Epigraphs

Hello friends,

My novel comes out in a month . . . and to be honest, I feel a bit silly doing book promotion amid such a consequential election season. I’ve been very distracted by the news for the past few weeks and I bet you have, too. I hope this letter about epigraphs will be a welcome distraction, but if you just want the most pertinent facts, here they are:

1)     My novel, We Were Pretending, will be released on August 13. You can pre-order now!

2)     There is a Goodreads giveaway happening now where Goodreads members can win a free ebook to read in advance. Giveaway ends August 12.

3)     If you have already received and read an advance copy, please consider rating and reviewing it on Goodreads, posting photos of it on social media, and handing it to Reese Witherspoon if you happen to run into her.    

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about epigraphs . . .  

I like to collect epigraphs as I am working on novels and even short stories. It helps me to track the themes that I’m dealing with. I don’t search for them; I just notice them in the world and then paste them into the manuscript. Sometimes they come from the reading I’m doing for a novel or story, sometimes I hear them in songs, and sometimes it’s an overheard scrap of conversation. At one point, We Were Pretending had three epigraphs:

Hecate. . . embodies an element of the gratuitous in the divine world; she brings a touch of the random.
--Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, The Gods, And Men

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants—
--Emily Dickinson

This old world ain’t got no back door.
--The Marvelettes, “Destination Anywhere”

These first two quotations highlight the symbolic aspect of mushrooms, the way they are mysterious, shape-shifting creatures, neither animal nor plant, good or bad. But I decided not to use them because I felt they were somewhat opaque. I didn’t think they would do anything to draw the reader in.

I still like the lyric from “Destination Anywhere” and think it speaks well to the overall themes of the story, but I don’t have a strong relationship to the song or to The Marvelettes, so I felt a bit weird using it. Also, it’s very hard to secure the rights to song lyrics and writers often hit a dead end trying to figure out who owns them. I feared that might happen with The Marvelettes, a long-defunct girl group from the early 1960s.

There were several poems in contention. From Philip Larkin’s “The Trees,” I considered using the opening stanza:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

I adore this poem, and I allude to it in the novel, but it was almost like I loved it too much, and I didn’t want to break it up and affix it, collage-like, to the first page of my book.

I also considered the first stanza of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

I know these lines because my grandmother made a framed embroidery of them for my sister, and for years it hung in her bedroom. I found myself thinking of it when I worked on this novel, but since I don’t have much familiarity with Blake or with the whole poem, I decided against it.

I also really liked this stanza from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes has thou seen!
There were the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

But again, I don’t know Tennyson’s poetry very well and it felt pretentious to use one stanza from an extremely long poem that I had never finished reading. I can’t even remember how I came across it in the first place.

I ended up finding my epigraph from an unusual source: The Army’s October 2020 Field Manual for Holistic Health and Fitness, a.k.a FM 7-22. You may wonder how I ended up reading a military field manual. It was certainly not a book I ever thought I would have in my possession. (This is what I love about writing, all the unexpected paths you end up following.) When I started drafting this book, in 2018, I decided that my protagonist, Leigh, would be working for the Department of Defense, helping with new mental health initiatives for veterans. I’d read a few articles about experimental therapies that the VA was using to treat PTSD, treatments that went beyond the usual mix of medication and talk therapy. I was especially struck by a story about service dogs who were trained to wake up veterans when they were having upsetting nightmares. The attention to the soldiers’ unconscious life surprised me because it seemed to acknowledge how deep the psychic wounds of war can go. It was also a treatment that seemed to acknowledge the special intelligence of animals. I decided that Leigh would be involved in researching these alternative therapies and writing them up for the DOD.

I have to admit, I got a bit bogged down researching these alternative therapies. I became overly interested in the placebo effect and tried to work that into the book. It was a mess! (Though, if you want to read fiction that incorporates research about the placebo affect into the storyline, Nathan Hill did a very good job of it with his recent novel, Wellness.)

A couple of years passed. One day, I heard a news story that the Army had released a new fitness manual that included instructions for “Holisitic Health and Healing.” For the first time, the military would provide soldiers with tools for improving their mental and spiritual health as well as their physical fitness. I couldn’t believe my ears. The job I had invented for Leigh actually existed! I decided I had to get the manual, so I ordered it online. It is, first of all, a fitness manual that includes information about physiology and anatomy and provides training plans for peak physical fitness. There are also some chapters on “nutritional readiness” and “mental readiness.” That seemed to be the old school portion of the manual. The newer portions included instruction for “sleep readiness,” which emphasize the importance of rest and recovery and even include a section for soldiers who are post-partum. But for me, the most fascinating part of the manual was a chapter called “Spiritual Readiness.”

In the context of the manual, Spiritual Readiness means encouraging soldiers to take time for religious rituals and spiritual practices because it is good for their overall health and will help them to cope with stressful situations. That seems like a commonsense idea. But in practice, “spiritual readiness” struck me as paradoxical because spiritual growth is mysterious and doesn’t have any obvious or predictable outcomes. Which is kind of the opposite of what FM 7-22 aims to do. It’s easy to tell people to get into shape by doing x-number of jumping jacks and sit-ups, but how do you program and test spirituality? What does it mean to become more or less spiritual? And how might spiritual development change someone? I’ve seen people from all walks of life do a complete 180 after delving deeply into spiritual texts and practices and it seems likely that some soldiers might make some drastic changes to their life after immersing themselves in religious and philosophical thought.  

What’s interesting about the Army’s manual is that it seems to recognize this paradox, acknowledging that spiritual readiness and spirituality itself are difficult to define. There are some odd paragraphs about the nature of memory, emotion, and identity, and how spiritual practice informs moral and ethical reasoning. You can feel the strain in the writing as the authors try to reign in these weighty topics without the aid of metaphor, simile, myth, or other poetic tools that would have come in handy. It was from this stiff bureaucratic language that I found my epigraph: 

Spiritual readiness, by virtue of its transcendent nature, does not provide objective metrics and measure.

The word “transcendent” was what caught me. It seemed to hint at the experience of awe, which is so fundamental to human flourishing, and it is most reliably found in nature, even as it remains subjective and hard to predict. But we live in an age that looks to new technology for experiences of enchantment; there’s a desire to systematize and manufacture encounters that are, by definition, elusive. There’s a tension there that I find very interesting, and which I tried to explore in this novel, from a variety of angles. I hope that my epigraph will hint at this theme, and draw the reader in. At the very least, I like that it has a direct connection to Leigh’s job.  

I will close with one more epigraph that I discovered after I turned in my final manuscript, and which I might have used, if I’d had the chance. It’s from Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life.”

-Hannah