Took a Long Time to Come
Yeah, this will be our year
New Year’s doesn’t do much for me. Time isn’t real. We get opportunities for new beginnings every day.
Of course, this New Year’s I’m heartbroken and horrified for my beloved New Orleans. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said, but I felt the need to acknowledge the pall Wednesday’s tragedy has cast. Tomorrow I’ll be making a king cake for Epiphany on Monday, meditating with dough. That’s all I can do that’s good in this situation.
Before the attack, my New Year’s focus was on remembering back to NYE 2011. It’s incredible to me how a time that seems perfectly normal when it happens can be the exact moment that, a dozen years later, I can pinpoint as being the moment I changed.
CJ was seven, and our babysitter canceled on New Year’s Eve, which meant we had to cancel our plans to attend a very kid-free party. I was more upset about this than I probably should have been, but it was a rather bleak time. I won’t go into that—another long story entirely—but I was consoled with an evening of couple friends and kids, some very strong vodka punch, and a Twitter conversation with another St. Louis music writer, Scott.
In the days leading up to New Year’s, a writing by Woody Guthrie was making the rounds—his New Year’s “Rulin’s” for 1943, released for the upcoming centennial of the folk icon’s birth. Scott wrote a blog post about it that sparked something in my perpetually pissed off mind:
“We should write something together,” I tweeted.
NYE 2023 is the first year since then that no one has sent the Rulin’s to me. I didn’t see them making the social media rounds like they have every year since. To my surprise, its absence left a hollowness in my chest. Not because I longed for NYE 2011, a night that led to some awful but necessary changes in a lot of lives. Not that anything bad happened that night, but the tectonic-like plates deeper than my bones shifted.
Seven years ago this Monday, I drove to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I would stay for two weeks, followed by two more weeks in May, researching in the Woody Guthrie Archives. I spent those weeks in a room, reading letters Woody and his wife exchanged. That wasn’t what I went to the archives to read. I clicked on the wrong link in the digital archives which took me to this rich thread of letters that, I realized before the end of the first day, was the iceberg with the Rulin’s being the tip.
A lot of people know I have written a manuscript about Woody Guthrie, those letters, and that most tumultuous year of my life. 400 pages that’s eaten space on several hard drives and taken permanent residence in the Cloud. For nearly a dozen years that manuscript has been my personality, my life.
My whole life, my big dream has always been to write and publish a book. I had no idea it would be about Woody Guthrie. I barely knew who he was on NYE 2011. I dove into Woody’s life to distract myself from my own, something I doubt I will ever regret. More than anything—even parenthood—learning about Woody on such a deep level helped me become a much better person. Very slowly, but I’m still gleaning lessons from him, and from 2012.
Remember 2012? Occupy and the Arab Spring the year before were huge news, and a hint of where we were headed (and still need to go). The thought of Mitt Romney as president was abhorrent. We were shocked when some asshole in Florida stood his ground and murdered a 17-year-old Black boy.
We were on the precipice and didn’t have a clue.
And that’s why NYE 2011, the manuscript, and such have been weighing heavy on me. I mean, they always weigh heavy on me.
In 2012 I hit the road, traveling the country to places where Woody-related events were happening, taking me out of CJ’s young life for multiple chunks of time, and keeping me very distracted when I was home.
Will I ever forgive myself for going to Chicago to see Springsteen and write about Woody’s ghost the morning after our cat died, leaving CJ a crumpled, grieving heap? Probably not.
Crowdfunding at the time was new and required giving rewards to givers, which I bungled, having grossly over-promised on rewards I was sure I could deliver but couldn’t. That shame still burns in me.
I lost a lot of friends in 2012-2015. Mostly I’m okay with that, seeing that those losses came from the painful growth spurts writing the manuscript brought to me. It still hurts to remember, especially now that I’ve gained the ability to see the part I played in fucking up those relationships.
Would I do it again? Absolutely.
At the end of 2020, I spent most of a week in a hotel room, completing the sixth edit of the manuscript. I thought I was happy with it, but I couldn’t get motivated to query agents and get it published. Granted, there was a global pandemic, two broken knees, and a soon-to-graduate teen that were also in the picture. The manuscript sat untouched.
Until I was in New Orleans in October. I sat at Petit Clouet (one of my favorite NOLA coffeehouses), pulled up the first chapter on my phone, and, with pen and paper, rewrote the first chapter, shaving it from 11 pages to eight.
The next day I had coffee with my friend Mark. He’s a history professor who, at a Woody event in Tulsa in 2017, cornered me to find out what I was doing … and how he could help. Without Mark, I never would have even considered applying to research in the archives. When we met I was in Tulsa trying to decide which direction I needed to go with the manuscript. Mark showed me. And over coffee in October, he showed me again.
It’s time to rewrite the manuscript. Take it down to its bones. Strip away my navel-gazing and focus on what I experienced in 2012 and 2018 that left me wondering how we didn’t see what was coming. How close fascism was to becoming an American reality. My ego can’t be a part of this manuscript, and that’s what has weighed it down.
Okay, so I’ve only shaved down the one chapter, as November and December were ridiculous and I’m just now catching my breath. But I think I needed to know who would be elected president in order to do this edit properly. I think I needed to feel an attack on a city I love to truly grasp the horror that’s upon us.
Book writing is HARD. But it’s the one way I know to resist and fight.
And to that tune, I need to let go of all the embarrassment and shame that’s come with not publishing the book yet. Of the missteps I made in the last dozen years. The embarrassment and shame have their place—in the past and in the book.
In recent years I’ve absolutely hated it when people have asked how the book’s coming along. Regardless of the reason for asking the question, my brain always turns it into an accusation, rewords it to, “Why aren’t you finished?” I’m going to appreciate that question now. Just like on December 31, 2025, I’ll be grateful if anyone sends me Woody’s Rulin’s. Just as I believed the first time I read them a dozen years ago, we’d all be better if we reviewed them annually. I’ll be keeping the last three on the tip of my tongue for the foreseeable future:
Love everybody
Make up your mind
Wake up and fight
Robin! So inspiring! Thank you for this. Keep going!
Always willing to be a test reader or lend an ear, I've got 2! You can do it. Your words blend like flour and eggs with just the right sugar and vanilla to bake a perfect cake.