You never know, my mother was fond of telling me. You never know if that lie you told about Ira Silverman being your boyfriend might come back to haunt and embarrass you. You never know if Steven Scharf, who makes you squirm, what with his acne and his bad hair, might turn out to be the best kisser in all of JHS 135. You never know if that hobby of writing cool letters to your friends might turn out to be your avocation.
During Woodstock Writers Festival 2013, Ann Hood told me that she was editing an anthology about knitting. She had already gotten commitments for essays from Jane Smiley, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Andre Dubus III, Joyce Maynard and others. I didn’t even think to tell her about the knitting story I was dying the write, the one about what happened when my best friend joined a cult, and the only thing that made me get out of bed in the morning and made even the tiniest bit of sense, was casting on and knitting and purling, making something out of nothing, holding on to the thing that friend had taught me.
About a week after the festival, I got one of those off-the-cuff emails from Ann Hood. “Hey,” it said, so nonchalantly, “someone dropped out of the knitting book. Have a story you might want to write?”
I wrote the story that night and sent it early the next morning, just in case reason prevailed and Hood realized I didn’t belong anywhere near that book. She wrote back almost immediately, saying she loved it and was sending a contract.
I was actually getting paid for the privilege of being in a book with my literary heroes? I hadn’t even imagined that. You never know.
When I saw the amazing cover of Knitting Yarns, I was beyond thrilled. It was lush without being cloying; it made you want to knit without making you feel inadequate.
The early reviews were an even bigger thrill— all were raves and a few mentioned my story in particular.
But then I started to worry: I hadn’t knit in over a decade! I had always been a pick-it-up, then put-it-down knitter. I never really got any better. Everything I made was flat– a scarf or a blanket. I didn’t ever think of making anything intricate or something that had shape. I was the remedial knitter.
When the book was a few weeks from pub date, I got involved in a knitting group. 4 or 5 of us meet for a few hours every week; we hired a teacher. She told us to bring all our old projects. That first week she went around the room, gently urging people to pick up the needles and finish what they had started. For every sad story she had a perfectly optimistic retort. Soon people were finishing scarves; figuring out the sleeves on sweaters they had forgotten about for years.
When she got to me, she frowned. Every piece I showed her— a half finished scarf that had a glaring mistake 2 inches from the bottom, a sad looking blanket with amorphous edges, a glove that had no mate or wool— she clicked her tongue. “Rip them out,” she finally said, not unkindly. I gasped. “No, I mean it,” she continued. “You hate every one of them. You don’t have to finish them. Rip. I’ll teach you to make a gorgeous pair of gloves.”
In the 6 months since then, two amazing things have happened. I have fallen in love with knitting again, and have finished some beautiful projects: gloves, hats, scarves and thick cowls. I am lovingly eyeing an A-Line cardigan and will begin knitting it as soon as I figure out what color it should be.
And Knitting Yarns is a big hit! You never know.
Watch me talking about Knitting Yarns with my pal Jimmy Buff on Kingston Now.
