Hey friends,

Check out a radio interview I did about writing, I Don't Want to Be Crazy, my new book, and more at http://www.kpon.org/ (click on Penguin Tracks to get to the podcast.) This interview also features YA writers Niki Burnham and Kieran Scott.

Be well,

Sam

After many, many months, my book has a name: You Are Not Here.

It also (sort of) has a cover. Not sure when I can show it, but it's a really beautiful photograph. An image I had thought about while writing, actually...and my publisher came upon it without me even mentioning it. It's nice when things work out.

So, I am back from vacation, very rested, and eagerly waiting for notes on my second draft. For this draft, I did A LOT of new writing and moved around the order of many of the poems. That's sort of the beauty of writing in verse--it gives you the ability to shuffle things in a way that I don't think you can with prose.

Here's a sneak peak at a poem I really like:

I’m trying to decide what is worse.
Someone being gone,
but still out there,
or someone being gone forever,
dead.
I think someone being gone,
but still out there might be worse.
Then there’s always the chance,
the hoping,
the wondering
if things might change.
If maybe one day they’ll come back.
There’s also the wondering about
what their new life is like.
The life without you.
Are they more happy?
And if they are,
you’re left being sad,
wondering what it would be like
if you were happy with them.

But when someone is dead,
they’re dead.
They’re not coming back.
There is no second chance.
Death is a period
at the end of a sentence.
Someone gone, but still out there
is an ellipses . . . or a question
to be answered.

The first few posts are up at www.youmakemefeellessalone.blogspot.com.

Check them out! Subscribe! Send in your own stories!

Your words are powerful. Your words can help people.
Share them.

Dear Friends,

Since the publication of my memoir, I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, I have had the privilege of getting your letters. You write about your fears, your struggles, your isolation...but also of your hope and recovery. The most common phrase in all your emails is: “Your story made me feel less alone.” The repetition of this phrase is not surprising since one in four adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year—that translates into nearly 58 million people (NIMH). Of those disorders, anxiety disorders are the most common—affecting 40 million adults (ADAA).

I am honored to be your audience of one, but your story—like mine—has the power to help others. With this in mind, I created www.YouMakeMeFeelLessAlone.blogspot.com as a place for YOU to contribute your stories and poems. Together, we can close the gap between all those people who are “one in four” and struggling with mental illness.

Your words are powerful. Your words can help people.

Share them.

Be well,

Sam

* * *

How do I post?

1) Email your submission to samanthaschutz@hotmail.com. (In order to keep the site organized and free of unrelated content, I will post your submission for you. However, all readers will be able post comments directly to the site.)

2) Put “YouMakeMeFeelLessAlone” in the subject line.

3) Copy and paste the info below to the top of your email. Then fill in the answers.

Do you want your name to appear with your post?

If so, do you want your full name or first name only? ______________

Do you want to post anonymously? ______________

What is your age? ______________ (FYI: If you are under 18, I am not comfortable posting full names and locations.)

Where do you live? ______________

If I create a Twitter account (or something similar) for this program, could I post a snippet of your submittion?

When will my post appear?

Once I get a few initial submissions (and finish the design of the blog), I will begin posting. After that, I hope to put up posts within a week or so of getting your submission.

What are the guidelines?

-Keep posts to under 500 words.

-Submit only about topics relating to mental illness.

-Take care and pride in your post. Please review your submission carefully before emailing me.

What else should I know?

-Your post is yours. By posting you are NOT giving me any rights to your words.

-You can subscribe to this blog for free. That way you’ll get an email each time there is a new post.

At long last, I've heard back from my glorious editor about my manuscript. I think the highlight of his email is when he wrote that the ms was "thoroughly disturbing." I don't think I could come up with a better compliment that that. But, uh, I guess that's just me.

So, the work begins again. I'm really excited to get back into it after months of distance. (It's also not so bad that I have a shiny new apartment and shiny new desk to work at.)

More to come! I hope to be posting more frequently about the revisions process.

Sam

So the first draft of my new novel has been delivered to my editor! The last few weeks have been totally exhausting and I am so glad that I have some time before I’ll need to look at the manuscript again.

The process was not easy (and it’s far from over). But it was also really interesting. I’ve never written fiction before. A lot of people said that fiction would be easier than memoir—after all, you can make up whatever you want in fiction. But for me, that made it even harder. I had to come up with everything—every place, every name, every emotion. When I wrote I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, I knew the story. I knew the characters. I knew the emotions. Because I lived it all. The hardest part was figuring out how to tell the story (as opposed to figuring out what the story was).

This novel has been years in the works. It was probably sometime in late 2006 that I first got the idea. And it came from such a random place. I was in a meeting and a coworker said something like “Wow. That would be a crazy place to live.” I don’t even remember what he said, but the first thing I thought of was that it would be weird to live across the street from a cemetery. And later, I thought it’d be even weirder to live across the street from a cemetery if someone you cared about were buried there. Then this little idea came to be a bigger idea. What if a teenage girl’s boyfriend suddenly died and was buried outside of her window? At first I thought that I would make it about really lovely relationship, but soon realized (or was it my editor who told me?) that happy relationships are boring (to write or read about anyway). And then my brilliant editor had the idea to make the boyfriend already dead on page one. And so it went… (Only now, the cemetery is a few blocks from her house. It seemed like overkill to have it be right out her window.)

This may seem so obvious to everyone, but I was shocked at how much of my own personal life I could work into the book. I would love to do some sort of annotated manuscript or interactive website where you could click on a part of the book and it would tell you the real story behind the inspiration. For starters, the cemetery that the book takes place in is in my parents’ neighborhood. The dead boyfriend is made up of bits and pieces of people I’ve dated. An important photo that the main characters references a few times is based on an actual photo of me as a baby. Names of people in the book are based on people in my family. Even the ending is completely based on something that happened to me when I was about 17. Or at least it’s based on what I remember 13 years later.

More to come once I get comments from my editor!

Here's the first poem of my new book. Alas, the book still doesn't have a title.
This poem's still a work in progress. Just like with I Don't Want to Be Crazy, I am starting with a bit of a flashforward...

Enjoy!

PS: The first draft is due in less than 4 weeks...OMG!



I walk down my block
and then take a right turn.
Two more blocks
and I’ll be with Brian.
For the first time
in a long time,
I know he’ll be there
waiting for me.
I sit down on the grass next to him.
He has flowers,
but I know they’re not for me.
I wonder who gave them to him,
but I don’t ask.

I tell Brian about my day.
I say, “I saw your dad
at the supermarket.
I didn’t talk to him—
not like he knows who I am
and even if he did,
I wouldn’t know what to say.
I watched him
take things off the shelves,
look them over
and then put them back.
There was almost nothing
in his cart.
I wonder if he’s always been like that,
or just lately.”

I say, “I miss you.”
I ask if Brian missed me too,
then wait for his answer.
If that squirrel runs up that tree,
then Brian’s answer is yes.
If it stays on the grass,
his answer is no.

The squirrel doesn’t move,
and my breath catches in my throat.
After a moment,
it zips up the tree.
I smile and lay down
next to Brian.
I wish he would hold me
like he used to,
but he doesn’t.
The warm sun makes me drowsy
and I fall asleep on my side
next to Brian.

When I wake up,
grass is imprinted
on my arm and leg.
I get up and brush the grass off my clothes.
Brian doesn’t move.
I say, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I reach out to touch him.
My fingers make contact
with smooth, cold granite.
I trace my fingers
over the deeply imprinted words:

Brian Dennis
Born February 11
Died age seventeen
Beloved son and friend

Hey friends,

I’ll be doing a reading, talk, and book signing at the South Brunswick Public Library on Thursday April 30th from 7-8pm.

Hope to see you there!

http://www.sbpl.info/
South Brunswick Public Library
110 Kingston Lane
Monmouth Junction NJ 08852
TEL # 732-329-4000