Visiting the past and the future all at once

Also, meet authors right here in our own community on our new Spark Author Page

Before we begin

How close have you ever gotten to being able to time travel? Maybe you didn’t literally go back in time but maybe you lost your orientation, even briefly, and wondered where and when you were? What did the experience give you or take from you? Are memories our only vehicles for visiting the past? 

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Time travel can catch up with you

“When she was a teenager, the 1980s had felt far away, a lifetime ago, but now, when she was so many more decades ahead, 1996 still felt recent. The first twenty years of her life had gone by in slow motion--the endless summers, the space from birthday to birthday almost immeasurable--but the second twenty years had gone by in a flash. Days could still be slow, of course, but weeks and months and sometimes even years zipped along, like a rope slipping through your hands.” ― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

A little over a week ago, I was still on the road, paused in a bookstore staring at the shelves of Morgan Hill Bookstore in New London, NH, waiting for the right book to reveal itself. Honestly, I wasn’t even able to read the titles. I could only stare straight ahead. For the first time in nearly two weeks, my body was not in motion yet I felt as though I were still traveling. I was dizzy with exhaustion and reeling with emotions from the all-too-brief visits I’d had with people I loved in places that were both home and not-home. 

I passed

Emma Straub

’s This Time Tomorrow. Then I returned. I’ve been reading her accounts of her promotional tour for the paperback. I’ve been reading wonderful things about the book itself. I felt that flutter, that feeling we’ve talked about before when the right book comes along at the right time. I bought it and fell into it that night and finished it before my return flight from Boston touched down in San Diego. The story weaves together time travel, love, loss, grief, joy, and hope.

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice Stern is facing the imminent death of the father who raised her, working at a job that may be going away, and exiting a relationship she knows is not what she wants. She is looking both backward wondering how exactly this happened, and forward at what lies before her. Then, the next day she wakes up and it is her sixteenth birthday. She wakes in her old bed with her now very-much-alive dad who is in the kitchen making breakfast. 

The rest of the story sees Alice returning more than once to her sixteenth birthday, using each “trip” to learn more about the man who raised her and herself and to try to rewrite the future for each of them. The journey becomes less about “getting it right” and more about knowing how to live in the present as well as to move on. Along the way Alice explores many of the questions that rode along with me on my trip: How much do we ever know about someone we love, especially our parents or our children? How well do we even know ourselves? What is home? What is adulthood? How do we respond to the losses, big and small, that are inevitable? How do we let go and live right here, right now? 

“The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer.” ― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Straub’s voice on the page is searching, funny, wise, warm, honest. She proved to be the companion I needed as I neared the end of a trip that spanned twelve days, nearly seven thousand miles by plane, bus, and car – and sometimes took me back and forth through time in the space of a single day.

There was my family. There were friends. There was a funeral. There were reminders at every turn that no one remains the same. Bodies fail. Memories go missing. Adjustments must be made to accommodate new and harsher realities. 

There was also love, light, laughter. There were long talks. There was the awe I felt every time I Iooked out a window and saw a field full of lupine or the way sunlight filtered through the trees or shimmered on the rivers, lakes, and ocean. There was the constant sense that I was traveling through time itself, visiting people and places as they are now yet seeing them as I remembered them as vividly as if it were a moment, not decades ago.

In This Time Tomorrow., Alice gets a chance to try out different futures for herself by revisiting the past. This is the fantasy, the part that drew me as a reader and was so different from my own recent journey. 

As I traveled, I lost things: a backpack, an iPad, a Kindle, a journal that was nearly full, an earring that was part of a favorite pair made by my sister. The backpack had traveled with me throughout the U.S. and Europe. In addition to the various devices I’d come to rely on, it contained a printout of a big piece of my novel with margin notes, a favorite pen, money. No matter how hard I tried to retrace my steps, to go back to the moment when I lost these things, I could not retrieve them. 

Part of me still harbors the hope that some of these things will, miraculously, be found and returned to me. Even if they do, though, I’ve already started moving on without them. This is how it is with losses, big and small. There is no going back. There is, as Alice discovers, only forward, “Until the future, whatever that was going to be.” 

“Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope– hope was honest. Hope was good.” - Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow.

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The Authors Among Us: Introducing the Spark Authors Page

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of The Spark Authors page, a section devoted to the authors in our community and their books. Here, you can browse for your next read and support an author who shares your love for the way stories can make us think, cry, engage, escape, learn, laugh – the whole nourishing buffet offered by books. 

You’ll find poets, novelists, journalists, writing literary fiction, historical fiction, mystery/suspense, laugh-out-loud funny books, social commentary, creative nonfiction, and more. You’ll hear about new books coming from our authors and we will be highlighting members of the list from time to time so that you can get to know them and their work even better. 

All are ready and willing to meet with your book club and are easily contacted by using the links provided in the profiles on the author page. 

From L to R: Kristen Tsetsi, Stacy Dyson, Marivi Soliven, Julia Locke, Jim Ruland, Marilyn Johnson, Lisa Stice, Julia Carol Folsom, Andrew Merton

From L to R: Robyn Ryle, Jonathan Posner, Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Michael Estrin, Sandra de Helen, PJ Colando, Cynthia Newberry Martin, Kathleen Rodgers

Here’s our inaugural group of seventeen authors. You can go right to their profiles by clicking on their names. Or you can just click here to begin browsing the entire page. Here is our group, The Authors of Spark, over on Bookshop.org.

• The Poets: Sandra de Helen, Stacy Dyson, Andrew Merton, Lisa Stice, 

• The Novelists: PJ Colando, Sandra de Helen, Jim Ruland, Robyn Ryle, Cynthia Newberry Martin, Kristen Tsetsi, Marivi Soliven, Kathleen Rodgers, Julia Carol Folsom, Michael Estrin, Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Jonathan Posner, Louisa Locke 

• The Nonfiction Writers: Marilyn Johnson, Robyn Ryle, Jim Ruland, Andrew Merton

Let’s Grow Our List

If you’re a subscriber who has published a book and want to share it with some new readers, click the link below to add your info. If you’d like to see an author you know on this list, please share this with them. 

• Spark Authors & Their Books

Coming Next: Spark Writing Professionals

Spark Writing Professionals will be a central page where you can find the editors, teachers, book doctors, publicists, and others who help writers with the craft or the business of writing. If this describes you, add your info to the list by clicking the link below and filling out the google form. 

• Spark Writing Professionals & Their Services

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ICYMI

Thank you to both Rosalynn Tyo of

All By Our Shelves

Courtney Cook

of

Survival by Book

whose guest essays these past two weeks resonated with me deeply as I crossed the country to old landscapes and trees full of family. If you missed them, check them out here. I’m looking forward to sharing writing by others that get me thinking and offer you something wonderful to read.

• Climbing Down From The Family Tree by Rosalynn Tyo

• The Centerline of This Particular Weekend Was Survival by Courtney Cook

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Spark is Yours: Chime In

Have you just finished a book you loved? Tell us about it.  Got a great resource for readers or writers? Share away! How about sharing your book stack with us, that tower of tomes rising next to your bed or your bath or wherever you keep the books you intend to read – someday. And if you stumbled on a Moment of Zen, show us what moved you, made you laugh, or just created a sliver of light in an otherwise murky world. 

Thank you and Welcome

Thank you to everyone who has shared Spark with a friend. We are nearing 900 subscribers which is thrilling. Please keep sharing. Invite a friend to join us!

Welcome to all new subscribers! Thank you so much for being here. If you would like to check out past issues, here’s a quick link to the archives. Be sure to check out our Resources for Readers and Writers too where you will find links for readers, book clubs, writers, and writing groups. And if you’d like to browse for your next read, don’t forget to check out books by authors in our community at the Spark Author Page or the many wonderful reviews you’ll find among the #Bookstackers. 

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That’s it for this week. Thank you for being here. Let me know how you are and what you are reading or what idea took hold of you this week and wouldn’t let you go.

Ciao for now.

Gratefully,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…Lost in the lupine

I hadn’t seen the annual spring bloom that covers the fields “back home” in decades, only the photos my mom would send. Seeing it “live” took my breath away or maybe it was the squeezing in my heart when I realized how long it had been. Lush. Lovely. Wild. Lupine.

Calling for Your Contribution to A Moment of Zen

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

And remember,If you like what you see or it resonates with you, please share Spark with a friend and take a minute to click the heart ❤️ below - it helps more folks to find us!

(Wherever possible the books here are linked to bookstore.org where every purchase helps local bookstores and, if they link to our own page, they generate a commission. )