December 27, 2013
Friday

Don’t throw the past away,
You might need it some rainy day.
Dreams can come true again,
When everything old is new again.
— Peter Allen, 1944-1992
Australian songwriter and entertainer

I have written about Julie Hayden and her single published work, the story collection The Lists of the Past, three times. In 2008, the title of the book floated into my mind when I chose to write off a prompt about “lists.” That’s when I did some research and discovered that Julie Hayden had died in 1981 without having published the novel she was said to be working on. In 2010, I had the book with me during a sojourn at the Vermont Studio Center, where I was working exclusively on revision. Six months later, I took the theme of the six connected stories that comprise the book’s second half to write about the thirty-fifth anniversary of my coming to the house that I have lived in now more than half my life, that I will almost certainly die in.

The first piece led to a brief correspondence with Patsy Blake, Julie Hayden’s sister, who wrote to thank me for my kind words. I would learn that they were the daughters of Phyllis McGinley and Charles Hayden. Phyllis McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. I knew her work as a teenager. She published frequently in The Saturday Evening Post, which came to our house. She was also a Catholic poet who wrote often about “suburbia and sainthood,” so there is not a doubt in my mind that she was represented in the small anthologies of work by Catholic writers that were used in my parish elementary school.

A week ago, I received an email with the subject line “The Lists of the Past.” It was from Harry Kirchner, the publisher of Pharos Editions, a house “dedicated to bringing to light out-of-print, lost or rare books of distinction.” They are re-issuing The Lists of the Past in May. He found my 2011 piece about Julie Hayden while doing research for the jacket copy, and thought I would be interested in the news. The new edition was selected and will have an introduction by Cheryl Strayed, a writer of my acquaintance whose work I greatly admire. So even though I have a first edition of Julie Hayden’s book, which Mr. Kirchner calls “so fresh and honest it takes your breath away,” I am excited to acquire the new edition as well.

This good news comes as I am getting ready to ease out of “holiday mind” and back into “fiction writer’s mind.” I have not written any fiction since December 15. That’s the day I sent off some new work I prepared for a fellowship application. I knew then that my next effort would be deep revision of a manuscript I had recently shown to my mentor. It’s been knocking around in my files for more than ten years, and I regard it as my strongest work. She thinks it is, too, and sees many possibilities as I bring to it the more advanced craft skills I continue to acquire.

As it happens, it’s the story I worked on in Vermont in 2010, when I re-read Julie Hayden’s work yet again as a way to fall into fiction.