The Ending

          

           I completed my copy of Anna Karenina on December 31, 2015, my forty-ninth birthday. I had intended all along to make one final post, but as happens in my life, I put it off; a year passed, and still I had not written to you about the experience.
           In that year, one of my stories and an essay were published. I co-directed a play. I saw 17 (18 at the time, now 19 and rapidly approaching 20) off to college. My husband surprised me with a dinner party celebrating my fiftieth birthday. Three babies were born into my extended family. I applied for and did not receive grant funding to visit the Tolstoy’s summer estate.

And I wrote a story.

A short story.

A short—seven pages—story inspired by my field immersion into the life of Sophia Tolstoy, by our country’s election of a man with a history of degrading women, by a past relationship with a partner diagnosed with bipolar disorder, by my own recovery from mental illness, and by an ongoing struggle to balance creative work with my family’s needs.

I wrote the story down in two days, workshopped it with my writing group, stalled when the feedback left me feeling at loose ends. I sat on the story for several months, pulled it back out, cut it by half, polished it up, workshopped it again, this time with my Warrior Writer Women, and settled on a title.

Then I submitted it to a list of journals and contests. I received several good rejections. By good I mean the editors really like the story, but…

There was always a but.

The ending felt unresolved. Or she didn’t feel it was quite ready for publication. Or the story didn’t fit into the upcoming issue.

And then, while making breakfast on July 5^th, nearly three years after I began the project, I received an email that said, Congratulations. “The Ending” had been long-listed for the Bath Short Story Award, included in their top 50 out of 1100 submissions.

I know, right? How cool! The short list was to be announced a week later, and the winner ten days after that.

 I was excited to see the title of my story on the Bath Short Story Award website. If I got short-listed, the story would be published in an anthology and read by a London literary agent, and then maybe, I could send him a query letter for the collection that I am trying to publish. My family heard the news and got excited too. When would I find out if I won? How much money would I win?

The next day, I received another email, this one from a small literary journal in Ohio, that supports a local public library. The editor loved my story and wanted to publish “The Ending” on July 25^th.

I emailed my Warrior Women Writers. I had never been in this situation before.

They all said, wait it out, and go for the prize.

The night before the short list was announced, I couldn’t sleep. I woke early and checked my email, then their website. Nothing. I lay in bed, texted with a few friends and my husband.

I checked the website again. Held my breath. There it was.

My story did not make the short list.

I’ll be honest; I was deflated. I wanted the big win. I let myself sulk for a couple of hours. Then I pulled together a bio, accepted the small journal publication, and set a deadline to write this last post, which I am doing.

            If I could rewrite the ending to this story, I would have stepped away from the big prize, the possibility of fame (of a sort) and money. I would have joyfully accepted the offer from Fourth and Sycamore, knowing it was in line with my personal values. Because that is the very thought I had when I opened that second congratulatory message. I knew when I submitted my story to them that they and I seemed like a good fit. And it took them less than a month to agree.

            I think Tolstoy would agree too, but I wonder about Sophie.

            Sophia Tolstoy spent years working as an editor, publisher, copywriter, mother, partner, without any financial compensation. One could say she had that luxury as a woman of privilege. One could also say she had no choice.

This kind of work is what the world has valued in women, but I also recognize the deception inherent in using financial reward as a measure of artistic value. Unfortunately, we live in a world where money talks. And so, many women’s voices have been silenced. A member of my writing group and I often lament the pressure to make money, to not feel like a financial drain on our spouses, she on her wife and me on my husband. We talk about the value of our work to the well-being of our family and the world-at-large.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay “In Praise of Threat” that the current push to preserve traditional marriage is aimed at protecting the male-dominated hierarchy. Wives who make money, have access to birth control and become educated are no longer dependent on the old model (Solnit, 59). What would happen if we let that old model die off completely? What might the world become if we moved away from the of accumulation of wealth and exploitation of resources—human or otherwise— to a whole new kind of value system?

            Simone Campbell of Nuns On the Bus spoke with a group of highly-paid executives about why they need more money when they are already making millions of dollars. She asked them, “Well guys, I’m kind of curious about this. Is it that they’re not getting by on 10 million that they need 11 million? I don’t get it” (Campbell). The men (mostly) said it wasn’t about the money. It was a game, a competition, a way of valuing their worth. To which Campbell responded, then we need a new way to measure our value.

            We need to know that the work we do is valued as important and sustaining even without an assigned dollar value.

            I’m pretty sure Sophia Tolstoy felt the same way when her husband signed away the rights to a book on which she spent years laboring as unpaid help.

            School is about to start, and every parent knows that means money spent on supplies, school shoes, book fees. In the dream where I won the big award, I planned to use the prize money to buy a new laptop for my daughter. In today’s world, money is still a necessary means of getting what we need and want. I’m not poor. I’m not even broke (a distinction pointed out by Roxane Gay in her new memoir Hunger), but there is a part of me that would like to know that my work can help to provide for my family.

            Another part of me, the artist, is grateful that I did not make the short list, that I was given the opportunity to let my writing do a different kind of work, one that cannot be measured monetarily. Leo would be proud of me for that.

             But it is Sophie who has reached forward in time, across the divide between life and death to find me. I dedicate “The Ending” to her.

https://fourthandsycamore.com/2017/07/25/the-ending-fiction-by-julie-ann-stewart/

Works cited

Solnit, Rebecca. “In Praise of Threat.” Men Explain Things to Me. Haymarket, 2014, pp. 59-68.

Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. HarperCollins, 2017.

Campbell, Simone. Interview by Krista Tippett. “How to Be Spiritually Bold.” On Being. 11 June        2015. https://onbeing.org/programs/simone-campbell-how-to-be-spiritually-bold/.