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| Rebecca Kanner |
Do you ever compare yourself to other writers? I’ll
admit—I do . . . But it isn’t much fun to lament
that I’ll never be as good as so-and-so. Today on Seriously Write, author Rebecca Kanner shares part of her
journey to publication. Embrace her encouraging words and go write!
~ Dawn
Only
You Can Tell Your Story
by Rebecca Kanner
A lot of us struggle with writing. In one of the classes I
teach, “Silencing the Inner Critic,” some students have shared that their
biggest obstacle to writing is a belief that their stories don’t matter. They
compare themselves to others, or wonder what they could have to say that’s
worth somebody else’s time.
I’ve struggled with this too. For two years when I was
writing my novel and cobbling together a living doing freelance work, some of
the people in my life considered me to basically be unemployed. I sometimes
felt ashamed that I was spending so much time on my work. But a voice within me
was stronger than any of the voices outside, and it told me to write.
When my students mention the names of great writers, names
we all know, and ask questions such as Why
should I write, I’m not Maya Angelou? I tell them, Just as you can’t tell Maya Angelou’s story (or Madeleine L'Engle’s, or
Francine River’s), neither can she tell yours.
This is the message I want to give you: Only you have fully
experienced your own struggles. Only you know how you continue to struggle or
how you’ve overcome your struggles, or both.
The story I wished to tell in my novel is the story of how
some of the things that I thought marked me as ugly or unworthy in some way—my
struggles with anxiety, depression and eventually addiction—ended up saving me.
In Sinners and the Sea: the Untold Story
of Noah’s Wife, I convey this message by giving the narrator a mark upon
her forehead that is seen as the mark of a demon. Because of this mark she is
considered unmarriageable and her life is very hard. But then along comes Noah,
a man who knows the mark is not that of a demon. He looks at what’s beneath the
surface of her skin and sees a good woman. Without the narrator’s mark, she
would not have been married to Noah, she would have been married to one of the
other men her father tried to get for her. Because she ends up being Noah’s
wife, she and the sons she has with Noah get to be on the ark. She eventually
realizes that her mark has saved her.
Today I’m grateful to my struggles. They’ve brought me to
the spiritual place I’m in today. There is an often quoted saying at one of the
wonderful recovery meetings my addictions have led me to: God doesn’t make junk. Trust that He has made you perfectly and has
given you the voice with which He wants you to speak.
The young heroine in Sinners
and the Sea is destined for greatness. Known only as “wife” in the Bible
and cursed with a birthmark that many think is the brand of a demon, this
unnamed woman—fated to become the mother of all generations after the great
flood—lives anew through Rebecca Kanner. The author gives this virtuous woman
the perfect voice to make one of the Old Testament’s stories come alive like
never before.
Rebecca Kanner
holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Washington University in
St. Louis. Her writing has won an Associated Writing Programs Award and a Loft
mentorship Award. Her stories have been published in numerous journals
including The Kenyon Review and The Cincinnati Review. Her personal
essay, “Safety,” is listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2011.
Her first novel, Sinners and the Sea, was
published by Howard Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in April 2013.
Rebecca will be featured along with other writers including Michael Cunningham,
Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates in the upcoming book Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Authors. She
is a freelance-writer and teaches writing at the Loft in Minneapolis.
Visit her website at www.rebeccakanner.com,
like her on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SinnersAndTheSea
and follow her on twitter
@rebeccakanner.
