Guest Post:

BookSpin is pleased to host a guest post by author Wendy Crisp Lestina for her book:

A Bit of Earth
by Wendy Crisp Lestina
Lychgate Press


My first books were published by Putnam (now, Penguin Random House). The initial title sold for a big advance. The book, 100 Things I’m Not Going To Do Now That I’m Over 50, earned out that advance and quite a bit more. Putnam was happy, so they published two more titles by me, neither of which earned out. The red ink on the balance sheet made me a personae non gratae, or, as I prefer, a person au gratin. I’m not an unsuccessful author. I’m someone who’s smothered in cheese.

My new book, A Bit of Earth, was published by Lychgate Press, an indie in Corvallis, Oregon. There was no advance and, unnervingly, no contract.

“What if, say, someone were to buy foreign rights?” I asked cautiously.

“I’d send you the money,” the publisher said.

“All the money?”

“If you wish. I’d like to keep some for myself.”

That sounded good: doing business with an independent press as a human-scale experience. And, I liked that the publisher’s name is also Wendy.

A Bit of Earth is a memoir. The only task more difficult than writing a memoir is talking about it. Yes, it’s all about me, and now I’m going to talk about me writing all about me.

For women—I’m generalizing—the exercise is counterintuitive. We’re trained, nurtured, coaxed—choose your verb—to be focused on others. When I was in elementary school, the biggest negative character flaw a girl could have was to be conceited. Over the years, that concept became selfish; then, self-absorbed. (Now, the trait is narcissism, and it’s not merely abhorrent, it’s internationally life-threatening.)

I began to write the memoir and quickly became uncomfortable. Who cares what happened to you?

I flushed out those furies and a new, tougher, crew showed up. Are you going to tell the truth? Really? Ha, ha, ha. You won’t be able to live in this town again.

I live four miles outside of the town of 1,500 people where I was born. I left Ferndale when I went to college, and I didn’t return for 34 years. By that time, I was almost 50 and I thought—incorrectly, as it turned out—that I’d made all my mistakes off-stage. As I wrote in the preface to A Bit of Earth, “I was confident I understood life, and I was ready to share my unique wisdom. I wrote three books saying as much. They were very short books.”

I kept writing and rewriting, and as I wrote, a certainty crept in. I began to realize that although the stories are about my reactions to my experiences, A Bit of Earth is not about me.

It is about our very human search for joy, and the remarkable, mysterious hope that keeps us believing, like the child on Christmas morning in the old joke. We rip through a box of manure, shouting with excitement, “I know there’s a pony in here somewhere!”

And there is.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Book Description A Bit of Earth, published by Lychgate Press, an independent press in Corvallis, Oregon, is a memoir that begins in 1980 with the theft from a car parked on the streets of New York City of my father’s Silver Star medal, which was awarded to him for his heroism during World War II—heroism that resulted in his death. The book ends, 22 chapters later, with its unlikely recovery, 34 years later, in 2014. The story in-between, life stories that begin before I was born and take place in various settings (farms in northern California and tiny towns on the Minnesota prairie; Los Angeles and New York) is a kaleidoscope of stories about a life—mine—influenced by a dead father’s spiritual admonition to "life a big life, as big as you can make it, big enough for both of us.” A Bit of Earth is both a personal story, filled with details of people and places and things that are unique to my experience, and a story about everyone whose childhood and adult life began in the atomic age and wove through a world in which long-standing rules were subject to revision or dissolution. Everyone seeks ways to survive, cope and—occasionally—master this challenge by finding a home, something to hang on to, a piece of earth. My way is humor. This is, mostly, a funny book. - - - - - - - - - - - BookSpin would like to thank Sage's Blog Tours for inviting us to participate in the promotion of this book. Sage's twitter is here.