Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

I'm working on the novel a bit today. But I stopped to revise a poem while the words were fresh. I have two books partially read for reviews, another waiting attention for a blurb. And I must plan tomorrow's class. And winnow down that big pile of manuscripts for the first of three contests I'm judging over the next six weeks. How to focus! It seems so much like piecing. I remember both grandmothers making quilts, cutting all those tiny scraps from outgrown dresses or remnants from other projects. Triangles and squares cut then sewn into larger patterns, and then those blocks assembled into one great project to fling across a bed. They kept those grand patterns in mind as they interrupted their work for the hundred other tasks of a day around farm and home and garden and children. The color and order must have given their minds a place to settle when everything was in a whirl. How to keep it all in mind! And I think of my many years as a reporter, never with the luxury ...

I’ve spent the first quarter of this year prepping my first book, Gift of the Dreamtime – Awakening to the Divinity of Trauma for its second edition, due out early summer. Dreamtime is a memoir, focusing on my twenties, during which I sought out spiritual healing for PTSD and depression stemming from childhood incest. Writing the book the first time was hard enough. Going back through it has been challenging on levels I never imagined. First off—I can’t edit my diary. Life happened the way it did, and it’s been before an audience for 7 years. No matter how I’d write it differently now, I can’t radically change it or give it a more fantastic ending. It is what it is, and in some ways that’s an even harder pill to swallow now than it was when I was first started writing it 11 years ago. I can’t express how often I’ve slapped my hands not to change phrases from the way I would say them now, or to alter concepts to better fit my present state. In several places I cringed at the...