Gift by Donna Steiner

I received a wonderful gift in the mail today: the first book written by my friend, Susan Fox Rogers.  It’s called My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir and is being published by Cornell University Press.

I remember walking along a little stretch of the Hudson, listening to Susan describe her vision for the book.  Over time, I read some of the essays that would become chapters and then, as the manuscript progressed, I read full drafts.  As writing friends do, I marked the drafts, trying to make funny or encouraging or helpful comments in the margins.  Later I read the galley proofs, and even got to weigh in on a few design elements.  The book became a godchild, one I wanted to pay careful attention to and love and protect.

Susan and I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona.  We had a couple of classes together and became friends; eventually we each left Arizona for New York.  We stayed friends – writer friends – which means we periodically read each other’s work and cheer each other on, occasionally ponder a rejection, frequently laugh about the weird and wonderful facets of this chosen life.  We’ve been close for a dozen years, we’ve had a lot of fun together, we’ve shared some heartbreak.  A lot stands out, but there’s been nothing quite like seeing My Reach come to light. 

As any writer knows, many good poems and stories and essays and novels never make it to print.  I have friends who are intelligent, graceful, compelling writers but can’t find a publisher.  I have manuscripts of my own collecting dust on a shelf.  It can be a discouraging process, the years of effort that seem, at times, to come to nothing.

But this time, with Susan’s project, it was different.  All the customary things happened that typically do when a manuscript is under way – the ideas, the slow progress, the revisions, the submissions, the rejections.  Sometimes that’s as far as it goes…  But after years of hard work, an editor became interested and the funding was found and the project was slated for publication.  The ideas I’d heard while walking near the Hudson had been refined.  The project had become more complex, more touching and more engaging.  It would still be a book about the Hudson, but it was also about the quiet beauties of exploring a territory by kayak.  And, perhaps most interesting of all, it was about grieving, and about joy.

It was, in short, a book – a beautiful, tangible, hard-cover book.  And that book arrived in the mail today.  When I read the Acknowledgments, I cried.  I didn’t cry when my name was mentioned, although it makes me proud to see it there.  I cried when Susan talked about her family.  I won’t give anything away – you should read My Reach – but Susan’s family came to be part of the book in ways that she never anticipated. 

That’s the thing about writing, and about families, and about friendship, and about rivers, and even, I think, about something as simple as opening your mailbox.  You don’t really know what’s coming.  Today came Susan’s book.  Today came a reminder of why writing matters. 

What a wonderful gift.

Donna Steiner’s writing has been published in literary journals including Fourth Genre, Shenandoah, The Bellingham Review, The Sun, and The Los Angeles Review. She’s a contributing writer for Hippocampus Magazine, teaches at the State University of New York in Oswego and is a 2011 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts.