Poet and fiction writer Paula Marie Coomer has written an essay about her road to becoming a writer and to publishing her work. Through her story, you will relate to the persistent internal voice (echoed by those who know your essence) that urges you on and makes you take your writing goals seriously—or that finally shouts to be heard above din of all the “shoulds” you’ve accumulated.

There are many ways to read Paula’s novel, Dove Creek. It is available for anyone to read–for free–online at Booktrope. You can also buy the print version by ordering it from your favorite indie bookstore or online from Booktrope or Amazon, which also offers the Kindle version.  You can download an older version in mp3 format.  Paula says, “I’m happy to talk with anyone about this novel or to schedule readings and book club discussions and can be reached at coom1286@hotmail.com.  Or leave a comment at my website. What a day we live in!”My thanks to Paula for offering her story to Writing It Real subscribers, for introducing us to many ways of getting one’s work published and for providing us a hit of her bountiful energy and stick-to-it-iveness, which inspires as does her writing.

The Road to Dove Creek
by Paula Marie Coomer

If I take Dove Creek back to its very first kernel, it is an admissions essay for medical school.  I am working as a public health nurse on the Nez Perce Indian reservation in Idaho, tramping around the countryside in a Jeep Cherokee–the Nursemobile, as I’ve affectionately named it–checking in on elderly tribal members and those suffering chronic disease.  It is 1992, and I have plans to rendezvous in Colorado with an insane Indian Health Service physician who also happens to be a creative writer.  He is hairy and ugly and nobody understands what I see in him, nor why I’d be so stupid as to spend time and what few dollars I have flying to meet him.  No one has told me that lots of crazy folks who can’t make it in the big world seek safe harbor in the Indian Health Service.  I will later wonder whether I am one of them, but at the time my answer is simple:  he knows things.

At some point in our brief dalliance, I mention to this doctor that I am thinking about going to medical school.  “You can’t just think about going to medical school, “he says, “you have to have a plan.  You have to look into it.  There’s a process.  Start by writing an admissions essay.  You have to be able to articulate why you want to be a doctor, and why a medical school should accept you.  You’re getting to the point where you’re too old.”  Harrumph.  I am all of thirty-six, and tell him so, and decide, I’ll show you and sit down to write my admissions essay in a Dolores, Colorado, hotel room on a legal pad.

His response to my little two-page description of going into a tiny camp trailer filled with garbage to give a flu shot to a traditional Nez Perce woman is one I’ve heard before, years back, from the Oregon Health Sciences University nursing school dean:  “Why do you want to go to medical school when you can do this?”

The next day we travel to a few mining towns–Silverton, Telluride, and one smudgy little near-ghost town called Dove Creek.  Something occurs to me there, which I now understand was inspiration, but at the time feels like mystical transformation, like magic, like this little daughter of Kentucky mountain people belongs in this place.  I feel kinship with the young girls who, in the 1800s, sold their bodies to men and dropped their spent opium vials behind the wallboards.  I feel belonging.  I feel renewal.  And I feel like I have to act on those feelings or I will die.

A few months later, back on the reservation, shivering in the cold in the Indian Health Service clinic parking lot at Lapwai, Idaho, a co-worker delivers to me the story of the Seven Directions, the Indian notion that a human life has seven directions:  north, south, east, west, heaven, earth, and heart, and that we each much live through the lesson of each direction if we are to become a whole human.  It is a philosophy common among indigenous peoples.  A few days later another co-worker, unbidden, hands me a thick book titled, America’s One Hundred Best Poems, and the next thing I know, I’m writing poems, typing them on a borrowed computer, and handing them out in sheaves.  People are hanging them on their office walls, commissioning me to write new ones for special occasions, and my supervisor, who is well-read and owns every classic book in existence, tells me, “You really have a talent for this,” and buys me a book of Emily Dickinson poems, inscribes it with, “To my new favorite poet–poems from my previous favorite,” and suddenly life takes one great big shift.

 I’d already had one piece published in a nursing journal and had been planning on becoming a writer for most of my life.  I “wrote” my first “book” when I was 4 years old. Copied words from the newspaper onto squares of manila paper, drew pictures to match the story in my head.  Stole a needle and thread from my mother’s sewing cabinet to bind it, and got a whipping with the belt for my trouble.  My parents, who were Kentucky mountain people transplanted to the hills of southern Indiana, sat around our basement house reading Zane Grey novels all the time.  Daddy had a bureau drawer full of them.  I wanted the same attention they were giving those books, I think.  People had been telling me forever and always that I was this great writer.  Evangelists from back home used to tell me I had a “very special mission in life.”  On a return trip to Dove Creek in 1995, when I said to a store clerk, “I’ve been thinking about coming down here someday to write a novel, and he said, “Someday is passing you by,” I knew unequivocally that “someday” had come.  I’d finally heard those familiar words one too many times.  It was time to act.  Then, days later, on the same trip, I dreamed of a book titled Dove Creek.  In the dream, the cover is teal with raspberry letters and the book is surrounded by a heavenly aura.  Native American people are applauding my having won the Pulitzer.  My unconscious self was rising up to assume its proper position as my guiding light.

By this time I was Director of Community Health programs for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe of Idaho.  I returned from that trip and resigned my commission as a lieutenant with the U.S. Public Health Service.  My final day of work was one day before my thirty-ninth birthday and three days before my promotion to lieutenant commander would have taken effect.  The feds fined me $2500 for breaking my contract.  I didn’t care.  I was going to be a writer.

I suppose the Lessons of the Seven Directions were the true inspiration for the book, however.  My creative mind simply took the town Dove Creek and started intertwining the two, but it took a few years before I understood the Seven Directions as a structural framework for Patricia Faye’s memoir.  That scene in the clinic’s parking lot is one of the few scenes in Dove Creek, which is lifted directly from my own life without much embellishment beyond the dialogue.  I was suffering through an emotion-laden divorce and my youngest son was not adjusting after the move to Idaho and was quickly becoming a juvenile delinquent.  I turned to my native co-workers for advice.  I was very drawn to their spiritualism and wisdom.  Sadly enough, as with the protagonist, Patricia Faye, I did have to take my son to live with his father, who was an abuser and probably an alcoholic.  It took more than a decade for him to finally forgive me, but it saved him.  He is now married, has a son of his own, a good career, serves his community.  My sons and I lived through some pretty difficult stuff.  Using it as the basis for fiction was a way to control it.  Infiltrating Patricia’s life with my own pain and tragedy was a way of unburdening myself.  It brought me great release to have the book finally published.

At the time I finally stopped doing research and scribbling notes and started writing the book in earnest (1997), New Age spiritualism was having its heyday.  Women Who Run With the Wolves had been out for a while.  So had The Celestine Prophecy.  My mother is 1/4 Cherokee and my father 1/8.  I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to be full blood, to have lived with the culture.  My mother’s heritage is quite evident: she looks Native, as did her mother.  I’ve always wondered how that affected her growing up.  I think she was teased and taunted by her schoolmates.  And I was curious about the Indians who hid from the Trail of Tears.  You hear lots about those who went, but plenty didn’t.  Plenty of Cherokee hid out in the mountains.  They intermarried with whites, and so, despite the fact that tribes from out West consider it a big joke, many of us from that region and my generation have Cherokee in our bones.

I do know that my mother’s Cherokee grandmother was something of a healer, that she delivered babies, etc., got paid in chickens and teacups.  I wanted to try to understand her, so I explored Native American myths and the Indian way as much as was possible.  I burned sweet grass and sage and the bark of virgin cedars.  Gathered branches from wild rose bushes, boiled them, and bathed in the water.  Trying to break away from the pain of my own very difficult life.  I was lucky enough to have people on the two reservations where I worked be very generous in teaching me.  To be a bit more succinct, Patricia’s exploration of herself as a shaman came about as a result of my having tried to learn as much as I could about Native traditions so that I could understand that part of myself.

The hardest part of writing Dove Creek was learning to recognize the way I’m drawn to the details.  I don’t just sit around imagining detail and story.  I actually have to follow my instincts, to go places, absorb those places, their essence, which is why I think I was drawn to that crazy doctor.  Some part of me knew he was going to lead me to the town of Dove Creek and to the inspiration for my first novel.  I have been known to grab my car keys and hit the road with no destination, following my nose, until I observe or witness a piece of a scene or find an item or person to fit into whatever I’m writing.  A simple example of this is the section of Dove Creek titled, “My Mother’s Eyes Dancing.” I took two round-trip bus trips across the country in the span of a year to write that section. I drafted and revised it on the bus, by hand.  I thought I’d die from the lousy food, and my knees have never recovered, but that particular section seems very alive and real to me, and I think it’s because of how and where I wrote it.  People want to think that those are my private journal entries, but they are actually the result of using the Greyhound bus as a writing salon.  Most of the book was written that way–going to various places and capturing details by writing about them while in the place.  Those bus trips also resulted in the collection of short stories I’m working on right now called, Hair of the Dog. I have enough material beyond what I needed for Dove Creek to write an entire book of short stories.

In another example, I drove cross-country to write the single-poem chapbook, Road, which is simply one road sign and road event after another linked in an exploration of my life and heritage.

If you look at it from the point of view of that medical school admissions essay, Dove Creek took 18 years to write, minus a few years to write a book of poetry and a book of short stories, and it went through 46 rejections by agents and publishers.  In 2006, I shoved it into the back of the closet after revision number 14.  The only reason I took it out again is because an acquaintance who is a local radio producer came to a reading of Summer of Government Cheese, my book of short stories (which Dove Creek’s publisher, Booktrope has now re-released), and asked me if I had anything of novel length.  She wanted to serialize a novel and make it the subject of a radio broadcast on the local indie station.  What a fabulous exercise that was.  Once I started reading into the microphone, I saw all those big holes and inconsistencies.  We postponed the recording of it, and I went home to roll up my sleeves.  That final revision took a year.  Then the recording took six months.  Twenty-three months later there have been more than 3200 episodes of a somewhat different version of Dove Creek downloaded from KRFP’s website and it is available in syndication for other indie stations around the country to broadcast. (The published version features one fewer husbands and two completely new scenes.)  The number goes up every day, and at that time news of it spread mostly by word of mouth.

In October, 2010, scheduled as a presenter at the Write on the Sound Writers’ Conference in Edmonds, Washington, I decided to make up some advertising cards with a bit of artwork, a description of Dove Creek, and its URL.  Sheila Bender picked up one of the cards and sought me out, told me about this publisher, Ken Shear, in Seattle, who was looking for manuscripts. Oddly enough, just before the conference, Dove Creek had been rejected the 46th time, by an editor who told me the narrative arc was not “male” enough–meaning it didn’t have enough of a climax for his taste, which is what inspired me to write the two new sections, one of which features Patricia being sexually assaulted.  I had decided at that point, once again, to relinquish Dove Creek to the closet.  I had my a new novel, Jagged Edge of the Sky, about the first caravan (RV) park in Australia, and a new book of poems, Nurses Who Love English, and needed to start searching for homes for them, and a third novel for which I’d nearly completed the research and needed to begin drafting.

Once last time, I said to myself, and sent Ken Shear a synopsis, the first pages, and my CV.  While I was waiting to hear back from him, I orchestrated one more revision–number 16–merging Patricia Faye’s two husbands into one, deleting a few things, tweaking details to further protect identities of those characters who were based on conglomerates of real people.  Ken wrote back asking for the entire manuscript.  A week or so later he asked to speak to me over the phone.  He had been bitten.  He loved Patricia Faye’s story and asked to see my other books.

Finally.  Somebody understood Dove Creek, saw the beautiful tragedy that was Patricia Faye Morrison’s life and was willing to invest in getting it out to the world, even down to commissioning original artwork for the cover.  The New York publishing world be damned.  The support I’ve received from this small Seattle press far outshines that of many of my friends and colleagues who are famously published by New York presses.  People have told me this before, and now I know it to be true:  it’s a little like finding true love when you find the right publisher–you just know.  And it never happens the way you think it’s going to.