Guest Post: Ellen Newmark, Author of The Book of Unholy Mischief

I had planned to write about passion, about how it adds richness and meaning and beauty to life, but faced with losing my partner of almost thirty years I couldn’t summon up enough passion to write about passion. I felt bereft. I looked it up to be sure that was the correct word.

Bereft: deprived of something; lacking something needed or expected.

Yes, bereft is correct.

But I made a commitment to this blog tour so I opened my computer and started to string sentences together. Of course, being bereft, I wrote about watching my smart, sweet, beautifully educated husband asking, “What’s happening to me?” over and over. He could not answer questions like, “What year is this? How many children do you have? How old are you?” His body was there, but he was gone.

Bereft.

Yet, as I wrote I began to feel slightly less bereft. My passion is writing and doing it made me feel less hollow and less frightened. That’s when I decided to go back to my original idea and write about passion. Passion doesn’t only enrich the good times; passion can get us through the bad ones.

Pablo Neruda described a writer’s passion more beautifully than I ever could. He said:

“… I love words so much: the unexpected ones, the ones I wait for greedily are stalked until, suddenly, they drop. Vowels I love, they glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish. They are foam, thread, metal, dew. I run after certain words… I catch them in mid flight as they buzz past. I trap them, clean them, peel them. I set myself in front of a dish; they have a crystalline texture to me; vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agate, like olive. And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I garnish them…like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coal, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves. Everything exists in the word.”

That’s the passion that kept me writing through thirty years of rejection.
In 2008, Simon & Schuster published my novel, The Book of Unholy Mischief, and I was elated. But the giddy moment passed, and I understood that fleeting success did not measure up to the profound pleasure of creating something original.

Thirty years of writing yielded new and various rewards on a daily basis, one of which has been sharing my passion with my grandchildren. My grandkids know that a day out with Grandma means going to the bookstore, and they love it. We each choose a new book, and then we sit down to lunch and pour over our treasure. It gave me a deep, tickling satisfaction to hear that when my daughter found the Italian edition of my book in Venice, her five-year old ran through the store yelling, “We found Grandma’s book!” Hearing that was a wonderful moment born of passion.

My husband has had his passions too. He climbed mountains, flew glider planes, kayaked, and practiced medicine. After we married we shared a passion for travel and visited dozens of countries on six continents. We lived abroad and our shared love of exploration gave our lives scope and dimension. Now that his future is uncertain our history of shared passion is a comfort. Passion is our consolation for mortality.

Thank you, all who read this, for helping me indulge my passion and soften a hard moment. May you all find a passion, and indulge the hell out of it.