IN THIS LETTER:

* Farm stands, fireflies, and a swimsuit that never dries out

* NYC reading on Sept. 5th

*  St. Simons Island workshop -- 4 spots left! 

* Slideshow: Picture yourself at Lake Atitlan next Februarn

Dear Friends,

For sixteen years now, ever since I left my home state of New Hampshire for Northern California, I’ve yearned for the East coast when summer rolled round.  Nearly every summer I’ve made it back for a week or two  -- just long enough to dive into a few of my favorite swimming holes and share a meal with old friends, bite into a cob of corn and a tomato straight from the garden, pick wild blueberries for pie.  But I’m always running, and the time is always too short. 

I wanted to be able to pick up the phone and ask her, “Want to come for dinner?”  Or drop by the little cabin where she lives, and take a hike together without needing to schedule a trip or drive to an airport. 

I wasn’t looking to go on a vacation.  I love my work.  But I’m lucky, that so long as there’s a  quiet place to plug in my laptop, and a few days in a row where I stay put, I can be writing (or revising my writing, which was the task before me these past few months with a new novel finished and one final round of changes needed before calling it completed). 

So I rented out my house in California for three months and lined up a series of short-term rentals (in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire -- even Rhode Island for a night.)  In between rentals, I reached out to old friends for a place to stay along the road, I just left the calendar open, with the plan of having no plan at all but to ramble.  This year, I told myself, I’d have enough time in this place I love that I might even welcome a rainy day.  I’d remind myself how it felt to see the sun rise over the ocean, instead of watch it setting there.

There was another important element to my plan: With the exception of a couple of quick trips through Boston, my boyfriend, Jim -- the man with whom I’ve been keeping company for nearly a year now -- had never experienced New England.  (He’d spent a few days in Boston once.  That didn’t really count.)

Jim was turning sixty in June, and hadn’t taken a significant amount of time off work in thirty six years.  I suggested a sabbatical.  He said OK, and threw in an additional element to the plan: he registered for a motorcycle class, got his license, and a Triumph Bonneville.

Now, I don’t want to drive a motorcycle myself.  (And let me add, you do not want to be out driving on any road where I’d try my hand at that.)  But I love to ride on the back.  Jim didn’t want to take me as his passenger until he felt sure we’d be safe, but I figured there was no better place for a new motorcycle rider to practice his skills than the back roads of small towns in New England.

For $500, he found a guy to truck the bike to Maine, the place where we started our travels.  For $1800, I located a 1990 Plymouth LeBaron convertible on the Maine Craigslist, and got it registered in my New Hampshire daughter’s name.  June 21, we hopped on the plane and headed east to meet up with our vehicles.

We’ve put three thousand miles on that red convertible since then -- splitting up for a few hours on occasion, when the car and the motorcycle need to get from one stop on our sojourn to the next.  When we began our trip, in the state of Maine, the lupine was in bloom, and now, as Labor Day weekend approaches, the flowers by the side of the road are goldenrod and Queen Anne’s Lace.  The angle of the sun is different now too, from how it was on the night of the solstice, when we set out.  There’s a faint hint of fall in the air, and as I look out  across the lake where we’ve landed, for the final stop on our ten-town, five-state odyssey, I can spot the first faint signs of red and yellow in the once-green leaves that line the shore where I took my daybreak swim this morning.

We started out with a visit to my friend Becky’s family cottage on Mousam Lake in Maine, followed by a five-week stay in Rockport, Maine, where Jim took photography classes at a place called The Maine Media Workshop and where I worked on a writing project.  From there, we went to Blue Hill and Winter Harbor, Maine (where Jim -- unfamiliar with the Maine coastline, and the slickness of the rocks at low tide, took a bad fall on some rocks and broke a rib.  This was very painful, but it didn’t stop us from moving on.)

After that: A second visit to the set of the filming of the movie being made of my novel, Labor Day.  (We met up there with my daughter, Audrey, and her father’s eleven year old son, whom she calls not her half brother but simply her brother.  There was a time -- and it lasted years -- when it would have felt too painful to see and know this child.  Now I can love him -- and do.  I recognize the parts that remind me of my own three children, when they were young, and the ones that are this boy alone.)

Our LeBaron suffered a few setbacks along the way, as a 22-year-old vehicle is likely to.  At some point, partway into our time in Maine, Jim pronounced himself ready to take on a passenger, and I bought myself a good helmet (after taking in the concerned remarks of my two motorcycle-riding, skateboarding, snowboarding sons, who did not always heed my many exhortations to wear a helmet, over the years.  With the shoe on the other foot, they were suddenly taking the pro-helmet position, even for Live Free or Die -- helmet-optional -- New Hampshire roads.)

We headed to Boston for a Red Sox game.  (Missed out on our tickets, but watched the game from the cool of a sports bar directly adjacent to Fenway park.)  We touched down at the house of good friends in Cape Cod, who lent us bikes to ride the bike trails there, and body surfed in the waves at Martha’s Vineyard.  There was one day where we ate lobster three times in a single 24-hour period, and there was no day when I didn’t swim.

We navigated the largest corn maze in Vermont, and at the Nelson N.H. town hall, we danced to a live fiddle and piano (played by a musician who had played those same tunes at my wedding, thirty five years earlier) at the longest continuously-running country dance in the United States.  (They’ve been dancing every Monday night at the Nelson town hall for two hundred years now.)   We visited the Maine State Prison gift shop, and climbed Mt. Cardigan, and kayaked across Newfound Lake, waving as we did at the girls’ camp  next door where, among the campers, were two girls with the last name of Obama.

Along the way, I worked to make my new novel  -- coming out next summer -- the best book it can be, and struggled with my hair (that looked so great, when I got that $800 haircut paid for by a magazine last January, and less great two months later, when the cut grew out, and I went to a different haircutter). 

I discovered I love riding on a motorcycle.  I gave a couple of readings -- met old friends, and longtime readers, and new ones.  Sometimes, we were in a place too remote even for phone or internet service.  I discovered this was not such a bad thing.  I read all the New Yorkers I didn’t have time for all year, and made a few pies, but didn’t cook all that much.  My skin got browner than I should have allowed it to get, and my roots grew out, and I didn't care.  Most nights, I studied the night sky.  In a few places, all you could see when the sun went down were the stars.  Night was pitch black.

I spent every day in the company of a man I didn’t fight with even once, and marveled at how, at the age of 58, I seem finally to have learned how to be patient in a relationship  -- without tears or drama or pouting or petty complaints of the sort I’ve indulged in plenty over the years. 

The last few years have taught me some valuable, though hard-won, lessons.  Patience and humility high on the list.  Also, gratitude for every single good thing.  And the importance of asking the question -- when I get irritated about something:  Does this really matter all that much?  Will it matter at all, in a day, a week, a year? 

Mostly, the answer is no.

I’ll be heading back to California in about ten days.  Jim may actually ride the motorcycle back across the country, but I’ll get back home by a somewhat quicker, though less exciting, method of travel. 

Sadly, we may have to part with the red LeBaron.  As great as a convertible is, for warm summer nights, it’s not the kind of car a person can leave sitting outside her daughter’s cabin, over the course of a long and very possibly snowy winter. 

Before totally leaving the topic of driving, however, I want to tell you about an essay of mine, “Under the Influence”, just published in the current issue of MORE magazine.  It's actually part of a collection edited by Caren Osten Gerszberg and Leah Odze Epstein due out this month from Seal Press, called  Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up, featuring a terrific and enormously varied group of essays by women writers on the subject of their relationship with alcohol.  In my case, the story is a tough one: it concerns a night, almost exactly a year ago, when I was back in New Hampshire for a visit, but on my own, when -- after a happy evening with friends, in which my host had topped off my wine glass more times than I could count -- I was pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence.  Rather than telling you here how that one worked out, I’m hoping you’ll read the story.  I will tell you, however, that the experience changed my behavior.  I do not drink and drive any more. 

I'll be joining other writers whose work is featured in the collection to give a reading at Strand Book Store in NYC on September 5th at 7 p.m.  Please make sure to say hello if you make it there. 

As it turned out, I met Jim about two weeks after this episode occurred.  Some women might not start off a first date by telling the man on the other side of the table that they’d recently been  handcuffed and brought in to a police station -- but if you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you may not be surprised to know that, liking this man as I did,  I chose to tell him the truth about one hour into our first meeting.  September 1 marks the one-year anniversary of that night. 

We have travelled a lot of miles since then.  Only some by car, or motorcycle, or plane, in kayak or on foot. 

The most demanding journeys, I think, sometimes take place right there under your own roof.  I’m hoping to be on that one for a long time yet.

With friendship

Joyce

P.S. For those of you who write, or want to write, or simply those who think you might want to write, I want you to know that a few spaces remain in my Write By The Beach memoir workshop, November 15th - 18th on beautiful St. Simon’s Island, Georgia (evening welcome and  talk from Joyce on Thursday night, intense workshopping Friday and Saturday, final readings and circle on Saturday evening and departure Sunday morning).  My assistant Melissa will be happy to fill you in on details if you think you might be interested in joining us.  This workshop is a little shorter (and therefore, less expensive) than my usual week-long workshop, but as with all of my workshops, it’s my goal to give your writing my close personal attention, and to send you home a stronger and more expressive writer than you were when you got there.  I don’t want to change you.  My goal is to locate the story you already have, and help you tell it in the most powerful and moving way.

And, of course, I’ll be hosting my annual Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in my other favorite place  -- Guatemala -- this coming February, where I will once again be joined by a terrific team of teachers, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer DeLeon.  I hope you’ll take a look at the SLIDESHOW we’ve just put together, from last year’s workshop.  If you’ve written with me at the lake before, I don’t need to tell you this is a magical place, or what an extraordinary experience it is to share this intense time, working on your writing.  But we’ve also made some important changes to our program that should make this week even better, including more personal attention and some beautiful new rooms to house my students.  Priority in room selection goes to those who sign up early, so if you think you may want to come, let Melissa know. 

It’s a time I look forward to all year.  I’d love to see you there.