letter #2 from me (Gwenda) to you: funereal joy, what people see, doing the work
Here I am again, as promised, in your inbox with a letter about the week and a few newsy tidbits at the end.
When I announced I was leaving my day job around the end of last year (I actually left it in January), I joked online that for most people it was probably a surprise that I had one. This was true for a couple of reasons--the main one being the job in question (the other being that, yes, I was doing way too much work to be healthy). Anyway, for those of you who don't know, for many, many years I was the assistant communications director/public information officer type in Kentucky's giant health and human services agency, mainly working with reporters to answer their questions and set up interviews, dealing with strange crises (usually of the public health variety, involving whatever the terrifying-disease-of-the-week was), coordinating media campaigns, etc. It was a good day job; never boring, I enjoyed it, and I was good at it. But it's not the kind of job it's appropriate to talk about online. I always kept a very strict separation of--I joke--church and state. The state being my job and the church being my vocation, writing, and the entire rest of my life.
To say I feel much freer these days to be my goofball self and not have to worry about it popping up in a harmful way at work would be a massive understatement. GIANT BONUS of being a writer: your eccentricities become delightful--unless you're, you know, Bukowski or something. If I want to post a comment about politics, because I'm experiencing a brief fit of insanity or don't have enough to do that day, I can do it without fear of being called into my boss's office. But, really, I'm giving you all of this context so I can talk a little about one of the parts of my week, a funeral.
I moved from working in the Governor's press office over to the health agency right before 9-11 happened. My first day on the job, I got pulled into an exercise because my boss didn't really have anything else for me to do. It was a National Pharmaceutical Stockpile simulation being run out of our commissioner of Public Health's office, a guy named Dr. Rice Leach. (Trivia alert: the NPS got renamed the Strategic National Stockpile when its profile got boosted, because no one had ever cared before that it had the same acronym as the National Parks Service.) My working relationship with Dr. Leach would become one of the best of my government career. He was a FASCINATING man, who'd already seemingly had a zillion jobs, and we hit it off right away. We were both goofballs who worked hard, but who liked to crack--sometimes inappropriate, sometimes overly cerebral--jokes. I had no problem arguing with him, where sometimes people could be intimidated, and he respected me for that. We crafted responses to things like the great anthrax scares and rolled out our state's smallpox vaccination campaign (remember when that happened? Oh, the Bush Sr. years! Dr. Leach actually got his THIRD smallpox vaccination during that time; he also wrote a letter to help me get out of a jury duty summons that hit right when we were starting all this, saying that the commonwealth would be in big trouble if there was a smallpox epidemic and I wasn't at work...which still cracks me up because I think we'd *all* have been in big trouble, no matter who was where ;-). He'd spent many years in the U.S. Public Health Service, as chief of staff for the Surgeon General and on several reservations out west. He really, truly cared about people and about using his influence and experience on behalf of the most vulnerable. I could go on and tell more funny stories too, but I'll just sum it up: To say I learned a lot from him is an understatement.
And unlike a lot of people I worked with over the years, we always kept in touch. I'd heard that he'd stopped working, fighting another cancer bout. I knew it must be serious if he was actually retiring FOR REAL from public health life. But it still came as a shock when a reporter friend tweeted me about his death last weekend (along with a video of him cranking the 1812 overture for a groundbreaking). I attended his funeral on Tuesday afternoon, my first Catholic burial mass. At his request, a Dixieland jazz band (he'd spent time in New Orleans) played his family into the cathedral and out at the end, all of them laughing as they exited, a colleague who'd given his eulogy wearing a jester hat. It made me--not at all in a morbid way--want to plan eccentric things for my own funeral (hopefully a long way off, having lived as worthy a life as Dr. Leach). Farewell, Doc. He was much on my mind this week.
The other strange thing about the funeral is that of course I saw a whole bunch of people I used to work with. Some as recently as a few months ago! It all felt very far away. Some of them I'd lost contact with were surprised (and pleased) to hear that I was writing full-time. And it just reminded me how many different people we all are, how to people who know only one or two facets of our lives, that's who we are to them. It made me appreciate the biggest change I've experienced shifting from having two full-time jobs. Finally, I have a more integrated life, where I get to be that eccentric writer person--to live the church part, if I can say it that way without a lightning strike--all the time. It was deeply weird to run into people for who I am still, in their mind, "the eccentric PIO person." ;-)
Thinking about these things also illuminated for me why, perhaps, my new book is about a girl with a double life.
Speaking of which, because this has gotten long and I should wrap it up, the writing went much better this week. I earned celebratory cake for getting my word count every day, and this afternoon wrote what I think may be one of my favorite scenes EVER (oh, off-color jokes and awkward flirting, you're my favorite!). I was laughing while I wrote parts of it, but it doesn't matter if the coffeeshop people think I've lost it. See above.
I hope you all had a good week, and have an even better next one. See you then, when I'll be writing you from LAS VEGAS and the RT Convention. Yay!
This week's newsy bits:
- I'll be at RT in Vegas! I have a couple of panels, including a juvenilia one (!), and am signing for Teen Day, where there will also be early copies of Double Down hot off the press.
- I chatted with Newbery winner and delightful human Kwame Alexander and wrote about our convo for the LA Times; you can read it online.
- I did a new interview with Sci-Fi Bulletin about Lois Lane, Girl Over Paris, and etc.!