My daughter’s school always gives a ninth grade English assignment: Ask your parent to assign a book to read and write about that meant something to them as a teen. For Hazel, I assigned T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. The decision was partly a function of what I turned around to see on the bookshelf, partly a desire to not assign C.S. Lewis (because, like, he’s great. But. We get it.), and my benevolent wish to give her something fun to read.
When I was a kid in Amarillo, TX in the nineties, I loved the library. The books of White’s Arthurian legend series were bound in midcentury olive greens and muddy oranges. I read them the way kids read Rick Riordan now, and though White’s books are about knights, witches, and a wizard, they were decidedly less action packed—and less modern—than ancient Greek monsters showing up in the middle of a field trip to the New York Public Library just when puberty’s hitting.
Hazel prefers Riordan. She’d complain when she needed to read and struggled to “lock-in.”
I don’t blame her. She’s a very busy girl, with barely an empty hour in her day when she shouldn’t be asleep. She was moved from JV to the varsity volleyball team and is taking multiple honors classes. All very different from my long middle school afternoons between the end of homeschooling and waiting for my evening ballet class.
She had to interview me about why I chose the book for her, and of course I dug deep. Why, indeed? Why did this book about a gawky kid no one likes who becomes the legendary king of England connect for me? Obviously, the Hero’s Journey is baked into so many of us—the story of receiving a call to be more than we think we are, digging deep, suffering, changing, and succeeding. The story of Arthur—or Wart, as he’s called most of The Sword in The Stone—is the Hero’s Journey, but it’s bucolic and well-tended by Merlin.
I think I loved that book because I was gawky and lonely, and I had a Merlin I wanted to impress. My ballet teacher, Mr. Neil Hess, was eccentric—a polyphasic sleeper and a vegetarian whose hands always smelled like Frito’s—and multi-talented. I could go on and on (and did in The Almost Dancer), but at this point in my life, the thing I admire most about him was how seriously he took himself and his mission. He invited us to join him in believing that art—dance specifically—could change the world. He told me, “When you see something beautiful, pay attention. Find out why it works.”
That directive has defined my days more often than not.
To prepare Wart for his future, Merlin uses magic to expose him to teaching from creatures like birds and snakes. He’s invited to pay attention. White’s descriptions of nature are long (too long for a busy volleyball player), and I remember loving them. As a fourteen year old, I loved that trait in Dickens too!
***
Yesterday, I headed to Whidbey Island to check on the house and get it ready for a family taking a retreat this weekend. As in every Autumn, I was excited to see what the mushrooms were up to and to breathe in the loamy, evergreen scent of the wet woods. I was second in line for the ferry, so I got a front row seat to a bright rainbow arc pouring into the Salish Sea. As I got out my phone to take pictures, we turned away from it and toward the island—to my disappointment—but then, in front of us instead was the other half of the rainbow, equally bright and reflecting on the gray rippled glass of saltwater.
If I didn’t have beauty to pay attention to, I might die.
My dancing days are long done, so I’m not watching anymore to see how an arm turned into a swan’s wing so that I can replicate it. But I still make myself a student of the birds and snakes, like Wart. I study the fresh dusting of snow on the foothills of the Olympics and Cascades, reminding myself not to crane my neck to far off the road in front in front of me.
***
While on Whidbey, I put away dishes and fluffed beds, but I also attended a webinar for using Scrivener to support plot development—writing is kind of the new dancing—and met with friends from my MFA program about… oh, nothing much… wanting to start our own small press.
I’m in the writing phase where there’s a lot of waiting, lots of rejection (though “decline” is a much better word), and this nagging pin-scratch thought in the back of my brain all the time: somebody let me in.
“Jess,” a friend said to me recently, “it sounds like you have a lot of gatekeepers in your life.” He was referring—mostly—to all the hidden voices in my head that limit me, ghosts of Christians past, and I took his point. But that word, gatekeepers, plagues the writer’s life. There’s always the question: Do I wait? How long? Do I just publish myself? Is that giving up?
Now—calm down, ok? I don’t need to be told that it’s been, like ONE SECOND in writer time since I’ve been submitting manuscripts for publication consideration. I know. Yes, many of my favorite writers were rejected for years and hundreds of times before their work found the right champions.
And here I am back to Sword in the Stone. Seeeeeee meeeeee, help me, choooooooose meeeee, we writers beg. What if I’m destined to pull the sword and usher newness into the world?
A few things keep me going: 1) The pleasure and joy of the craft itself. Writing is paying attention. 2) The vision of what could be. Absolutely, you betchyerass, I’m thinking about my name on shelves and lists and panels. Visualization is equally for volleyball serves, hard conversations, and writers at their keyboards. And 3) community—including the communities to which I aspire.
***
Last week, news hit that Catapult Book Group—including Counterpoint Press—was being sold for its assets and shut down. I don’t know the whole story or what’s happening to all the people and parts, but it hit like a ton of bricks. I would have LOVED to be published by Counterpoint like so many of the writers I admire. And Dan Smetanka, the Executive Editor of Counterpoint Press, is hands down my favorite person I got to meet amongst the many guests invited to my MFA program residencies.
The gatekeepers have gatekeepers.
Another Merlin gets shut down?
We should start our own press, I texted my friends.
A few days later—yesterday—we had an initial conversation. It feels crazy and absolutely impossible in lots of ways, but as we kept saying to each other, “I just want to do cool stuff with you guys.” And I want to create context, open gates, leverage whatever privileges I have—and NEVER underestimate the privilege of community and energy—to make more goodness, more beauty, and more opportunity for someone’s “voice to have legs,” as Nancy put it.
Don’t hold us to it. But don’t not?
When I stop wanting, that’s when I’ll worry. I saw five—FIVE—more rainbows yesterday on my drive from Whidbey to the small mountain town where Hazel’s volleyball game was held. I craned my neck every time and drank it all in.
We have to keep a spark going inside if we want to share any warmth or light.
Books are especially wonderful because they live so long after us. The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938, and who knew it would mean so much in 1993 to a girl in Texas who closely resembled a dandelion with a full seed-head?
***
The Sword in the Stone is also about bullies, naysayers.
I can’t stand meanness, us-versus-them-ness. It’s so terrifyingly dangerous. When you can tell yourself that someone else deserves to be mistreated, you are risk of losing your humanity. I don’t even like it when my kids complain about their friends, even if their friends were being rude or selfish or whatever. And I know I drive them crazy—and I know I am guilty of judging and other-ing people too!—but, man, it’s worth calling out and trying to squash.
Hazel’s volleyball games last night determined their ranking for play-offs. The host team’s town is surrounded by extreme beauty of forests and mountains. The gym is cool, old. They have wooden built in bleachers set like galleries on either side above the gymnasium floor—stadium style. Lots of the community showed up for the game, including a group of a dozen-ish high school boys and an even bigger group of little brothers. They stood on our side of the net, on the lowest level of seating. And every time one of our girls was up to serve, they leaned over the edge, hammered their hands against the wooden panel, and shouted.
I’ve been to a college game, and I understand that making noise on the other team’s turn is a thing. But in our league, almost NO ONE else does that. The gyms all have these retro signs in them admonishing us in friendly font to Cheer For! Not Against!
And it wasn’t just the deafening rumble of their hands on the wood. The targeted taunts are what really got me. That and the fact that a whole row of elementary and middle school aged boys was right there next to the older guys, learning exactly how to behave while the parents all sat on the other side of the gym, letting it happen.
(And here I’m judging the heck out of them.)
In the grand scheme, is it a big deal? Maybe not, but I think it’s in these mini methods of training that we turn ourselves into people who can watch while other people get hurt. I felt like I was at a toxic masculinity training workshop. The image of twenty young men leaning over to sneer and taunt a sixteen year old girl just trying to play her underdog game twists the ribbon of girlhood that I’ll always have in my belly.
Those boys' mothers were there.
So, I go back to my own values and goals to re-center. When you see something beautiful, pay attention to why it works. Maybe the corollary instruction is, when I see something hideous, pay attention to what would help. I think it would have helped for any ONE of the adults on that side of the gym to say, “Hey, is this who we want to be?”
Maybe that is who they want to be. I don’t know why, but we are all products of our environments.
Perhaps that’s part of why it was important for Merlin to show Wart what it was like to be someone/something else.
***
On the long, winding, wet drive home in the dark, I talked to Hazel and Ivo about what had happened. Ivo watched those boys do that to his sister and his girlfriend, and it turned his stomach too. It’s tempting to wish ill on them. “But we can’t!” I said.
Hazel pulled out her laptop in the backseat to work on her paper about The Sword in the Stone. I was proud of her. “I did actually like it,” she told me. “I just didn’t have time to relax in enjoying it.”
She let me read her paper (so long as I also checked all the comma usage). Here’s a banger of a section from it:
I learned how growing up as a homeschooled kid in the 80s affected how she connects with books. Her childhood made it so that she would connect on a deeper level with the books because they would fill part of the hole left by being homeschooled and having less friends due to that. When I asked my mom what she had learned about me, she said this: “What each one of us takes away from ANY piece of art has so much to do with what we are going through in our own lives and the interpretive lens we bring to the work. A lonely kid in Texas is going to experience a book really differently than a busy, many-friended kid with access to so much more literature in 2026!”
To be fair to myself (and my mother!), I don’t think homeschooling left a “hole” inside me, but I get what Hazel is saying. She’s not wrong. I enjoyed my imaginary and book friends very much.
I wonder about the interpretive lens my kids are forming. I hope it is shaped for paying attention to beauty, seeing bullies with clarity and compassion, and thinking always about their own intentions and motivations. They are young, but even still for me in middle-age, the lens is continually being ground and polished.
Parents are definitely gatekeepers. So are agents and editors. Teachers. Coaches. We all are. The primary set of gates we keep are the gates to our own hearts—whether good or ill is flowing from them at any moment. I love Dan Smetanka because he seems to be so clearly himself all the time, and it’s warm and smart and energized and community-minded! His booklist reflects that.
Access is power, and what we do with our own access-passes really tells us—and the people around us—who we are.
***
It wasn’t until I got into bed last night—after the long day of rainbows, waves, mountains, dreams, education, literature, defeat, and bullies—that I saw a screenshot from my sister-in-law’s social media memories of The Almost Dancer. “Happy Memoir-iversary!” she wrote.
Seven years old, that book. It made sense to me then that the day had been one of so much open-ness and reflection.
I needed the reminder that I’ve already pulled many a sword from many a stone.
And I shall continue.
Wart had to grow up, grab that thing on his own, and pull. The sword meant access, power. In the end, he threw open the gate to the next way of doing things. I’m grateful for the story.