The All-Night Sun
Page 31
I put the frail crown of reeds in the water. As it drifted away, I wanted to remember all the flower names. I wanted to remember everything, and I felt that fear again, that forgetting such things about my parents, about Siri, would disconnect me from their love forever.
But what had Birgit said? It would all still be written on the heart of God.
When I was young, I used to think that if God was bearing witness to our lives, it was to record our names and the good and bad we’d done. But in that moment I had the feeling that if there was any book, it was a much bigger one, with all our stories, all the ones that I remembered and had forgotten, and not just what had transpired, but all the narratives there ever were, all the trajectories our lives could have taken, all our dreams come to fruition, all the bad decisions leading to good luck, all the sadness leading to a bursting open.
Maybe a true friendship is being able to hold, equally, all of those pieces. I was broken, but now there were people who held me, just as they held Siri. I had experienced a true friendship, a precious friendship, and there could be more. There could be other versions of family, of love.
I saw Siri first as someone who might save me, then as someone who had failed me. But love was holding all the pieces at the same time. And it’s always true, whether we remember that or not. Perhaps because of that, though there are things we might forget, nothing is ever really lost.
Our book was a big book, and it would have names for not just the grave markers but everything we ever were, all our hopes and dreams, every broken piece of us, and tons of notes in the margins, winding their way all around. In our book, all our pictures were in order, and any torn pages were repaired with gold.
I headed back through the wood to my car. I saw a path. A pressed-down place in the snow I had not seen before, an ancient road that had risen up to meet me.
The woods ended in a glade. And there, standing crookedly behind an abandoned red house with white-framed windows, was a midsommarstång.
It was tall, covered with ivy, and draped with striped ribbons that snapped in the wind. This is what Siri and I had gone looking for in Loftsvik that day—what she had wanted to show me. A symbol from her childhood, of better times. The ivy was dried, and the ribbons were blanched. I realized the pole must have been there since last Midsommar.
We would have danced around the midsommarstång. We would have laughed like nothing bad had ever happened in our lives. A memory of it would have been recorded in the margins of our guidebook. A painting might have been rendered from that memory. At home, I would find myself remembering it with as much joy as if we had danced around it. I would come to realize that there are things that you don’t see when you are lost in grief. But things were coming back to me now.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH LOVE TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER, TO BLAIR, AND TO SARAH.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO ALL WHO are struggling, who don’t know if their voices matter; to the writers and artists who wonder if all they do will forever be invisible, I honor you.
To the tellers of stories for which there are no comp titles; the writers of “unlikable” female narrators; to the misfit writers; the parent-writers scribbling after their babies go to sleep; the writers writing in their heads; the writers writing in their cars; the writers living in their cars; retiree writers who feel too old to start; the young writers whose families tell them it’s not practical to continue; the twenty-year “overnight successes”; the poor ones, the sick ones, the baffled, the lost, the marginalized, the slushed, the ones with no writers groups, the ones with destructive writers groups, the ones who want to clear a path for others—I see you and urge you to keep going. You are not alone. Please believe in yourself, even when you don’t believe in yourself.
I send thanks and love to JW, my exceptional friend, who has always been able to see when someone is hurting. You came into my life when I needed a thawing out from grief, and you welcomed me home into a new world. This book is partly a list of the things I feared could go wrong. They didn’t.
I send gratitude to my loving and dedicated agent, Katherine Fausset. Thank you for standing by me through everything, and for showing me so much compassion and friendship. This book would not have been possible without you.
I send love to my incredible, otherworldly editor, Clio Seraphim, visionary, motivator, friend, who believed in me and these characters when I feared no one else would. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you to everyone at Curtis Brown and Random House. Thank you to Sarah Horgan, Diane Hobbing, Nicole Ramirez, Aja Pollock, Ayelet Gruenspecht, and Melissa Sanford.
Thank you to all who have ever been part of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, the most heart-driven phenomenon of literary service I have ever been a part of. I am forever grateful to the mentors who have freely given of their time and talents to the next generation of writers.
I am grateful to all the people who have nurtured and loved me and let me love them back.
I want to give thanks to Julia Phillips, who is such a model for me of the kind of writer I want to be in the world.
Thank you to my extraordinary writer friends: debut-author-sister and angel Natalie Jenner; Sandra Gail Lambert, who fought breast cancer at the same time I did; Lori Ostlund, Jerod Santek, Liz Paley, Terry House, Ananda Lima, and Martin Wilson. Thank you to Liz Stein. Thank you to Alice McDermott, Rebecca Makkai, and Tania James—the women workshop leaders I needed so much. And deep thanks to two of my early writing teachers, Nick LaGrega and Sam Ligon, both beloved.
Thank you to Sue Adams, Annie Werbitzky, and M3.
Thank you to the communities at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, the Tin House Writers’ Conference; The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia; the MFA Program at the University of Florida; Svenska Skolan in Washington, D.C.; and the American Scandinavian Association for their winter Santa Lucia services that marked each of the twelve years I took to write and edit this book.
Thank you to my fellow 2020 Debuts who have had to have their dreams come true in a different way because of the pandemic. I know your words will still find their way to the readers who need them.
Over those years, I had a baby, worked full time, and went through cancer treatments.
This book would not be here were it not for my kind and beautiful husband, Blair, who sacrificed so much to give me the time necessary to create. All those years of “Can I go upstairs for ten minutes?” “Can I have a four-hour block?” of being the only person to take our daughter to birthday parties and to care for her while I was at conferences or writing in the car down the street—thank you for believing in me and being my partner. Thank you forever.
And finally, to my beloved Sarah, I pray that you can always look up into the sky, dark or light, and know that you are not alone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DIANE ZINNA is originally from Long Island, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and went on to teach creative writing for ten years. She formerly worked at AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, which hosts the largest literary conference in North America each year. In 2014, Diane created their Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, helping to match more than six hundred writers over twelve seasons. Diane lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband and daughter. The All-Night Sun is her first novel.
dianezinna.com
Twitter: @DianeZinna
Instagram: @DianeZinna
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