The Story of All This Pt. 3
I thought and thought about that question and finally realized that, if I could do what I really wanted to do, I would work with 12- and 13-year-old girls, because that was the age when things were so awful for me. As it turns out, during a period when she didn’t have any money, SARK had put together adventures for young artists. I liked that and set out to create a four-week, summer art course that would center on the emotional side of being 12 and 13 years old. I’d have the kids keep sketchbook journals as a way of expressing how they were feeling, spilling open. Our focus would be growing pains, aliveness, being yourself. It was the course that I’d wished I’d been able to take when I was that age. Nobody signed up. It threw me into a tailspin. I had believed so strongly in the class that it hadn’t even occurred to me that people would be anything but thrilled to enroll. I swirled ungracefully into self-doubt. It wasn’t pretty.
“You could still think about doing that book,” SARK encouraged.
“But, what would I do?”
“Create a few sample pages of your book, how you see it.”
“But, I have no idea what that would be.”
“Can’t it be like your journals?”
“That would be really expensive, it clearly couldn’t be in color ; no way.”
“There’s a lot of power in those journals, there’s nothing else like it. Wouldn’t you have liked to have them as a book when you were younger?” I had to nod. “Think about it as a big letter to the world.”
I was terrified. Surely, people would say: “How dare you.” “Who do you think you are?!” “What are you talking about?” “Who are you to think that, at nineteen, you’re ready to write a book? You write a book once you’ve really lived your life and can look back on it all and reflect with the wisdom of experience. Who do you think you are to write it now?”
To which, SARK replied, “That’s precisely why you have to write it now, because you’re in the middle of it, it’s visceral.” She was right, of course. Many people have written about being young from a vantage point of looking back in time, but there’s something about being in it and saying, “You know what, these are my questions, this is really where I’m at, and I’m going to speak about it now because that’s all I can do.”
I started going to bookstores with SARK, looking for local publishers, checking out the kinds of books they published. I made appointments at a couple of them and had pretty mediocre meetings, because I was looking for someone to tell me how to do the book. I hadn’t made sample pages. I was going in with my journals, wanting someone to say, “We’ll do it,” and then give me the vision of what it was, to tell me how the book should look, and then I’d go off and simply do it. My final call was to a publishing house run by a man who had written a book about visionary business. I met with him on the Fourth of July. I took my journals but, by now, I knew that no one was going to create the book for me, that I would have to step up to it myself. A very insightful and open man, the publisher told me about how he, himself, had had a dream to start a publishing company. At first, he didn’t believe he could do it. But he worked on envisioning it, seeing it, believing it and once he could visualize it, it happened. I could almost hear my dad saying, “Brave on the rocks, Sabrina.” I told him about the art class I wanted to do with teenagers, how I had this passion to help young people be themselves without the adolescent junk that makes kids feel awful about themselves. “Well Sabrina,” he concluded, “I think you should root the book in that art course and make up some sample pages.”
“What should they be, can they have color?”
He didn’t say, “Make them and give them to me and I’ll think about publishing them.” He said, “How do you see them?” In other words, make them for yourself and then you’ll know what to do with them. He sent me off saying, “If I can do it, you can do it. If SARK can do it, you can do it.”
I spent the next two weeks making eight pages of a book I was dreaming. During those two weeks, I was tortured and excited and euphoric all at the same time. When I was done, I felt oddly confident about what I’d created. I put the pages in brown paper and wrapped lavender and twine around them and drove back over to the publisher’s office. I walked in, went upstairs, and passed by a glass boardroom where the staff were all sitting around a table looking sophisticated. I kind of waved and blushed and didn’t say anything, because they were in the middle of a meeting. I leaned the package against the publisher’s door and walked away. Sabrina, you’re such a dork, they’re probably wondering, “What is that little girl doing out there?” I felt so crazy. But, at the same time, a thrill rushed through my body. I was living, really living, risking, taking a chance. I called my parents from the pay phone down the street and yelled, “I did it!”
A few days later, I left for Toronto, where my family lived before the move to California, which, by the way, was the call of a dream that my dad had answered, knowing that Hollywood was the mecca of film and that he, a filmmaker, would always wonder what might have happened if he’d gone there and tried to make movies that mattered. We still continued to summer on Lake Simcoe in Ontario like the three generations before us. It was there that I went into detail about leaving the package at the publisher’s door and slinking away, which prompted my dad’s speech about the importance of rejection, a subject with which he is very familiar, the film business being all about rejection and requiring great commitment in order not to compromise one’s vision. “It’s important that you did this,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what happens. You did it, that’s the important thing.”
Time passed and I didn’t hear from the publisher or any of his people. Obviously, they hated my work. My friends asked how the project was going and I said that I was trying to get the artwork back. My dad told me to send a self-addressed envelope and ask them to mail it back. I couldn’t face driving over there and asking for it. And then, I got a call from the editorial director. “I opened up this package,” she said. “It was sitting against the door for days and I couldn’t stand it, I had to know what was inside. So, I opened it and I’ve been walking around the office with these art boards thinking how much I’d love to have my daughter read this. I’d like to meet you.” That was the beginning.