What I Thought I Knew is a gorgeous collection of life-, love- and spirit-affirming personal essays. In the preface to her book, Barbara Stahura says it this way:

Sometimes, I wake up early in my grown-up bed, windows open around it, and hear the distant whistle of trains. It is then I remember that little girl who did not know the most important thing her grown-up self would learn: life is all about choices. Learning how to change your mind, when the moment is right, is often the best gift you can give yourself.

And one of the biggest gifts an author can give to her writing and to her readers is to hold a question before her as she writes and show in reflection how the answer is uncovered.

In the blurb I was asked to write for the book, I said:

How does one become acquainted with one’s inner strength and manifest wholeness? Reading Barbara Stahura’s personal essays is both a delight and an answer to that question: By paying attention–to dreams, thoughts, the words of others, and the details of one’s surroundings. Embarking on a spiritual journal helps, too, when it is in conjunction with living deeply, as Barbara does, both in her love, her self-reflection, and in the very real fear of losing her beloved to injuries sustained in an accident. Life is difficult and wonderful, and Barbara helps us find our feelings and rejoice.

Writing It Real is fortunate to publish this conversation with author concerning how she fulfilled her dream of writing and publishing personal essays.

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Sheila
When we first met, you had come from Indiana for a weekend writing retreat on the OR coast. And at that time, you were just starting to turn to the personal essay as your heart-genre. Can you tell us what you were hoping for with the personal essay?

 Barbara
I like the way you call personal essay my “heart-genre.” That’s very true. I knew writer and memoirist Lisa Norton from her work with the International Women’s Writing Guild, and she was hosting writing workshops in Manzanita, Oregon. I can’t remember the exact year when I went to your workshop there, but it was in the mid-90s, just a few years after I’d started freelancing. At that time, I was writing a lot of marketing materials, along with some magazine articles, but I was already in love with personal essays, even if I was mostly reading them instead of writing my own. So when I heard about your workshop from Lisa, I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn more about writing them.

I really didn’t know much about crafting personal essays. I knew only that they grabbed my heart when I read them, or at least those by excellent writers like Barbara Kingsolver, the late Paul Monette, Scott Russell Sanders, and Nancy Mairs. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to match their skill, but I wanted to try my hand at this genre. Something in me wanted to be able to be as honest and clear and eloquent on the page as they were. It still does. Maybe I love personal essays because I’m always trying, not always successfully, to figure out what I feel, and the best essayists seem able to convey their feelings so artfully. I think I also wanted to find in myself that same sense of personal discovery that they seem to have found.

Sheila
I notice that Scott Russell Sanders is among those contributed blurbs for your book. He said that your insights into what you call “‘the holy mysteries are hard won and movingly told.'” It is an exciting moment when you see someone you have admired for so long lending support to your published work.

When you were still getting there, what helped you the most to find the time to develop your personal essays?

Barbara
I began writing professionally with a corporate job and continued as a freelance writer to support myself. I’ve never been the kind of writer who has to write every day or burst, or anything like that. So even when I began writing personal essays, I wrote them in hopes that I would be paid for them as well as for the satisfaction and discovery that came with the writing. When I thought I had something to say, I would fit the essay writing into my regular writing schedule. My first piece of writing to resemble a personal essay was published in 1995 in Science of Mind magazine, and it was about my habit of meditating. I say “resemble a personal essay” because while it was a first-person story, it wasn’t as insightful or as revealing as I hope my essays are now, all these years later. But it was the start.

Sheila
When did you start writing the particular essays that appear in your book?

Barbara
More than a decade ago, although I had no idea then that they would eventually end up in a collection. I began the book’s first essay, “My Dad and the Sphinx” in the mid-90s. It sat for quite a while, and then every now and then, I’d bring it out to tweak it again. In 2003, it won first place in the personal essay/memoir category of a writing contest. It was later published online, on Science & Spirit magazine’s Web site. Then, when I started actually working on the book last year, I added a substantial ending section that gave it a whole new flavor, and which allowed it to fit into the book’s theme of changing my mind and changing my life.

Some of the other essays were written, in one form or another, in the years since then, and the last five are new for the book and were written in 2007 and in early 2008. The subjects range from my father dying when I was 14 and coming back to me many years later, learning to ride a bike at age 38, leaving corporate life to become a freelance writer, following my call, my spiritual journey, finding a wonderful husband after being divorced for more than twenty years only for him to sustain a traumatic brain injury in an accident, and our recovery from that.

Sheila
Did you send them out one by one?

Barbara
The last five essays haven’t appeared anywhere else, and I never sent them out. However, I pulled bits and pieces of some of them from older published and unpublished pieces, and worked them into entirely new essays. For instance, from an earlier essay titled “Riptide,” which was published in Science & Spirit magazine, I pulled some of my favorite passages and used them in the much longer essay called “Brain Wreck” about Ken’s accident and brain injury.

The book’s introduction was taken from an essay titled “Dreams of Going,” which appeared in your book, Writing and Publishing Personal Essays. “Following the Call,” in a different form, appeared in Science of Mind in 2001. “Overcoming the Wobblies, or Those are the Brakes,” won the 2006 contest held by Sculptural Pursuits magazine and was published there. I’d written that one in the mid-90s and could never find a home for it until the contest came along. Again, I lengthened it and added a new ending for the book. “Fallow Time” first appeared in a shorter version on MoonDance.org in the early 2000s.

Sheila
If they were rejected, how did you feel about their inclusion in the ultimate collection?

Barbara
I haven’t written all that many essays, so the ones I used whole or in part for the book had either already been published or were written especially for it.

Sheila
An important essay in What I Thought I Knew is about a midlife love challenged by a near-fatal motorcycle accident. What was the hardest thing for you about publishing material about such a sad and traumatic time in your life and marriage?

Barbara
You’re referring to “Brain Wreck.” I had written about it several times before, in shorter essays, including “Riptide” and “How My Husband Came Back,” which appeared in the My Turn column of Newsweek online. I had also attempted to write a memoir of this time. Writing “Brain Wreck” was still very emotional at times, but I was used to writing about it already. Plus, by the time I wrote the essay, it was more than four years after Ken’s accident, so I had some distance from it.

There were two hardest things about writing “Brain Wreck.” One was capturing, or trying to capture, the feel or description of someone with a terrible injury to his brain. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent time with someone whose brain has been newly injured, and injured severely, but a person can be very different from the way he or she used to be. With Ken, it was almost surreal. For a time, he had what is called “fluent aphasia,” so he could talk, but much of what he said didn’t make any sense. It was often very funny, in fact, but not intentionally so. He would begin a sentence, and then go off in another direction entirely, picking up words from the TV or other conversations around us, or from who knows where. More importantly, while Ken was certainly present in the room, he also wasn’t. His “self,” or the self I had known, was trapped inside his injured brain. Or it was off in some other, inward place that he could not access. Or perhaps it had disappeared forever. There was no way to know at the time. When I wrote the essay, I could remember what it felt like to be with him then, and I struggled to tell it as best I could by describing how I experienced him.

The other difficult thing was describing myself and my feelings and actions in a way that felt accurate and true on the page. As soon as I heard that my husband had suffered this terrible thing, I went into warrior mode or mother bear mode. My only goal in life was to protect him from another calamity, and although that wasn’t really possible, that feeling ruled my life the whole time he was in the hospital and in rehab and even for a time after he came home. Eventually, I had to find a way to let it go, or go crazy. It was truly fascinating, as a writer, to find ways to describe myself as Ken’s wife going through these wrenching months. In the end, even though there is lots more I could have written had space and time allowed, I was satisfied with what made its way to the page.

The one thing that helped most in the writing of “Brain Wreck” was the journal I kept during this time. It was such a traumatic, confusing, painful time that there was no way I could have remembered as much as I did without journaling every day. I took my journal with me everywhere, even while visiting Ken in the hospital and in HealthSouth, where he went for brain-injury rehab, and wrote pages every day. It was good therapy at the time and a rich resource later.

Sheila
How did you go about searching for a publisher and how did you find the one who brought the book out?

Barbara
Actually, I didn’t search for a publisher. The original publisher came to me. My friend and colleague Bob Yehling was in 2007 affiliated with a small publisher. He knew my work, and one day said if I would pull together a collection of essays, they would publish the book. How wonderful was that? He did have to encourage me a lot, though, since I wasn’t sure I could actually do such a thing. And Ken did a great job of encouraging me, too—well, pushing me to get past my doubts and just do it. So I decided to accept this wonderful gift that had been offered to me.

However, when the manuscript was nearly complete, the original publisher, with whom Bob was no longer affiliated, began treating me in a way that I knew would not work for me through the rest of the process. I had not signed the contract yet, thank goodness—mostly because the publisher would not send it back with my requested changes, nor even respond to my emails about it—so I fired them, if that’s the right word. I wasn’t even nervous about doing that. I just knew I couldn’t work with someone who didn’t treat me with at least some measure of respect and professionalism. I figured if the book was meant to be published, it would be.

Talk about synchronicity! Around this same time, a friend reminded me about Nancy Cleary, of Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing Inc., with whom I’d worked years before on another kind of project. I’d forgotten that she was also an excellent small publisher. So I emailed her with a “Remember me?” She did, and asked me to send the manuscript. I did, and very quickly she said she would love to publish it. Nancy has been a dream to work with. Someone was looking out for the book and for me by guiding me to her.

Sheila
How does reading from the book, answering audience questions, and thinking back to the time when Ken was injured affect you in your life today?

Barbara
It’s not a problem at all. In fact, it helps us both in the most positive way to feel like survivors. As I said, we have some distance now, and Ken recovered well, although in the beginning he was not expected to. One thing that makes me feel good about having written this essay is that people with brain injuries or their family members can look at Ken and me and see that it is possible to navigate through such a horrible time. Although, I’d like to add that we are very fortunate Ken recovered as well as he did. We’re so grateful for that. Not everyone is so lucky.

Sheila
Any advice for those writing personal essays about difficult subjects and times?

Barbara
If possible, keep a journal. You won’t remember all the details of a traumatic time, even with a journal, but you will remember a lot more if you can manage to write about it when it’s happening. I wrestled with this a little bit, at first thinking that keeping a journal to use as fodder for later writing was somehow a little ghoulish or cold. But I knew it would be important for me to write about it all, and I knew that Ken would want to know what had happened to him, and to me, during this time of which he has no memory. Plus, he had been in another serious accident eighteen months earlier when I was not keeping a journal, and I’d always regretted that.

Also, when you finally sit down to write about a difficult time and subject, give yourself the gift of writing as many drafts as you need. Your perspective will change as time passes, and it will change as you keep writing and discovering more of the elements important to the story. This happened with another essay in the book, “Two Snakes,” the events of which were tied up with my emotional recovery from Ken’s accident. If I had tried to write it sooner, it wouldn’t have worked because I needed time to internally and unconsciously process what had happened. I had tried my hand at writing a memoir of the time after Ken’s accident before writing “Brain Wreck” as an essay, and there were many things wrong with it, one of which was that not enough time had elapsed to find a solid perspective from which to launch the writing.

Remember also to do your best to be truthful, to tell your own truth. Everyone involved will have his or her own truth, and you might want to know theirs, but ultimately this is your writing about what happened to you, so hold to that truth as much as you can.

Sheila
Any advice about creating a collection from such essays?

Barbara
I was totally in the dark about pulling a bunch of essays together into a collection. Bob Yehling was a big help there, telling me, for instance, that a collection has to have some kind of theme. I couldn’t just throw any old, unrelated essays together as a collection. So I came up with the theme based on something an acquaintance had told me several years earlier and which had literally changed my life: ”Maybe it’s time to give up what you think you know.” The title of the book and an essay in it, “What I Thought I Knew,” sprang from that, as did the notion of how changing my mind had changed my life more than once.

Sheila
Even though it was easy for you, do you have any advice about finding a publisher for such a collection?

Barbara
I was so lucky in the way I rediscovered Nancy Cleary, and even the original offer to publish my collection came from a friend who knew and trusted my work. That’s not the usual way that books come about. But I will say it’s important to trust your gut. If you have found a publisher who seems interested but who will not respond to emails or calls, who appears will be difficult to work with, then take some time to investigate and decide if this is the right publisher for you. Don’t be so desperate to have your book out in the world that you accept being treated poorly.

Sheila
Barbara, thank you for your answers. It is always interesting and helpful to hear from those who have succeeded in reaching their writing goals. I have very much enjoyed our conversation and reading and listening to the material at the links (listed below) that you sent. It is thrilling to learn about the fabulous press your book has received. I also want to thank you for allowing Writing It Real to publish one of the essays from the collection, “Fallow Time,” which will appear next week in our Gallery section.

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What I Thought I Knew by Barbara Stahura is a POD edition. It can be ordered through bookstores or purchased on the author’s website as well as through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online.

Interviews, reviews, and podcasts with the author:

Tucson Weekly Book Review
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Books/Content?oid=oid:118425

Brad Swift’s Living on Purpose Radio Show
http://exceptionalwisdomradio.com/archives/LWOP/archive_LWOP_BStahura.html

Video Interview on Arizona Public Media
http://ondemand.azpm.org/videoshorts/watch/2008/9/24/kuat-southwestern-authors-writers-conference/