Compiling a Book of Published Essays
By Beth Kaplan
Through the 1990s, I wrote a lot of essays. A 40-something former actress and single mother without money or confidence, I was struggling to turn into a writer in my spare time. One day I saw that a national newspaper had reserved its back page for thousand-word personal essays by the general public. I sent in a story about an elderly neighbour teaching me to garden, and two weeks later, it appeared. The paper paid a big fat $100.
An essay writer was launched.
Short pieces were ideal for someone with little time. For the next 10 years, out flowed a stream of essays and articles for newspapers, magazines, and radio. When over 50 pieces had been published or broadcast, I realized I should preserve the best in a more permanent form. A friend designed a book, and I produced 30 cerlox-bound copies with that renowned publisher, Kinko’s.
After becoming a teacher of memoir writing at a local university, which helped pay the bills, I switched my focus from short pieces to books.
Nearly three decades and four books later, I dug out and re-read the Kinko’s masterwork. Surprise—it still had a lot to say, I thought, about vital issues of midlife: divorce, teenagers, elderly parents, friendship, travel, volunteering.
I decided to slam together a new book consisting almost entirely of essays that had already, by being published, proven their worth. How easy this will be, I thought. The content was already written. There’d just be compiling and a bit of tweaking.
Ha!
This book turned out to be more difficult than any of the others, because even a compilation of published articles needs an arc, a shape, a journey. But the shape was my actual past life, and the arc was already written. To start, I discarded essays I thought weak or not resonant enough—an ode to peanut butter, a strained humour piece about my big feet, some sentimental thoughts on snow—and added a few recently published reminiscences about my distant past, until there were about 45 pieces of varying length and tone.
And then the struggle began. How to take this pile of random narratives, most written decades ago, and arrange them so the chronology made sense and readers could watch me and my kids grow up, yet also find a place for stories about my childhood and the world at large? How to help readers experience a steady odyssey from divorce to something like peace, with digressions—about acting, reading, running, dating, disability, the Beatles, Goodwill, France, pen-pals, AIDS, wine, death, facelifts, and writing—that I thought were strong and evocative but also all over the map?
It was like trying to renovate a rickety heritage building with unstable walls instead of constructing something fresh. In draft after draft, the order did not work. What was this book really about? What was the through-line, what Dinty Moore calls the “invisible magnetic river” underneath? Was simply being written by me enough? No. I tore out my hair. Taking a friend’s advice, I lay coloured index cards on the floor—blue for family topics, pink for divorce, yellow for community, green for my childhood—and moved them around. Still, the arrangements did not flow. Nothing worked.
Until it did. Desperate for a pair of outside, objective eyes, I hired an editor who was not chronologically fixated, like me. She pointed out gaps in the narrative, and I found some unpublished pieces to insert. Other pieces, I saw, needed cuts or updates; just because they’d been published didn’t mean they couldn’t be ripped apart now and rewritten.
She thought the book needed separate sections, and we divided the lot into nine chapters, with titles like The Break, The New Reality, Looking Back, Crazytime, and Coming Through, with six or seven essays in each and short bits of context and commentary at the end. I wrote a foreword to introduce the material, and an afterword that brings readers up to date with the narrator, aka moi.
But throughout, I wondered if this was a valid book or a vanity project long past its due date. I was now 72. Would a collection of work from my midlife years really … work?
With trepidation, I sent the final draft of 73,000 words to some trusted readers, including a much-published, painfully honest writer. A few weeks later, when his reply came in, I was scared to open it. “I really did start off dubious about a bunch of recycled pieces,” he wrote. “But I changed my mind fast as I got into the manuscript. Clearly, they were good on their own, but the way you have organized and revised and commented on the pieces makes them into a coherent and powerful whole—interest-holding all the way through.”
I nearly burst into tears.
This was the blurb he gave: “ Midlife Solo shapes bright fragments from a remarkable life into a twenty-first century kaleidoscope of women’s experience.”
Bright fragments shaped into a kaleidoscope: perhaps if I’d had this image in mind at the start, the job would have been easier. Never mind, it’s done now. My new book of old work comes out in November. With an actual binding.
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Beth Kaplan , a former actress, is the author of a biography, two memoirs— All My Loving and Loose Woman —and True to Life, a textbook guide to creative writing. She has taught memoir and personal essay writing at two Toronto universities for nearly three decades and is the winner of University of Toronto’s Excellence in Teaching award. Her new compilation of essays, Midlife Solo: writing through chaos to find my way in the world, will be out in November 2023. Find Beth at her website .
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