On a Soul Mountain writing retreat at Marilyn Nelson’s house in East Haddam, Connecticut, I started a YA novel in 2004, Seventeen Seasons. Not two years later, I had moved to NYC, started teaching at Juilliard, and acquired an amazing agent, Adrienne Ingrum, who almost immediately landed my first work for hire deal with Simon Spotlight, followed by a royalty deal for Seventeen Seasons with Penguin Putnam. I hadn’t even gotten my feet wet in NYC, and it was all happening so fast.
These publishers saw me as a hot, Caribbean- American poet novelist on the rise, and they wanted and got in early. I rocked the Simon Spotlight gig with “Everybody Hates School Presentations” and they remembered me for that some 10 years later when it really counted.
I tanked with Putnam, however. I proceeded to fall flat on my face with Putnam, which has since merged with Random House. Seventeen Seasons crashed and burned after so many tries, and I finally had to tell my patient editor that I just couldn’t do it. It was hands down the greatest source of my unhappiness that lasted for years in New York City as I struggled to make it something that it wasn’t. My kick ass, rising star of an editor at Putnam fell in love with a hefty sample of a book that I ultimately couldn’t complete in the ways that she wanted, and hell, the ways I wanted.
I believe that I got that opportunity before I was ready for it, and I suffered greatly because of this blessing that I am still paying for to this day. I consider this the biggest failure of my literary career and I figured the story was toast. And the story, in that form, is toast. I realize now that that painful period of discovering this character was all experience building and scaffolding for the novel named Seventeen Seasons that wants to come out of me, now.
The characters of that world have all gotten face lifts (aka revamps) and are very much alive in me, persisting at getting written into being. With the help and influence of my husband, the story is rewriting itself as I rewrite my life here in Trinidad, this island of my beginnings, where the story is now set. This book is a stone refused, and it definitely has a cornerstone complex (peep the Marley reference!). It’s now transmuting into a truth that I could not have ever scratched at back in 2007 when I signed a deal for this book that wasn’t a book, but the ghost of an idea that grew and grew under the pressure of approval and literary stardom, blah blah blah.
I initially got the idea for Seventeen Seasons at Soul Mountain, where I began drafting it. Soul Mountain was also the home of Marilyn Nelson, the poet laureate of Connecticut at that time. I was inspired my Marilyn’s career as both a poet and a children’s author, along with poet Tonya Hegamin who was with Marilyn at Soul Mountain. They gave me permission with their very lives to twirl outside the poetry lines, along with Rita Dove, who had already advised me to go ahead and write everything, and to never limit myself.
How this influence has reverberated throughout my career, a dozen book contracts later! It doesn’t mean that I’ve written everything, but it means that publishers seem to believe that I can.