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June 5, 2022:
The completion of a manuscript is an emotional event for any author because you always put little bits and pieces of yourself into everything you write. But for The River Years: A Memoir from the Muddy Banks of Lee’s Ferry, the bits and pieces don’t belong to me; they belong to my late mother, Dawn Myers. And for the most part, they were bits and pieces I did not know about her before reading and editing her work.
My mother started writing The River Years in the early 1950s when she was a young woman fresh out of nursing school and exploring the world. At the same time, her parents, Dean and Edna Tidball, and her younger twin sisters, Gay and Jo, abandoned their comfortable middle-class life in Montana to become latter-day pioneers in the desert of northern Arizona. To outsiders, this seemed like a feckless decision. Although Dean and Edna had long been fascinated with the southwest, its indigenous people, and tales of the Westward Expansion of the 19th century, they’d only been to Arizona once on a short vacation. Leaving everything they had known behind to lose themselves in an expansive wasteland was a self-imposed adventure that my mother admired and struggled to understand.
Reading The River Years — including its earliest drafts written by hand in numerous spiral notebooks — allowed me the opportunity to see my mother long before I knew her. It also allowed me the dubious opportunity to meet my maternal grandparents. When they were alive, Dean and Edna had been strangers to my sister and me. Edna had disowned my mother on her wedding day for reasons she never revealed to anyone else in the family. A highly controlling woman with an impressive talent for passive aggressiveness, she turned my grandfather against my mom a few years later. As a result, my sister and I grew up without knowing either of them, and we knew little to nothing about their time at Lee’s Ferry. However, through my mom‘s words, I came to see them (especially Dean) as people she admired, emulated, and dearly loved.
Although my mom always encouraged my writing and proofread almost every book, article, and blog I wrote, she rarely shared her work. During her life, she’d written numerous manuscripts and countless poems, essays, and short stories, Yet, I can recall reading only one of her young adult books back in the 1980s. Her reluctance to share her work may have been partly due to her introverted nature but also to her perfectionism. Whenever I asked to see her work, the invariable answer was: “It’s not ready to be seen by others. I still have a lot of work to do on it.”
When she was alive, I would’ve loved to have read The River Years — or even repaid my mother in kind for all her editing duties. I would’ve loved just sitting and talking to her about the people and events depicted in the memoir. Yet it was only after her death that I got close to collaborating with her on a writing project. It’s weird that the collaboration was editing a memoir I never knew about, and one she will never know was published.
Or maybe she will? I’d like to think she will know.
June 5, 2022:
The completion of a manuscript is an emotional event for any author because you always put little bits and pieces of yourself into everything you write. But for The River Years: A Memoir from the Muddy Banks of Lee’s Ferry, the bits and pieces don’t belong to me; they belong to my late mother, Dawn Myers. And for the most part, they were bits and pieces I did not know about her before reading and editing her work.
My mother started writing The River Years in the early 1950s when she was a young woman fresh out of nursing school and exploring the world. At the same time, her parents, Dean and Edna Tidball, and her younger twin sisters, Gay and Jo, abandoned their comfortable middle-class life in Montana to become latter-day pioneers in the desert of northern Arizona. To outsiders, this seemed like a feckless decision. Although Dean and Edna had long been fascinated with the southwest, its indigenous people, and tales of the Westward Expansion of the 19th century, they’d only been to Arizona once on a short vacation. Leaving everything they had known behind to lose themselves in an expansive wasteland was a self-imposed adventure that my mother admired and struggled to understand.
Reading The River Years — including its earliest drafts written by hand in numerous spiral notebooks — allowed me the opportunity to see my mother long before I knew her. It also allowed me the dubious opportunity to meet my maternal grandparents. When they were alive, Dean and Edna had been strangers to my sister and me. Edna had disowned my mother on her wedding day for reasons she never revealed to anyone else in the family. A highly controlling woman with an impressive talent for passive aggressiveness, she turned my grandfather against my mom a few years later. As a result, my sister and I grew up without knowing either of them, and we knew little to nothing about their time at Lee’s Ferry. However, through my mom‘s words, I came to see them (especially Dean) as people she admired, emulated, and dearly loved.
Although my mom always encouraged my writing and proofread almost every book, article, and blog I wrote, she rarely shared her work. During her life, she’d written numerous manuscripts and countless poems, essays, and short stories, Yet, I can recall reading only one of her young adult books back in the 1980s. Her reluctance to share her work may have been partly due to her introverted nature but also to her perfectionism. Whenever I asked to see her work, the invariable answer was: “It’s not ready to be seen by others. I still have a lot of work to do on it.”
When she was alive, I would’ve loved to have read The River Years — or even repaid my mother in kind for all her editing duties. I would’ve loved just sitting and talking to her about the people and events depicted in the memoir. Yet it was only after her death that I got close to collaborating with her on a writing project. It’s weird that the collaboration was editing a memoir I never knew about, and one she will never know was published.
Or maybe she will? I’d like to think she will know.