Then—and I hate to even tell this part—my beloved wife Kate was diagnosed with cancer; she spent a horrifying 6 weeks in New York hospital hell and I was dashing back and forth from home to office to hospital, trying to take care of my wife, my kids, my teaching, afraid to think about the future, or about much of anything really. The only thing that provided me any relief was working on Come Away; because it was both about my own anxieties and impending despair but also totally not about that. Working on the book was like going into a trance or something. I finished the first draft the day Kate died, in March 2012. I didn’t know, of course, it would be the day she died, only that I had already lost her and needed to work hard to keep from losing myself. For several months after she died, I did not look at the manuscript—there was too much to do, too many sad loose ends of our life together to tie up. During the fall of 2012, I took the semester off from teaching. Instead of working on a project I had planned to work on, I went back to Come Away. I liked/hated it, the way I always do with anything I’ve written. I revised it and, on a whim, sent it to Dzanc Books, which was holding a competition for a Mid-Career Author Award. It won the award. Various friends of mine have said, “Kate got you that award.” And maybe she did. ~ Stephen Policoff. *On the eve of the publication Stephen Policoffs new novel, Come Away, he gives an amazing interview on The Manifest-Station. Get the book! Its amazing. Thanks as alway to SimpleReminders
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 05:39:56 +0000
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