About Face
Kate Rounds, author of the newly-released novel Catboat Road, traces her pivot from angsty full-time journalist to angsty debut novelist.
The first story I ever wrote was about a blade of grass that had been murdered by a lawnmower. I was 5. I guess you could say it was a graphic novel because it was illustrated: bright red murderer, dark green victim; the scene of the crime all blue sky, house with a pointy roof, and fierce yellow sun whose beams touched down on Earth.
Confidently delivering it to my father, I demanded, “What does this mean?” Like I was already into lit crit. My dentist dad’s close reading of the text revealed to him a third-person chronicle of suburban lawn care.
It was my first teachable moment as a writer: You are going to be misunderstood, so make sure you get something tangible in return: an allowance, for example. And it doesn’t have to be great wads of cash. Just the exchange of services for silver would guarantee that you are a professional, unlike my mother, who was well-known all around town for her beautiful doggerel, which ended up on bread-and-butter notes and sympathy cards.
It was Mrs. Lindsay who I idolized because she was given a “stipend” for her society column in our local rag, where she wrote “a good time was had by all” — on a typewriter. That’s what made her legit. She had a machine, a down-to-earth mechanical device, the heart and soul of the Industrial Revolution that had made our nation great.
With the arrival of Al Gore’s Information Superhighway, everyone and her brother were out there throwing words around and photographing her food, gratis, so professional writing took on a special cachet.
This Bud’s for You!
I was 23 when I landed my first professional writing job. It’s thrilling the first time you see your byline as if it were coveted merchandise in a store window. But that wears off almost immediately, and before you know it, you’ve had a bunch of freelance assignments and a half dozen full-time journalism gigs. And, as Gloria Steinem purportedly said, “All of a sudden you wake up, and you’re in bed with a 72-year-old.”
It took me almost five decades to finally abandon my Puritan mania for good, honest (paid) work, whose ultimate reward was “the peace of perspiration,” according to my boarding school religion teacher.
My editor for this piece instructs me that it should be 1,000 words. Right now, at almost 500, at the halfway mark, I’m going to pivot, and relate how I went from being a stressed-out, deadline-obsessed journalist to a deadline-free, paycheck-free novelist. But could helplessly spinning into that vast black hole of the unknown be stress-free?
Lightbulb Moment 💡
It wasn’t that I woke up one day and said, “I’m going to write a novel.” I’d written dozens of unpublished ones. My big epiphany was that I had to sacrifice security for success. What I mean by that is the security of living so close to the bone that you become a champion saver of money, starting with Dad’s allowance.
For years I’d been living off the grid, in an old wooden fishing boat that sank on September 10, 2001; in a rickety walkup with no bed, so I slept on the floor on a wall-to-wall carpet, and I despise wall-to-wall carpets.
And finally in a basement apartment, flooded by the nor’easter of October 2021. I was lucky; some people drowned in their homes.
That did it. I moved into a unit in a huge, brand-new building, where all the appliances were operable. I had a stacked washer/dryer for the first time in my life; there was a weight room, fitness center, community lounge, shuffleboard table, outdoor pool in the courtyard, a “welcome desk” staffed 24/7, an Amazon hub, and a lobby with real furniture and a gas fireplace.
And neighbors who lounged in the lobby or leaned against the welcome desk jawing with the young kids who waited on us hand and foot.
It didn’t matter what season it was. I didn’t have to shovel snow or shiver when the boiler broke, or mop up floodwaters that soaked the rug and left dried mud on the tiled floors like a parched riverbed.
Most writers, rhapsodizing on their writing lives, describe just the opposite experience. They go from the lap of luxury to a shed (Henry David Thoreau and Deborah Levy) or a garret or a treehouse or lean-to and out pours Remembrance of Things Past.
In my fourth-floor aerie with enormous windows from which poured forth a blazing elixir of sun — unimaginable in my basement dungeon — I became a thinker, a woolgatherer, and a yes-woman.
I said yes to everything. How about a funeral? Yes, because I could sit in the back of a Catholic cathedral in the middle of a Monday morning, which was a new experience for this workaholic and lapsed Protestant, and learn things that might come in handy should I want to include them in a book. I took in the saints and the genuflectors, and poor, bloody Jesus of Nazareth, gaunt and twisted. In the Episcopal church, we had chaste crosses, no gory crucifixes with a penniless Jew trapped in the Roman’s elaborate death apparatus.
I said yes to movie nights with the girls, yes to museum and gallery visits, yes to happy hour, yes to bike rides and walks in the park, yes to family outings, and yes to LGBTQA+ conferences and invitations to book clubs.
Yes to checking out Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Swann’s Way, and Ulysses from the Jersey City Free Public Library. These were the kinds of books that should have come wrapped in plain brown paper because I was embarrassed by seeming to be uppity, and I honestly had no idea if I would finish them or even do justice to their creators.
Yes to not making money.
Yes to life.
