Let’s Pinky Swear…
The taxi driver and I spent the first 10 minutes of the drive trying to figure out if we had the correct flight information for the author we were due to pick up. There were two name placards flying loose on the front passenger seat with the same flight number mistakenly printed on both. Fumbling with his phone, the driver dodged a tuk tuk, and then nearly missed a red light. Feeling a certain comradery with him, I took charge. “You focus on the driving,” I said. “I’ll message the festival people.” We were headed for hill country in Kandy to the the Ceylon Literary Festival, and I’d have five hours to get chummy with the mystery author I’d be riding with. So far this year had been full of meaningful connections. I was sure this would be another.
Getting Vulnerable
Once an artist admiring my pregnant belly said with glowing authority, “Just you wait. Once you’ve had children, you’ll feel you can do anything.” She was referring to childbirth. That comment stuck with me—because the general consensus is that motherhood does more to bring you to your knees than to empower you. But it wasn’t until the day I saw my public speaking fears almost disappear completely that I knew it to be true. Not that I wasn’t nervous before my events at the Galle Literature Festival in January. Afterall I was just about to have my very first talk about my own work…with a famous author…on an actual stage. But it wasn’t that kind of heart-pounding, debilitating fear that used to keep me from even considering these opportunities.
Just minutes before the event began, I bumped into Nayomi Munaweera (What Lies Between Us). Even though I hadn’t seen her in a few years, I immediately confided in her like I would a sister. “I’m just so worried that when I get up there, my mind will go blank.” She looked me in the eyes, unblinking, and said, “It won’t. The lights will go on, and your mind will turn on. You’ve been working on this project for years, Marguerite. All of that information is in the back of your mind. You’ve got this.” She was right.
“Why do you have to always pick us?”
On stage that day, I answered questions from the wonderful Moni Mohsin (The Diary of a Social Butterfly), a Pakistani writer who also writes on culture, but through the entirely different lens of fictional satire. Moni was enchanting, honest. She told me that she was turned off by the subject of my book at first. “Why do you have to always pick us?” she asked. She was reflecting how my book, like so many others that have come before it, may appear on the surface to exotify Muslims. Then she went on to say that, reading one personal story at a time, her skepticism melted away, and she grew to love it. I was flooded with joy to hear the evolution of her experience with my book. Right after that talk, I spoke to a dozen readers and must have signed 30 books. Moni, you are gorgeous.
Making Mistakes
I walked across the human-sized checkerboard on the lawn facing the ocean to find my favorite new author friend—my carpool buddy from Colombo to Kandy, in fact. “How did it go?” she asked. She knew I had just confronted another author with whom I had a misunderstanding. “I think she blew me off,” I said, my shoulders slumped. “I was honest, but I’m not sure it worked.” I thought about her big brown eyes trying unsuccessfully to avert my gaze. “She said she thought it worked out fine and pulled away. But, I don’t buy it.” That’s when my friend advised me to go home, take some salt in my hand and swirl it around my head a few times. “That’s what we do in India to clear the energy,” she said. I did that very thing when I got home, not because I thought the ritual would work. But because I knew the magic was in my new friend’s support, her self-assured, quick faith in the purity of my intentions. Relationships are important.
Not Everyone is Your Friend
I can’t help but recall the chat with my first editor at the Pasadena Weekly, after I had delivered a lackluster investigative reporting piece about the realities of recycling back in 2002. It was clear to me that the landfill manager I had interviewed was trusting me not to tell all. He knew it would portray a negative image of the challenges inherent to waste management on limited city budgets. So I didn’t write the part about how it wasn’t cost effective for the city to recycle every type of item every time, and that a huge amount goes into the landfill every day. My editor thought that would have been the juiciest bit for all the readers who felt they were doing their part, blindly dumping every piece of plastic with an arrow triangle on the bottom into one big bin. Maybe I should have revealed the gritty details for the greater good, but I didn’t want to throw that guy under the bus. “Everybody doesn’t have to be your friend,” my editor told me. Even today, that’s still hard for me to understand. Are there some people that you should never do wrong, and others with whom it’s ok to do a little wrong? That still doesn’t sit right with me. Every one-on-one exchange is sacred to me. Especially when there’s shared trust in the moment.
What have I learned over the last two months? That speaking engagements are hard. That I shouldn’t do them back to back. That I have an exorbitant amount of faith in the people I connect with, and that I am no longer afraid to take the stage. Oh! And that I still love teaching. Did I mention I taught my first memoir writing workshop? I definitely packed in too much material into two hours, but it was exhilarating to recognize how much I have to share on the topic. More on that to come.