alive, although a Mexican Presidential guard had waved his gun at me, and an irate householder had actually shot at me (missing, thankfully) for playing Superball with some new-found friends around midnight in a suburban Guatemalan City cul de sac.  I had driven the van right through a trio of ghosts on the highway. When the van’s brakes had died on a downhill mountain slope, I had survived by grabbing the emergency brake in a timely way.  I had been penniless and hungry in San Jose, Costa Rica. I had eaten megadoses of psychedelic San Isidro mushrooms. I had lived through a 7.3 earthquake.

But now I was back home, in safe, beige Wichita. I put my trip journals in a box and got on with a clean sheets, three-meals-a-day American life.

More than two decades later a story tumbled out which had been incubating from the raw material of that trip.

And that is the genesis of the sixty thousand words of  Wild and Precious Life.

Now that the book is written, what’s next? The traditional route is to look for an agent, and maybe I’ll do that.

In the meantime, my friend Beverly has invited me to read a chapter at her Celebrating the Arts Salon on November 22.   Although I have read parts of the book to friends and family over the past year, this event feels different and more important.  I am running toward an open door.