Finding new forms for old ideas
Two years ago, I wrote a column for Reckon Review about planting pawpaw seeds and watching them sprout. I read that column aloud at an arts festival, and a man approached me afterward, offering to dig up some larger pawpaw trees from his property to transplant onto mine. I eagerly agreed, and a few months later when the weather was cool, I hopped onto this stranger’s excavator. We drove into the woods and pulled up four five-foot trees from his vast colony of wild pawpaws.
All the advice I read online was against doing this. Pawpaws have delicate root systems that are symbiotic with particular kinds of fungi in the soil. They also seem to panic when separated from their surrounding clones; in the wild, what we think of as a single pawpaw tree is usually one vertical shoot from a colony of roots that live for decades in the understory of mighty oaks. If those shoots are ever lucky enough to get a patch of sunlight to themselves, they’ll sprint upward, and if there happens to be another colony nearby to offer some pollen, they’ll produce the largest native fruits in North America, yellow-fleshed, green-skinned, and potato-sized, with a flavor that varies wildly.
Despite these facts, I was arrogant enough to believe that the pawpaws I’d plucked from the river property would be different, that if I just hoped hard enough, they would make it. And for more than a year, my hope paid off. The trunks seemed to live and even leafed a little in the year after their transplant.
But then, this winter, they died. All of them. The trunks went hollow and brittle, and the branches snapped when I bent them gently.
Yes, I cried. And then I got mad. And then I gave up and swore off my pawpaw project. My other seedlings were still only a few inches tall, and it felt unlikely that I’d ever see them get big enough to fruit. I was never going to personally profit from them, so they must be worthless. A waste of time and effort.
Right?
Throughout my childhood, I was a voracious consumer of the library’s New Fiction shelf, and I won back-to-back years of my town’s BookQuest, which tasked fourth and fifth graders with reading dozens of books from a pre-approved list and then “battling” against each other in a quiz contest about characters, story points, author names, and other trivia from the reading list. I was, decidedly, a Bookish Kid.
Then, gradually, my attention shifted to college and career building and romance and travel and all the other life things I’d read about as an adolescent. I drifted away from reading fiction for pleasure as I spent more time with my graduate school textbooks, even as I began to write short stories during that era, too. In 2016, I wrote my first novel manuscript, hated it, and promptly stuck it in a desk drawer. In 2020, I tried again, this time while enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Alabama. That manuscript earned praise from my advisor and landed me a literary agent, who sent it around to editors in New York.
If you’ve been reading my column for a while now, you know what happened next. I was certain I’d cracked the code of the Big Five on my very first try, but within months, my agent’s queries went cold—and so did her enthusiasm for my work. The book is about four girls growing up in a Rust Belt town in the Midwest, and one of them becomes convinced she can levitate. Editors called it “lyrical” and “well-written” and “beautiful,” but the plot was too slow, the structure too complex, the characters too quiet. It didn’t matter that the book opened in a haunted house and a murder happened at the midpoint, followed by a raging fire that burned down the life’s work of my main character.
Too quiet. Too slow.
Thankfully, another of my manuscripts found its home with indie publisher Belle Point Press a short time later, but ever since that agent dropped me, I’ve been struggling to make sense of what, exactly, went wrong with the “beautiful” book—and how to write something new, something loud, something fast.
I’ve spent the past year or so flailing around with two other manuscripts, but when another prestigious Southern press rejected one of those projects last month, I felt a deep crack in my backbone. The editor said my latest project wasn’t ready for publication, even though I’d take the extra steps of running it by a development editor and a copy-editing friend. While planning the novel, I’d drawn a massive Freytag pyramid on a wall and mapped every story beat onto it, just to make sure I was being as dramatic and plot-oriented as possible.
Even though, even though. Still not ready. Embarrassed and desperate, I fed a portion of the beautiful book into ChatGPT and asked for an analysis. The bot offered something unexpected: based on comparison titles, it would have had its best chance of Big Five publication in … 1990. “Upmarket literary fiction with gothic, mysterious, or magical elements was thriving then,” says the bot, and perhaps it’s right. Donna Tartt’s debut The Secret History came out in 1992, as did Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars. Barbara Kingsolver’s breakthrough novel, The Poisonwood Bible, released in 1998.
By 2000, when my preteen self was old enough for those kinds of books, they were already well-worn, dog-eared new classics in my local library—exactly the kind of stuff that appealed to a Bookish Kid with big glasses and unformed (yet ambitious) goals for her future as A Serious Writer. My imagination was built by character-driven stories that moved like water, subtly and swiftly around gentle bends, only occasionally dropping dramatically over big, showy cliffs. Only now do I wonder—with a fair amount of self-pity, I’ll admit—if those glittering, gentle rivers in my mind are too different from the swift rapids of contemporary fiction, with its predictably staccato-rhythmed sentences, cool-girl protagonists, and sixteen-point Save the Cat plot formulas, regardless of genre. If the chatbot is right, then the editor who most recently rejected me is wrong. The problem with my unpublished manuscripts isn’t that they aren’t ready; it’s that they’re overripe. By twenty-five years.
A waste of time and effort, probably.
It took me awhile to go back to the Pawpaw Graveyard, but I finally did during an exceptionally warm week in March. I scratched each trunk of the transplants, and each one was deep brown under brown, no hint at all of any green, living cambium left underneath the bark.
But as I was crouched down, I noticed something unexpected on the ground. Beside each trunk was a very small sprout, thin and bendy, with tiny leaf buds just barely beginning to form. Each transplanted tree had offered up a younger version of itself, in the shadow of the taller, hollow trunk.
The roots were alive. The mini-colonies were forming. Something was there, something that had survived the winter despite all the warnings, all the bad odds, all the signs of failure. It was just a matter of perspective: the trunks I’d transplanted, thinking I could cheat my way into faster fruit, had failed and would have to be cut down, but the trees themselves, their core roots, had made it. And they were now actively in the process of adapting to their new environment, their new reality.
Maybe, too, there’s something salvageable in the core ideas behind my unpublished novels, even if the manuscripts themselves aren’t viable in the current market. Maybe the characters should get out of their heads and out into their environments more. Maybe the meandering-river plots should cut across their bends more efficiently. Maybe the metaphors and imagery can be a little more on the nose.
Or maybe the only real idea I should attempt to transplant into new projects is a simple yet radical one: that long-form stories still matter in this time of ever-dividing attention, especially for younger minds who are eager and curious and open to new perspectives, guidance, and possibilities. This doesn’t mean writing for children per se, but writing for those Bookish Kids who, like me, will grow into Bookish Adults With Busy Lives. I have compassion for the little reader I once was, and perhaps I should also have more for the younger writer I was … and for the writer I need to become in order to stay viable and relevant.
I don’t know what this looks like yet in terms of my creative work. I also don’t know what shape the mature forms of my pawpaws will take. But in the case of the pawpaws, I think the lesson is that raw hope (and luck) did, in fact, carry the day, even if it happened in a way I didn’t necessarily intend or expect.
And if I have any say in it, all those little trees will eventually get their moment in the sun.
Read Sandy’s other work here at Reckon.
Sandra K. Barnidge is an Alabama-based writer with a passion for small towns and overlooked places. Her fiction leans speculative and has appeared in Barren, Nimrod, The Fiddlehead, Reckon Review, Reservoir Ridge, and elsewhere.