_ Psalm 1  Blessed is the woman
who walks not in step with abusers
nor keeps silent in front of lies.
Her will is with God
and on God she meditates
day and night.  She is like a tree,
planted near a river.

She shall bear fruit, in her season.
Her leaves shall fall in autumn
and return again in spring – 
unlike the evil ones
who shall be under God’s feet
like dust or chaff of wheat. 

Hear this:  the man who
hurts your children,
even though he is powerful on earth,
shall not stand before God forgiven.

You can believe it:  the Lord
watches over you
and your household. 

from A Woman's Book of Psalms

    When a book goes out into the world, it is like watching your half-grown child, riding the school bus with bullies and taking all kinds of risks, every day. However flawed, you know its very life is a miracle. A mother's heart thrills at any kindness shown your child - every smile, every friendly wave lets you know all is well.
    Just as A Woman's Book of Psalms was in final proofs, I edited out the back story of how it came to be, this summer and fall, not wishing to distract its readers with  intensely personal material.  I wanted it to live and breathe on its own, not be weighed down with sorrow.  And already I can see that those instincts were right.  The psalms are flying - they are free to swirl and heal.  I have not been able to read them since plowing through about twenty drafts, front to back and back to front, during the final month or so of editing and proofreading.  But soon I will begin to pray them, as was my original longing. It is wonderful to think that others might use them in prayer, too.

I didn't know it would be published on the Sabbath - that was a nice surprise.  Another thing I didn't know was that the psalms would be read aloud, taking flight in the air above Northampton, Massachusetts, the night before they took to cyberspace.

Psalms 22 and 23 - for Matthew Shepard and Ryan Skipper - two beautiful young men, one in Wyoming and the other in Florida - brutally attacked and left to die under the night sky.  How could the 23rd psalm be applied to them?  They had nothing of what David had when he wrote "The Lord is my shepherd - I shall not want."  They had no safety - no protection through the valley of the shadow of death.

Psalm 22 ("O God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") is where their story begins. I received a text message last night to let me know that 22 and 23 had been used at a fundraiser to help bring Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, to speak in Northampton next spring.  The HBO movie about Matthew's life was shown and then the audience sang "This Little Light of Mine," to have hope, in the night, that others can be saved, that we won't have to continue to lose our young people to hate crimes and bullying.

My heart is full and my soul is blessed to be able to see the psalms go out into the world and be used for the glory of God and the healing of my people.   Heartfelt thanks to all who nurtured them along to birth.  You know who you are.

 this very concept has a lot of people running scared. I watch my friends in publishing, both those who write and those who put writing into print.  I have long been fascinated with both.  Perhaps it comes from being privy to conversations between Willa Cather and her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet.  HM was her first publisher, up to One of Ours.  She left them to take her chances with a totally new name on the scene in 1922: Alfred A. Knopf.  One big reason for the change was that she didn't like the covers HM insisted on using for O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia.  They were brown.   She wanted green.  Perhaps she was a tad sensitive about being pigeon-holed as the author of a new genre in American fiction, something sarcastic ex-patriots with names like Hemingway and Stein were already calling  "the novel of the soil."

Cather’s era of publishing is long-gone and yet I covet those conversations about the covers she wanted for her books.  Houghton Mifflin had lost her confidence because they insisted on making her books look like “big clods of dirt.”  She pulled a joke on Greenslet when she first submitted what became her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours, and titled it Claude, the name she had decided to give her protagonist because it was the closest she could get to naming a book exactly how she thought it looked. 

Book collectors these days can tell original Cather editions across the room at antiquarian book sales by whether they have the telltale brown covers of Houghton Mifflin or the spring green covers of the Knopf editions (hand-picked by the author).  I have inherited Cather's foolish notion that an author should be able to choose how one's books will be presented. 
   
More than a decade ago, I tried to convey this to my would-be acquisitions editor at a university press from which I had received a request for a book on women authors in Florida.  She assured me that would never happen.  (I wanted each of the eight or nine women in the book to be represented on the cover.  She stated in no uncertain terms that they would use one image and one image only, and it wouldn't be of my choosing).  I took two steps back and I've been stepping away ever since.  Although it's meant a long delay in that book's birth process, I'm glad that Cather's independent spirit is still alive in me, for it caused me to carry it full term instead of giving in to a premature delivery, which works fine for babies but produces slightly less than admirable books.

Down through the years, I have lived a Parnassus-on-Wheels kind of life, carrying the best, most succinct, revealing words of dead authors in my head for the sake of revealing said author’s personality to audiences who still hang on their every word although they’ve been dead since 1947, in Cather’s case. I recite the poetry of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, supposedly dead since 1953, and realize from the looks on people’s faces that MKR is more alive than ever, as long as her poems sing.

Chautauqua is the most alive thing I know.  And it has a chance of lasting for a bit, I think, with the advent of something  called the enhanced e-book.  As I have rounded the corner toward sixty, I have finally decided to commit my fiercely protected live performances of these authors to one shot at posterity.  For remembrance, for my grandchildren Noah and Aria, for my great-nieces Amber Jo and Abigail and my great-nephew Joshua;  for yet-unborn children of my niece Julia and the people in my audiences, usually men, who have whispered “I hope you live forever," I will leave behind, time permitting, one small captured moment of each character I have portrayed, along with some things she might have said on any given day in her one beautiful unique life.  

For the first time in publishing history, it seems possible to have just the right cover, just the right selection of words and images into narrative, and something Willa Cather would never have agreed to – a recorded moment, in audio or video or both.  This seems to be the wave of the near future.  I hold my breath and cross my fingers and hope to be riding that wave, in my own offbeat way.

But first, The Woman’s Book of Psalms is in its birth throes. My dear friend Theresa Coley-Kuadio has taught me the best practice of midwifery:  it takes the time it takes. You can step away, now and again, for a few minutes or even hours, but not too far away to get back at just the right moment, to be a guide, watching it through and cutting the umbilical cord to usher this new being into the world that awaits it.

Other midwives for this book – Campbell Welch, Ann Simas Schoenacher, Sally Roesch Wagner – thank you for the seeds of prayer, idea, and history that have nurtured it through to completion.  Sisterhood is powerful.

I promised myself, really.  I have a lot of friends and even some relatives who blog.  Some do it so well that I'm in awe of them and others do it not so well or not at all.  They start blogging and then they trail off . . . never to be heard from again.

The only way I've been able to convince myself to do this is that I may have things to say, now that my first book will soon be out, followed by reissues of newspaper columns from the 1980s and two volumes of road poems from the 1990s.  After that will come, chapter by chapter, the Florida tome that has occupied most of my time since 2000. 
I'm still looking for a publisher who won't sell out and have books printed in China just because it's cheaper that way.   Until I find one, I've decided to put everything up on Kindle, et.al., and see what the market is like. If ya'll want print editions right away, let me know and I'll sic my would-be agent into action sooner rather than later.  Her main interest, I think,  is in the novel trilogy I've had underway for 20+ years, but Running South in Agitation:  The Florida Journeys has almost as much sex & intrigue as a novel.

Quiz question:  Who said "I write books about sex & intrigue because sex intrigues me?"

First person to know this (no Googling!) wins a free e-copy of A Woman's Book of Psalms with its wonderful introduction by Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner.  Only my Facebook friends know about this blog or my summer-to-autumn project:  rewriting the Psalms of David. You've got first dibs.