January 3, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, regular contributor to OAS, and author Leslie Leyland Fields tells her story of how she came to write her own memoir.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is our American Stories, and we tell stories about
everything here on this show. And today we have a
story from Leslie leyland Fields. She's an author, a speaker,
and a teacher, and she lives in Kodiak, Alaska. This
is a story of how she came to write her
first memoir, something she thought she'd never do. Here's Leslie.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is the story of a book. Really, it's the
story of writing a book I never wanted to write.
It's the story of surviving the writing of a book
I never wanted to write, but it changed my life
in every way. Let me back up. I've always believed
(00:56):
in the power of story. I was a voracious from
a young age, and as soon as I could write,
I began creating poems and stories. I grew up in
a time in culture when quiet children were the best children,
and thinking you were special in any way was the
pinnacle of pride, and pride was the worst sin of
(01:21):
them all. So when I grew up and became a writer,
my main interest was other people's stories. Who would care
about me or my life? Yes, my life was not
a typical American life. I lived in Alaska, mostly in
the summers. I commercial fished with my new husband and
(01:43):
his family on a tiny island in the wilderness with
no roads or cars. It was an island with eight
people on it, just us. We lived through days and
nights of such drama and stories. Even then, other people's
stories were much better than mine, so I wrote about
(02:05):
other people. By age forty, I had published two collections
of stories about fishermen and women, and then I began
a third book. This one was different. It was about
my own experience as living in the wilderness with my husband,
digging a well by hand, hauling water and buckets, building
our own house with very few tools, doing the laundry
(02:28):
outside in the winter in an old ringer washing machine,
prying frozen laundry off the line, and stacking the towels
stiff in my arms into the house like a stack
of wood. Stories like that, I sent it to my agent.
Yes I had an agent somehow Earlier that year I
(02:49):
had landed a hot New York literary agent. But she
didn't like it. Here's how our first phone call went, Leslie,
I really like these essays, but there's one problem. You're
not in them, I know, I replied, that's the point.
This is about topics much bigger than me, About water,
(03:09):
the ethical dilemmas of killing animals, about our wasteful culture,
so many important things. It's about universals, yes, but we
don't care about universals unless we care about you. You're
completely absent and nobody wants essay collections. Now this has
to be your story. You're gonna have to turn this
into a memoir. A memoir, I gulped. Memoir was a
(03:34):
dirty word to me. I equated it with first person
tell all stories by strippers and smoky bars, and with
supermarket tabloids of disgraced politicians and ravaged movie stars. Memoir
felt indulgent and just a little scandalous. I couldn't do it,
(03:54):
and besides, no one would be interested in my life.
Uh no, Kate, I can't do that, and I hung up.
But the next week, while teaching a creative writing class,
I heard myself say to my students, if you want
to grow as a person, as a writer, you have
to take on new challenges. And then I stopped for
(04:15):
a moment to listen to myself. I decided to try it.
Took a month to get another phone appointment with Kate.
The next call went like this. Remember, Kate, you asked
me to turn those essays into a memoir and to
make it about my life. Yes, of course, okay, I'll
(04:35):
do it good. I knew you would. Then I got brave.
So how do you write a memoir? She laughed, or
something equally unhelpful. You'll figure it out. It wasn't easy
to invite that eye into my house. I so wanted
to stay invisible. But I started with scenes, the cornerstone
(04:58):
of good memoir, to take the readers straight into the action.
Scenes that show a life rather than tell about a life.
I wrote about the first day when I officially became
a fisherwoman. I remember the process of getting dressed with
layer upon layer of sweatshirts, hip boots, rain pants, finally
layered so thick and heavy I could hardly walk. I
(05:21):
wrote about my first snack and bathroom break on the
water in the boat. Talk about basic. We worked in
eighteen foot open boats with no cabin and of course
no toilet. This day I was out with my new husband,
Duncan and my father in law de Witt. That scene
went like this, It's almost noon. Now we've been fishing
(05:47):
for four hours. I sit wearily on the wooden seat,
looking at the fish on the floor of the skiff.
There must be five hundred of them, all fat and shiny.
The waves slap and slosh our skiff from side to side.
I'm hungry and I need a bathroom break. But how
does this happen in an eighteen foot boat. There's no
(06:08):
cabin on our little wooden pea pod. It's just a
glorified row boat afloat on a great Alaska sea. Deit
sits heavily in the bow, his black green raincoat mirroring
the dark water below. Well, I guess I gotta shake
the dew off my lily. De wit in tones in
(06:29):
a gravelly voice. I can hear his Oklahoma accent. Though
we left forty years before during the dust Bowl. He
grew up poor, picking cotton and working the land. Now
he works the seas, but he moves awkwardly in the
boats and never seems at home unmoving water except now.
I smile at Duncan and DeWit and turn around when
(06:52):
they are done. It's my turn. Let me off on
that rock over there, Duncan. I point to a cove
with a shelf of rock jutting out in a moment
we are there, the skiff rising and plunging in the waters,
swirling around the rocks. I'm nervously perched in the bow,
ready to spring overboard at just the right second. My
(07:12):
hands twitch as they grip the rail. I'm motionless but
breathing hard. Jump. Duncan yells as the nose of the
skiff rises in the foaming surge. You're not close enough.
I shoot behind me. I see sitting calmly beside Duncan,
as if we've done this one hundred times, I can't
get any closer. Jump, he shouts, as the boak gurgles
(07:34):
and sinks now in the trough. I can't leap that
distance in all this fishing gear, and if I miss.
How did a simple bathroom break become a life and
death endeavor? I wrote scenes from my life all summer long.
But first we created a riding studio on our island.
(08:00):
Husband and I cleaned out a tiny shed on a
dock over the ocean. It was filled to the rafters
with decades of junk and old tools. We dragged in
two sawhorses, dropped a four x eight sheet of plywood
on top, and there it was my desk, my office.
The shed wasn't insulated or heated, so even in the summer,
(08:21):
with the temperature in the forties, I sat in a
winter coat, hunched over my legal pad or old computer, writing,
remembering as I wrote, the fishing boats rumbled as they passed,
the crows and bald eagles screeched overhead. I wrote, and
I wrote. Then I sent the chapters to Kate.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And you're listening to Leslie leyland Fields and the story
of writing a book that she said she never wanted
to write. In fact, as she put it, it's the
story of surviving writing a book that she never wanted
to write. When we come back, more of the story
of Leslie leyland Fields, a regular contributor here on this show,
(09:05):
her story about writing her memoir here on Our American Story.
(09:39):
And we continue with our American Stories. And we've been
listening to author, speaker, and teacher Leslie leyland Fields. She
lives in Alaska and has been brilliantly telling the story
of how she came to write her first memoir. Let's
return to Leslie.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm on the phone again now with Kate. Leslie good
scenes here, graphic compelling, her voices, clipped, hurried, as usual,
The book feels closer, but there's something crucial missing. What
is it? I asked with Dred, wondering if she's going
to tell me to scrap the whole thing and start over.
Why did you stay? I understand why you went into
(10:19):
the Alaska Wilderness all that, but what kept you after
all that happened? And how were you changed at the end?
Without that arc, there's no story. Yeah, okay, I say,
heart sinking. I know Kate is talking about the inner story,
haven't I taught this to my students. Every story has
(10:41):
at least those two layers. The outer story what happens
in the out there world, and the inner story, the
deeper story, this psychic, emotional, spiritual story. I knew this
before I began the memoir. This was what scared me
most about life stories and memos. But how could I
(11:02):
say no to this? Now? I had signed the book contract,
and I knew that if I was going to grow
as a writer and as a human being, I needed
to take this next step. There are hard questions I
needed to ask. Who was that twenty year old girl
just married standing in a skiff, trying to keep her
(11:23):
balance in the new waters of marriage? Living with her
in laws on a remote island in Alaska. Was there
something there we all might see about finding and making
home in a strange land. I started writing inside each
of the significant events of those first years. Whenever I
(11:43):
had the chance, I scribbled, digging down layer by layer.
I wrote myself back to those days in the skiff,
the long hours, the storms, getting sick and still needing
to work, to the icy silences between my husband and me.
I wrote about the day I jammed clothes and food
into a backpack and escaped the island the only way possible,
(12:07):
by waiting until low tide and marching off down to
an empty shack four miles down the beach, gun over
my shoulder for bears. I wrote myself back to that
near disastrous day when I almost didn't make it home.
I insisted on taking the skiff out on an important
errand it was going to be a four hour trip.
(12:31):
I insisted on going alone. It was a long way
to go on the ocean in the winter. A snowstorm
came up, I got lost in the total wide out,
and then the engine broke down. I wrote about it,
describing how scared I was when it started snowing, when
the engine died, when I knew I had drifted out
(12:52):
onto the open ocean, when I thought I might die.
But the inner story I didn't know it yet. I
was learning again what I thought I already knew. Are
stories about so much more than what happened. It's just
as important to know why those things happened, to know
what moves and motivates us, and how those moments, large
(13:16):
and small, change us, and how they might change our
readers too. I began to write more deeply into those
two stories, and it slowly came clear, word by word
what I was doing in both of those events. I
was escaping a place that wasn't mine, an ocean, an island,
(13:36):
a life that belonged to my new husband and his family,
but it didn't belong to me yet. It wasn't mine
except by marriage. By proxy. My life was borrowed, shoehorned
into whatever cracks I could fit in. Even where we
lived those first three summers. We lived in a tiny
(13:57):
loft atop a rickety ladder and an old building aloft
just big enough to hold a bed and a wood stove.
We could only stand up in the middle. As I wrote,
I realized so much about my life I hadn't seen before.
I felt compassion for the young woman I was, and
(14:18):
for my husband, for the two of us trying to
make a marriage work on a wilderness island with endless nets,
ocean and fish we couldn't control. I realized that both
those escapes helped make that island in that place mine too.
In some way, my fingers on the keyboard showed me
(14:39):
yet more. There were so many rescues and second chances.
I began to see that these chapters from my life
were indeed about survival, but it was also a story
of grace, not easy grace, hard grace, the kind you
pray you'll survive. And there it was the title and
(15:03):
the paradox that came to shape the final story, Surviving
the Island of Grace. Six months later, I finished the book.
My stomach quivered, my index finger hovered over attached file.
No one would publish it, I was sure, but I
(15:23):
had learned so much in writing it page by page.
I punched send and it was done. What would Kate think?
I soon found out. Kate sent it out into the
world immediately after receiving it, and then it began a
steady stream of rejections from the major New York publishers
(15:45):
over the next two months. But then there was a
yes from one of the New York Big ten publishers.
It was a hearty yes. Suddenly Kate was great, and
she said I was too. My first memoir and surely
my last would soon be in bookstores around the country.
(16:08):
But that's not the true happy ending to this story.
When I began writing the memoir reluctantly, I did not
even know what I was looking for. The writing showed me,
in the midst of roaring seas, the claustrophobia of an
island with no escape, doubts of my own ability as
(16:29):
a writer. Words saved my life. Words carved out a
space between land and sea where maybe I could hold fast.
Writing surviving the Island of Grace brought me here to
this moment. One morning, I sat on a distant beach
(16:55):
on our island. I was alone except for the two
ravens on a cliff above me, spatting. Was I sorry
I had chosen Duncan and this place and this very
particular life that came with it. No, how could anything
be other than it was? But when I chose all
of this back in nineteen seventy seven, I did not
(17:18):
know what I was choosing. I came here with Duncan
at twenty, running from a difficult childhood. I was certain
I would find wholeness and freedom in him and in
this island world. I looked around. It was still as
(17:39):
wild and clean and vast a place as when I
first came, but I hadn't known what to measure. Then.
I know now that what I was looking for is
not something that can be found, not in a place
or in a person. Freedom and wholeness must be made,
(18:00):
and it is made out of whatever is around you.
It is made out of whatever is given to you.
Like the barnacles on the rocks around me, I looked
at them closely. They were anchored to a massive rock,
but they were moving. In each of them, the beak,
like a tiny telescope, was rounding the perimeter of its
(18:23):
own shell. There, halfway between land and water, was a
creature that literally grows its own cliff walls, his own
form entraps him. It is his prison, his island. He
cannot escape. But then I saw it is also his
(18:46):
mountain fortress, the very grace that sustains his life. When
I finished writing Surviving the Island of Grace, I was hooked.
Once I started writing the truest words from my life
that I could find, such clarity, discovery, and consolations have
(19:07):
come to me. I don't ever want to stop. When
we steward the beautiful burdens and difficult passages we've been
given in our lives, we have another chance to reclaim
and heal those burdens. I've seen it thousands of times
in my own life in others. This is my work
(19:29):
now teaching others to do the same, and in all
our stories, we who are stranded on islands and in
strange places have found the words and the grace to
write ourselves home.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And a special thanks to Leslie laland Fields. To find
out more about her work and also her teaching, go
to Leslie Lalanfields dot com. I didn't know what I
was looking for. The writing showed me words saved my life.
Leslie leyland Field's story here on our American Stories
This is our American Stories, and we tell stories about
everything here on this show. And today we have a
story from Leslie leyland Fields. She's an author, a speaker,
and a teacher, and she lives in Kodiak, Alaska. This
is a story of how she came to write her
first memoir, something she thought she'd never do. Here's Leslie.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is the story of a book. Really, it's the
story of writing a book I never wanted to write.
It's the story of surviving the writing of a book
I never wanted to write, but it changed my life
in every way. Let me back up. I've always believed
(00:56):
in the power of story. I was a voracious from
a young age, and as soon as I could write,
I began creating poems and stories. I grew up in
a time in culture when quiet children were the best children,
and thinking you were special in any way was the
pinnacle of pride, and pride was the worst sin of
(01:21):
them all. So when I grew up and became a writer,
my main interest was other people's stories. Who would care
about me or my life? Yes, my life was not
a typical American life. I lived in Alaska, mostly in
the summers. I commercial fished with my new husband and
(01:43):
his family on a tiny island in the wilderness with
no roads or cars. It was an island with eight
people on it, just us. We lived through days and
nights of such drama and stories. Even then, other people's
stories were much better than mine, so I wrote about
(02:05):
other people. By age forty, I had published two collections
of stories about fishermen and women, and then I began
a third book. This one was different. It was about
my own experience as living in the wilderness with my husband,
digging a well by hand, hauling water and buckets, building
our own house with very few tools, doing the laundry
(02:28):
outside in the winter in an old ringer washing machine,
prying frozen laundry off the line, and stacking the towels
stiff in my arms into the house like a stack
of wood. Stories like that, I sent it to my agent.
Yes I had an agent somehow Earlier that year I
(02:49):
had landed a hot New York literary agent. But she
didn't like it. Here's how our first phone call went, Leslie,
I really like these essays, but there's one problem. You're
not in them, I know, I replied, that's the point.
This is about topics much bigger than me, About water,
(03:09):
the ethical dilemmas of killing animals, about our wasteful culture,
so many important things. It's about universals, yes, but we
don't care about universals unless we care about you. You're
completely absent and nobody wants essay collections. Now this has
to be your story. You're gonna have to turn this
into a memoir. A memoir, I gulped. Memoir was a
(03:34):
dirty word to me. I equated it with first person
tell all stories by strippers and smoky bars, and with
supermarket tabloids of disgraced politicians and ravaged movie stars. Memoir
felt indulgent and just a little scandalous. I couldn't do it,
(03:54):
and besides, no one would be interested in my life.
Uh no, Kate, I can't do that, and I hung up.
But the next week, while teaching a creative writing class,
I heard myself say to my students, if you want
to grow as a person, as a writer, you have
to take on new challenges. And then I stopped for
(04:15):
a moment to listen to myself. I decided to try it.
Took a month to get another phone appointment with Kate.
The next call went like this. Remember, Kate, you asked
me to turn those essays into a memoir and to
make it about my life. Yes, of course, okay, I'll
(04:35):
do it good. I knew you would. Then I got brave.
So how do you write a memoir? She laughed, or
something equally unhelpful. You'll figure it out. It wasn't easy
to invite that eye into my house. I so wanted
to stay invisible. But I started with scenes, the cornerstone
(04:58):
of good memoir, to take the readers straight into the action.
Scenes that show a life rather than tell about a life.
I wrote about the first day when I officially became
a fisherwoman. I remember the process of getting dressed with
layer upon layer of sweatshirts, hip boots, rain pants, finally
layered so thick and heavy I could hardly walk. I
(05:21):
wrote about my first snack and bathroom break on the
water in the boat. Talk about basic. We worked in
eighteen foot open boats with no cabin and of course
no toilet. This day I was out with my new husband,
Duncan and my father in law de Witt. That scene
went like this, It's almost noon. Now we've been fishing
(05:47):
for four hours. I sit wearily on the wooden seat,
looking at the fish on the floor of the skiff.
There must be five hundred of them, all fat and shiny.
The waves slap and slosh our skiff from side to side.
I'm hungry and I need a bathroom break. But how
does this happen in an eighteen foot boat. There's no
(06:08):
cabin on our little wooden pea pod. It's just a
glorified row boat afloat on a great Alaska sea. Deit
sits heavily in the bow, his black green raincoat mirroring
the dark water below. Well, I guess I gotta shake
the dew off my lily. De wit in tones in
(06:29):
a gravelly voice. I can hear his Oklahoma accent. Though
we left forty years before during the dust Bowl. He
grew up poor, picking cotton and working the land. Now
he works the seas, but he moves awkwardly in the
boats and never seems at home unmoving water except now.
I smile at Duncan and DeWit and turn around when
(06:52):
they are done. It's my turn. Let me off on
that rock over there, Duncan. I point to a cove
with a shelf of rock jutting out in a moment
we are there, the skiff rising and plunging in the waters,
swirling around the rocks. I'm nervously perched in the bow,
ready to spring overboard at just the right second. My
(07:12):
hands twitch as they grip the rail. I'm motionless but
breathing hard. Jump. Duncan yells as the nose of the
skiff rises in the foaming surge. You're not close enough.
I shoot behind me. I see sitting calmly beside Duncan,
as if we've done this one hundred times, I can't
get any closer. Jump, he shouts, as the boak gurgles
(07:34):
and sinks now in the trough. I can't leap that
distance in all this fishing gear, and if I miss.
How did a simple bathroom break become a life and
death endeavor? I wrote scenes from my life all summer long.
But first we created a riding studio on our island.
(08:00):
Husband and I cleaned out a tiny shed on a
dock over the ocean. It was filled to the rafters
with decades of junk and old tools. We dragged in
two sawhorses, dropped a four x eight sheet of plywood
on top, and there it was my desk, my office.
The shed wasn't insulated or heated, so even in the summer,
(08:21):
with the temperature in the forties, I sat in a
winter coat, hunched over my legal pad or old computer, writing,
remembering as I wrote, the fishing boats rumbled as they passed,
the crows and bald eagles screeched overhead. I wrote, and
I wrote. Then I sent the chapters to Kate.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And you're listening to Leslie leyland Fields and the story
of writing a book that she said she never wanted
to write. In fact, as she put it, it's the
story of surviving writing a book that she never wanted
to write. When we come back, more of the story
of Leslie leyland Fields, a regular contributor here on this show,
(09:05):
her story about writing her memoir here on Our American Story.
(09:39):
And we continue with our American Stories. And we've been
listening to author, speaker, and teacher Leslie leyland Fields. She
lives in Alaska and has been brilliantly telling the story
of how she came to write her first memoir. Let's
return to Leslie.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm on the phone again now with Kate. Leslie good
scenes here, graphic compelling, her voices, clipped, hurried, as usual,
The book feels closer, but there's something crucial missing. What
is it? I asked with Dred, wondering if she's going
to tell me to scrap the whole thing and start over.
Why did you stay? I understand why you went into
(10:19):
the Alaska Wilderness all that, but what kept you after
all that happened? And how were you changed at the end?
Without that arc, there's no story. Yeah, okay, I say,
heart sinking. I know Kate is talking about the inner story,
haven't I taught this to my students. Every story has
(10:41):
at least those two layers. The outer story what happens
in the out there world, and the inner story, the
deeper story, this psychic, emotional, spiritual story. I knew this
before I began the memoir. This was what scared me
most about life stories and memos. But how could I
(11:02):
say no to this? Now? I had signed the book contract,
and I knew that if I was going to grow
as a writer and as a human being, I needed
to take this next step. There are hard questions I
needed to ask. Who was that twenty year old girl
just married standing in a skiff, trying to keep her
(11:23):
balance in the new waters of marriage? Living with her
in laws on a remote island in Alaska. Was there
something there we all might see about finding and making
home in a strange land. I started writing inside each
of the significant events of those first years. Whenever I
(11:43):
had the chance, I scribbled, digging down layer by layer.
I wrote myself back to those days in the skiff,
the long hours, the storms, getting sick and still needing
to work, to the icy silences between my husband and me.
I wrote about the day I jammed clothes and food
into a backpack and escaped the island the only way possible,
(12:07):
by waiting until low tide and marching off down to
an empty shack four miles down the beach, gun over
my shoulder for bears. I wrote myself back to that
near disastrous day when I almost didn't make it home.
I insisted on taking the skiff out on an important
errand it was going to be a four hour trip.
(12:31):
I insisted on going alone. It was a long way
to go on the ocean in the winter. A snowstorm
came up, I got lost in the total wide out,
and then the engine broke down. I wrote about it,
describing how scared I was when it started snowing, when
the engine died, when I knew I had drifted out
(12:52):
onto the open ocean, when I thought I might die.
But the inner story I didn't know it yet. I
was learning again what I thought I already knew. Are
stories about so much more than what happened. It's just
as important to know why those things happened, to know
what moves and motivates us, and how those moments, large
(13:16):
and small, change us, and how they might change our
readers too. I began to write more deeply into those
two stories, and it slowly came clear, word by word
what I was doing in both of those events. I
was escaping a place that wasn't mine, an ocean, an island,
(13:36):
a life that belonged to my new husband and his family,
but it didn't belong to me yet. It wasn't mine
except by marriage. By proxy. My life was borrowed, shoehorned
into whatever cracks I could fit in. Even where we
lived those first three summers. We lived in a tiny
(13:57):
loft atop a rickety ladder and an old building aloft
just big enough to hold a bed and a wood stove.
We could only stand up in the middle. As I wrote,
I realized so much about my life I hadn't seen before.
I felt compassion for the young woman I was, and
(14:18):
for my husband, for the two of us trying to
make a marriage work on a wilderness island with endless nets,
ocean and fish we couldn't control. I realized that both
those escapes helped make that island in that place mine too.
In some way, my fingers on the keyboard showed me
(14:39):
yet more. There were so many rescues and second chances.
I began to see that these chapters from my life
were indeed about survival, but it was also a story
of grace, not easy grace, hard grace, the kind you
pray you'll survive. And there it was the title and
(15:03):
the paradox that came to shape the final story, Surviving
the Island of Grace. Six months later, I finished the book.
My stomach quivered, my index finger hovered over attached file.
No one would publish it, I was sure, but I
(15:23):
had learned so much in writing it page by page.
I punched send and it was done. What would Kate think?
I soon found out. Kate sent it out into the
world immediately after receiving it, and then it began a
steady stream of rejections from the major New York publishers
(15:45):
over the next two months. But then there was a
yes from one of the New York Big ten publishers.
It was a hearty yes. Suddenly Kate was great, and
she said I was too. My first memoir and surely
my last would soon be in bookstores around the country.
(16:08):
But that's not the true happy ending to this story.
When I began writing the memoir reluctantly, I did not
even know what I was looking for. The writing showed me,
in the midst of roaring seas, the claustrophobia of an
island with no escape, doubts of my own ability as
(16:29):
a writer. Words saved my life. Words carved out a
space between land and sea where maybe I could hold fast.
Writing surviving the Island of Grace brought me here to
this moment. One morning, I sat on a distant beach
(16:55):
on our island. I was alone except for the two
ravens on a cliff above me, spatting. Was I sorry
I had chosen Duncan and this place and this very
particular life that came with it. No, how could anything
be other than it was? But when I chose all
of this back in nineteen seventy seven, I did not
(17:18):
know what I was choosing. I came here with Duncan
at twenty, running from a difficult childhood. I was certain
I would find wholeness and freedom in him and in
this island world. I looked around. It was still as
(17:39):
wild and clean and vast a place as when I
first came, but I hadn't known what to measure. Then.
I know now that what I was looking for is
not something that can be found, not in a place
or in a person. Freedom and wholeness must be made,
(18:00):
and it is made out of whatever is around you.
It is made out of whatever is given to you.
Like the barnacles on the rocks around me, I looked
at them closely. They were anchored to a massive rock,
but they were moving. In each of them, the beak,
like a tiny telescope, was rounding the perimeter of its
(18:23):
own shell. There, halfway between land and water, was a
creature that literally grows its own cliff walls, his own
form entraps him. It is his prison, his island. He
cannot escape. But then I saw it is also his
(18:46):
mountain fortress, the very grace that sustains his life. When
I finished writing Surviving the Island of Grace, I was hooked.
Once I started writing the truest words from my life
that I could find, such clarity, discovery, and consolations have
(19:07):
come to me. I don't ever want to stop. When
we steward the beautiful burdens and difficult passages we've been
given in our lives, we have another chance to reclaim
and heal those burdens. I've seen it thousands of times
in my own life in others. This is my work
(19:29):
now teaching others to do the same, and in all
our stories, we who are stranded on islands and in
strange places have found the words and the grace to
write ourselves home.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And a special thanks to Leslie laland Fields. To find
out more about her work and also her teaching, go
to Leslie Lalanfields dot com. I didn't know what I
was looking for. The writing showed me words saved my life.
Leslie leyland Field's story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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