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21 urnout. Mary read about it in a nursing journal. It happened to drug users whose brains became like spent shell cases, but this author used it to describe worker fatigue that could strike almost anyone in middle age. Those of us in the service professions who are required to give, give, give, are particularly at risk of this moral exhaustion. To be sustainable, service work has to promise something new, and if it doesn’t . . . the creeping symptoms mirror those of depression and occur at a particularly dangerous time of life, the transition to the middle years. Jesus Mary and Joseph, she said to herself. An occupational risk of depression—I’ve been there, when Jim died; I refused it when Chris died. I will go anywhere else, but not back there. She went to Traverse City to ‹nd the AA meeting but let herself wander through the Goodwill store instead. She bought curtains, percolators , and a few books, including How to Write for Homemakers— the same title she’d checked out from the library several times and never found time to read. She could try something new and risky. Take that, burnout! But within half an hour of opening How to Write for Homemakers she had thrown it across the room. To think she had wasted the price of a hamburger on advice like this: “Father Knows Best . . . it’s well to get a man’s comment on what you write. His direct way of stating facts will help you to put strength into your copy.” What terrible advice—rather than study the way writing succeeds, run to Father for approval. And yet that advice came back to her in the following days. Crummy advice but with sticking power, like a caterpillar or stinkbug on your shoulder after a walk in the woods. So what if there was no “father” handy who knew best (what a way to refer to your own husband!). I am the kind of person who learns from experience, she thought, and being Jim’s wife for twelve years was not wasted on me. I want to learn to convey information—I want to test my own perceptions. This isn’t about just being happy in the woods, it’s about looking for information about how to live. So, information —movement—has got to come across, with salt for ›avor and room to breathe. What is it about the way men talk to each other? They don’t repeat 198 B themselves, she thought. They don’t go on. They don’t even check for understanding, they just assume that if they said something, the other person heard it. Not all men, but quite a few. Dean Holbus, for instance . Chris Olivet and his uncle. Jim. Certainly Caz Wilgosch. Sean, too. I happen to like repeating things, but maybe . . . I don’t have to do it quite so much. Instead of throwing it out, she put the little book on a shelf above her desk, spine against the wall, in case she needed it again. I should be open to accepting even backhanded advice, she thought. But is it really like this in the publishing world? Q. What shall I do if an editor asks me to make changes in my copy? A. Make them cheerfully . . . Q. What shall I do if an editor changes my copy? A. Nothing. That’s her privilege. Q. If I do not hear from an editor within a month, shall I write her? A. No. Be patient a little longer. She may be on a trip . . . Without a doubt, the book helped too by making her so angry that she determined to plunge ahead without dependence on guidebooks after all. Like her own father told her once, the best way to stretch eggs is to use more eggs. Have at it. Crack some eggs. Waste your time, if it comes to that. Make mistakes. Do it without anyone breathing down your neck! How to Write for Homemakers suggested you take a little stack of your little essays—that word, “little,” she didn’t care for it—to the proposed market. So that’s what she did: took four earthy little essays into the Miltonia Gazette on a red-letter day in January 1970 after just about the worst Christmas of her life. Becky and Sean had come home for Christmas, but no one could pull Melina out of the funk she’d been in for a couple of...
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