“Why don’t you write a book?” came the voice loud and clear. In a hectoring tone, it continued, “You’ve written more than 800 Medium stories in three years, that’s Moby Dick. Why don’t you pile the pages on top of each other instead of scattering them here and there?”
When you hear a voice, in the silence of 4 AM, is it your mother’s? Dody Gardner, smart as a whip, with a tongue to match, an English major who earned her degree in 1940, didn’t even read books except to her three boys as they were growing up.
But when her spirit tugs, I listen and engage.
“Mom, I’ve thought about this. My writing life is a kind of managed ADHD, the many instead of the few. I write about this, that, and the other because I’m interested in so many things.”
“Shallow instead of deep?”
“Precise instead of wordy.”
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