Limbo

Dear Reader,

I am currently in the place described above. The most difficult aspect of being in limbo is wrapped inside a more familiar word: waiting. We all experience multiple and varying degrees of it daily. Waiting for the bus, for the doctor’s nurse to call out our name, for the cold front to dump its frigid temperatures on us. We have been warned by our knowledge of schedules, appointments and weather forecasts– otherwise, there would be no waiting involved. We enter the state of waiting consciously, so before we finally jump on the bus, eagerly leap out of the waiting room chair or gladly grab the hat and gloves languishing in the drawer, we are grateful that the waiting is over.

At its best, waiting is a brief discomfort. At its worst, it goes on for longer and borders on the more dramatic-sounding but nonetheless appropriate word, agony - extreme and prolonged suffering. In this case, it is the latter: what to do while waiting for publishers to send news of heaven or hell – acceptance or rejection. The weight of anxiety is linked directly to the fact that the proposal or manuscript in their care is the result of ten years of rewarding and obsessive work. It’s a heavy weight, indeed.

This burden is different from a poetry manuscript, which takes me about the same number of years. Or my dissertation transformed into a book, which took about six years. Family, friends and colleagues were eager to see these books in print. Now, I have written a biography structured around someone else’s memoir, diary and letters. My place in limbo is exacerbated by the responsibility of honoring my subject’s expressed wish: to be published. She was a fine writer, with a fascinating and complicated story to tell. If I fail, I have failed her and her potential readers.

To deal with this agonized state of being, problem-solving skills have had to be employed. Some have been effective, some not-so-much: