“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
I think there’s a real vulnerability when we start to do a high wire act of: I’m going to tell this story, and no, I think I should tell it like this because this is who I am. This is how my brain works. This is what I’m interested in. We can get shot down so many times that we can start to believe that the conventional wisdom is more correct than our own internal compass about what we want to write. Which does not mean don’t take criticism. Editors are the best people in the universe! It’s a deeply collaborative job, what we do, and finding the people to be in a writing group was part of what kept me going. I could come every month to hang out with you all, and we could talk about what wasn’t working, and I trusted your readership, even though we’re all very different. I trusted that you were willing to hold something really precious, that I was trying to work towards. And also, if you get the gut feeling that somebody is really good at their job, and really right about what they know, but not right for your project, you deserve to find somebody who’s going to understand the weird, tender thing you’re making and champion you through the painful process of seeing whether anybody will publish it or resonate with it.
