Next: Microphone Jitters

A few weeks ago, I had the jitters when my book, “By the Banks of Cottonwood Creek,” became available in my hometown. Here is the update: friends and family in LaMoure have been very gracious! Thank you.

I’m especially grateful, because of a bad experience I once caused by dishing out criticism to an author. I had read a new book called, “What I’m Going to Do, I Think” by Larry Woiwode, a former North Dakotan. Young and brash, I wrote a letter to him saying I didn’t like his book.

Months later, on Memorial Day to be exact, the phone rang at 5 a.m. Now, my father had just undergone cancer surgery and he wasn’t doing so well. Certainly, the phone jangling in the predawn could only mean my brother was calling with bad news.

Instead, the voice on the other end said, “Hi, I’m Larry Woiwode and I want to know why you don’t like my book.”

It took me a full minute to figure out the call wasn’t about my father, but about a cheeky letter I had written months before. The next 45 minutes were rather awkward. I tried to articulate (at 5 a.m., wearing my jammies) what I didn’t like about the book and scrambled to remember parts that were really good!

Years later, Woiwode told me more about his side of the phone call. He’d been away working on his upcoming novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and got back to New York in the middle of the night. He stayed up reading What I’m Going to Do, I Think fan mail, hoping to hear from someone in his home state. I was the first person to write from North Dakota.

My critical words were a real downer for him. Imagine that. He’d won the William Faulkner award for that book. He wrote for the New Yorker and other big-name publications, and hung out with famous people like Robert De Niro, but what I wrote still mattered to him.

That lesson still stings. Our words are powerful, whether we’re talking with our family or a famous author. For me, learning to speak kindly and keep some opinions to myself is a lifelong process. I don’t always get it right, but hope to live by Colossians 4: 6, which states, “Let your conversation be gracious and attractive so that you will have the right response for everyone.”

Larry Woiwode is a giant in American literature and he is honored in North Dakota as the state’s Poet Laureate and a recipient of the North Dakota Roughrider Award. I fell in love with Beyond the Bedroom Wall on the first page and it is still among my favorite books.

Now that the hometown jitters are calmed, I have microphone jitters. My first book reading will be at the Touchmark Retirement Center next week. This neat place is just a few blocks from our home and I exercise there. They usually see this prairie chick sweating in the fitness center, so maybe watching me sweat in front of a microphone will be a step up.

Here is a great quote to live by: “Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise.” Mary Kay Ash