Click here to listen to an excerpt from the audiobook version of my new novel Telephone of the Tree. 

This was back in the days of screechy dial-up modems. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on my clunky old computer screen: “First time novelist tries but fails to move or matter.” 

Or matter.

I sat staring at the screen, my little kids looking at me silent and troubled, knowing something was wrong. I turned to them and smiled. I laughed about the review, pretended I didn’t care. But the photo above is what I typed into my journal that night.

This is not a story about a writer who got a bad review – all writers get bad reviews (especially from the un-bylined Kirkus). Nor is it a story about a plucky young woman whose novels went on to win a bunch of awards so haha. It’s a tiny story that stands in for a much larger story of casual, ongoing cruelty in a world in which those two words –or matter–should never be written by a human being about another human being. 

Those two words broke something in me a long time ago that can’t be fixed. That’s what cruelty does. I hate witnessing cruelty and I hate knowing that I have hurt others, even inadvertently, with my words.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
enwrought with golden and silver light,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

For more information on Yeats, please click here. Today’s first poem first appeared in 1899, in Yeats’s third volume of poetry, The Wind Among the Reeds. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter