The Manuscript in the Drawer

by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
published by The Hopkins Review

I’m sitting at a bar sipping club soda and writing. I’ve discovered this corner of a Washington, DC restaurant that has a long bar with plugs underneath for my computer. If I sit at the very end, I can occupy two or three seats—one for me, the others for my work—without inconveniencing anyone.  I order soup or a cheese board, drink soda or a cappuccino and write for hours with the hum of trivial and sometimes consequential conversation around me, but not addressed to me.  The clientele ranges from college students to government officials. I can eavesdrop, not to gather anyone’s business or secrets but rather the rhythm of life and conversation while I write from my own thoughts and imagination.

Before the pandemic, this was my modus operandi for decades, writing in restaurants. I began my career in a newsroom. Once when asked my ideal writing environment, I answered without thinking, “In the middle of a newsroom where I’m left alone to write fiction.” I like the hum; it concentrates my mind. At the moment three coeds a few stools away are bubbling over the boys and boyfriends in their lives. The conversation seems ephemeral and young to me but important to them. I remember that focus, though I think I was in junior high school then.

In these various venues, I have written four novels. Two of these are at last getting published, one in March 2023, the other spring 2024, demonstrating that writers write and eventually publishers publish. Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert are being published with a promotional tag suggesting “Jane Austen meets John LeCarré.”

I’ve been writing a long time, beginning as a journalist then shifting to fiction. In the late 1980s I published a collection of short stories—No Marble Angels—then a regional best-selling novel—The Dark Path to the River. Then came a long hiatus in publishing fiction. I suspect I am not the exception but rather part of a large family of writers whose novels may not be immediately published but who continue writing because sorting and organizing life and experience through words and stories is what we do.  

Anatole Broyard, famed New York Times columnist and literary critic a generation ago, noted the value of the manuscript in the drawer. By writing you were helping order the universe, he claimed, staying faithful to the task of thinking and seeking harmonies in the world. I often shared his column when I taught writing. It resonated with me and always with my students.

The value of the manuscript in the drawer expands when it finally gets out of the drawer and into the universe. Burning Distance, released this spring by Oceanview Publishing, might have been prescient if published when first written. It is a love story between an American girl and Lebanese/Palestinian boy who meet at the American School in London before the first Gulf War and whose parents turn out to be connected to arms trading and the weapons smuggling that fueled the war and the years that followed.  The novel spans 1981–1996. Now it may be read as historical fiction.

Living in London at the time, I was able to do extensive research and interviews after the first Gulf War. Along with others, I recognized the detritus of weapons, including those of mass destruction, left behind and accumulated in the build-up to the war and learned of the complicity of Western suppliers in that process. With children at the American School in London, I also witnessed how their generation was relating and developing friendships across national, political, and religious barriers and offered the possibility of a more connected world.

Among my ten-year-old son’s friends at the time were the son of the Kuwaiti Ambassador and a student from Iraq. When I picked my son up at camp the summer of 1990 and told him about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, his first question was: What will happen to Talal and Alec? The Kuwaiti friend began to travel with bodyguards, and the Iraqi friend never returned to the American School. The personal and political intertwined in my imagination, and the seeds of Burning Distance were planted.

I did extensive research. Through journalist colleagues who traveled and covered the Middle East, I was able to interview individuals, including an ex-director of one of Saddam Hussein’s ministries crucial to the acquisition of nuclear components.  When Saddam insisted he work to develop an atom bomb, the man refused. Saddam put him in prison. During the chaos of the war, he managed to escape to Iran and eventually made his way to England.

The challenge for me as a novelist was to take all the research and massage it into story and literary language, masticating “long-range ballistic missiles” and “isopropyl methylethylphosponoflourodite” into story and the language of literature. Sometimes the book seemed larger than my experience and skill as a writer, and yet I couldn’t put it down.  Between drafts I wrote short stories, articles, and two other novels, then I came back again, fresh, ready to reenter the lives of my characters and live through another and then another draft. Time has passed, but the themes remain relevant.

“Burning Distance is a double helix of a book, carefully plotted and beautifully told,” novelist and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has offered. “It’s a spy story interwoven with a love story, and the strands fit together in a way that moves the reader effortlessly from chapter to chapter. While fiction, its narrative of the CIA and the Middle East arms trade are very close to fact.”

Writers have been generous in their early response. After writing, the affirmation of readers is one of the payoffs, though the process of writing remains the gold.

My son Elliot Ackerman, the friend of Talal and Alec, is now himself a novelist and journalist. He once dubbed me “the last of the paper generation.” He was right. My basement is filled with research files and drafts of manuscripts. Somewhere among these is Anatole Broyard’s essay which I haven’t been able to find in my files, but its sentiment and the value of the manuscript in the drawer abides.

Umbrellas snap open like a flock of blackbirds arriving at the grave. Twelve of us stand wing to wing as clouds roll over the green hills and the rain falls harder. Few families endure one murder. I am mourning the second in my lifetime. I’m nineteen years old, and I am beginning to see that life connects.
My father used to say, “There are no coincidences, only life showing you its patterns.”
As I watch our small gathering on the hillside, I strain to see the pattern….

So begins my new novel Burning Distance which publishes on March 7 and can be ordered now. The opening chapter of the novel and an essay “Manuscript in the Drawer” will also appear on pub day in The Hopkins Review online.

I hope you’ll enjoy the story—find it moving, entertaining, informative, surprising…

I leave the adjectives to readers who I hope will also take a moment to write a comment or review with online booksellers if that is how you order. These are used to offer extra promotional benefits for the book. They also help the book on its way.

Burning Distance took years to research and write and even longer to publish. You may find of interest the Author’s Note at the end of the book which shares some of that journey and history. The publisher through Goodreads promoted Burning Distance this month with some giveaways of the digital book.

While the facts are well-researched for Burning Distance, the characters, the story and the world created sprang from imagination. The novel’s promotional copy heralds the novel: “Jane Austen meets John le Carré in this cross-cultural love story and political thriller….A modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against a background of arms smuggling in the Middle East.” I hope the book will appeal to readers who like international political thrillers and also those who enjoy a love story and family drama with characters you can care about.

I hope you will come along on the journey of Burning Distance. If you find yourself engaged, please tell a friend or many friends. A book extends its life through its readers and expands that life through word of mouth. Let me know what you think. And make some noise!

Thank you in advance,
Joanne

Events and appearances will be posted on the Speaking page of this website. I love to speak and meet with readers. Requests for appearances, zoom meetings or book club discussions can be noted under Contact Info.

The winter solstice has passed, and each day adds two to three minutes of daylight.

The crocus buds have already broken through the soil. So far winter in the mid-Atlantic, at least in Maryland and Washington, DC, has been wet but not freezing though we are not yet safe from frost. I wish the buds would hold off, not be too anxious to pop above the ground. February can still be a fierce month.

In the garden the birds are clustered around the bird feeder for food which is still scarce on the trees. The squirrels have figured out how to tip the feeders and scatter the seeds and grain on the ground so they can run off with it. My dog spends hours at the window watching the squirrels, just waiting to get out to defend her turf. She’s taken the side of the birds which she also watches but allows with more tolerance in her corner of the garden.

She sees a fox and wants to chase after it though she is smaller but just as fast. It is mating season for the foxes, and they disappear into their den.

The early signs of spring are breaking out everywhere. We wait, not always patiently, for the earth to warm, the flowers to bloom, the cubs to emerge and disappear into the woods and for the earth to tilt towards the sun.

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

The winter holidays start with lights in the U.S. and in many countries around the world. In the U.S. the lights begin to appear in early November, shining on street corners, in department store windows. By the end of November and the U.S. Thanksgiving, holiday lights are up and twinkling in white, blue, red, green, and gold on city streets and on country roads. By early December the lights are entwined on the trees and strung around front porches and lawns, and in shop windows, challenging the onslaught of winter’s darkness and the somber journey to the shadowed side of the sun.

The tradition of lights on Christmas trees started in 17^th century Germany where they were attached by wax or pins. Then along came Thomas Edison and the electric light. By the late 19^th century—in 1882—Edison’s friend and partner Edward H. Johnson developed the first string of electric lights for a Christmas tree by hand-wiring 80 red, white, and blue light bulbs together and winding them around his tree.

Many holidays around the world celebrate with lights, especially in the winter months, not only Christmas, also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, St. Lucia Day, the Winter Solstice.

At a time when war is taking away the option of lighted cities, let alone festive lights for many in the Ukraine and elsewhere, I wanted to share these virtual lights with a wish for illumination in the year ahead.

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

The geese have returned, flying in from Canada as the weather turns colder up north. The honking above each morning and evening signals the changing seasons.

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

As autumn accelerates with in-person meetings and events in Washington and New York, many for the first time in almost three years, I’ve been away from this haven on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But I have now arrived back for a few days, and in the morning quiet before the birds awake, my eyes and thoughts are drawn to the water and sky and larger vistas.

This coming spring 2023 I have a new novel coming out and anticipate going on the road a bit. During the pandemic my two nonfiction books published were limited to zoom calls and meetings. I’ll be glad to get out to meet readers again. Burning Distance, my first novel published in many years with a second novel—The Far Side of the Desert—coming out in 2024, moves into new territory. A thriller/mystery/love story set between 1981-1996, Burning Distance’s promo copy heralds: “Jane Austen meets John le Carré in this cross-cultural love story and political thriller. A modern Romeo and Juliet set in…the dark world of arms trafficking.”

The novel took years of research and writing. Like many writers, I write even if not immediately published just as artists paint or musicians make music. I have several novels at the ready, and the gate is finally opening. I hope you’ll step through it with me and enjoy.

I’m sharing here the cover of Burning Distance and some of the generous responses from writers who have read the novel. The book officially comes out March 7 but can be preordered on links here. I hope you’ll order, read and share with friends. Friend-to-friend, reader-to-reader word of mouth is how writing finds its home. Thank you in advance for your support.

“Burning Distance is a double helix of a book, carefully plotted and beautifully told. It’s a spy story interwoven with a love story, and the strands fit together in a way that moves the reader effortlessly from chapter to chapter. While fiction, its narrative of the CIA and the Middle East arms trade are very close to fact. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman observes the world of American spies and Arab fixers through the eyes of a young woman who keeps asking questions about her mysterious past until she gets all the revelatory answers. A subtle and satisfying novel.”—David Ignatius, New York Times best-selling author, Washington Post columnist and novelist

“Burning Distance opens with a mystery, glides into a love story, and unfolds into a political thriller. Set against the backdrop of 1980s and 90s global politics, readers will be up way past their bedtimes eagerly turning pages to discover what happens to Lizzy and Adil. A story of war, family, history, politics, and passion. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman’s evocation of the era is pitch-perfect. A great read!”—Susan Isaacs, New York Times best-selling author of It Takes One To Know One

“Running the gamut of emotions from fear to love, this plot surges along as  unpredictable as a riptide. Romance and thriller readers will both find plenty of mischief and mayhem.”—Steve Berry, New York Times best-selling author of The Omega Factor

“I entered the world of Burning Distance—of the characters Lizzy and Jane and Sophie and their mother and the family of Winston, Pickles and Dennis and the world of Adil Hasan and his father—and I didn’t want to leave. I cared what happened to them and was pulled along without being able to stop until the book was over, and even then I didn’t want to leave. The narrative voice unfolds the story both poetically and realistically. The story it tells is also the story of a political and historical time (1981-1996) that is relevant to the times we are living through. The narrative opens for the reader some of the history that has taken us to the current events in the Middle East and Europe and America. But first and foremost the reader will want to read Burning Distance to know the characters, particularly Lizzy as she makes her way and follows her heart through the conflicts of history and culture and family to find ‘the music’ that is in her life.”—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Lizzy is ten when her father’s plane explodes over the Persian Gulf and her life is set in motion. In the background of the narrative is the Gulf War and in Lizzy’s life, her father’s death marks the beginning of a search to peel away secrets, betrayals, international intrigue, dangerous associations which bring all the characters in this book under one umbrella. Burning Distance is a mystery, a complicated, story-driven drama of lives lived amidst the high risk of life and death in international arms trading and the book is grounded by the unlikely love story between Lizzy and Adil Hasan. Her obsession is to uncover the secrets which led to her father’s death and in her quest she comes to find that everyone in this story is linked by danger, everyone is at risk. This is a real page turner which also informs, excites and moves us.”—Susan Richards Shreve, author of More News Tomorrow

“I was immediately engrossed in the lives of Joanne Leedom-Ackerman’s characters and their fascinating and compelling stories. Joanne has the ability to take the big issues of contemporary life (including the clash of cultures and a remarkable grasp of the weapons trade) and render them in the contexts of love, conscience, and the consequence of choice. She reminds us as did Donne that we each are a piece of the continent, a part of the whole of humanity, and that no matter how difficult the time, that love and peace and hope can be realities rather than abstracts.”—Eric Lax, author of Faith Interrupted

The clouds have finally lifted after days of grey and rainy skies. The sun is rising in all its quiet splendor. I can see light hovering at the horizon on the far shore this early morning.

Photo Credit: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Since I returned from PEN International’s World Congress in Sweden earlier this week, the landscape here has been shrouded with the outer edges of Hurricane Ian. As the storm moved up the eastern coast of the United States, it delivered rain and wind and grey skies to the Washington and Maryland area. We are fortunate and probably needed the rain, but the devastation of the hurricane to the South haunts us and fills the airwaves with troubling news and pictures, as it also does regarding the war in Ukraine, the protests in Iran, and the famine in Somalia. These remind me to be grateful for my cloud-enshrouded patch of earth and at the same time to be attentive to all that lies beyond. My patch of earth at least is now filled with light.

Connected as we are and as we were this past week in Uppsala, Sweden at the PEN International Congress, we were reminded of the origins of the 101-year-old organization PEN, begun in the aftermath of World War One’s devastation. A few British writers, including Catherine Amy Dawson Scott and John Galsworthy, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, came together to form a dining club for writers of different countries in the hope that a community of fellowship and understanding would arise and diminish the nationalism and tensions that had brought on the First World War. Soon the concept spread across Europe and North America and then Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The mission also expanded to defend writers under threat. There are now 150+ centers of PEN in over 100 countries.

88^th PEN Congress, 2022, Uppsala, Sweden. Photo credit: Gustav Larsson

After two years of meeting on zoom, PEN delegates from 100 centers came together, hosted by Swedish PEN, to celebrate and defend literature, translations, and freedom of expression around the world, to bring to bear a collective voice to combat threats to writers and also to see longtime colleagues and friends. Gathering around the theme “The Power of Words,” writers celebrated the multiple languages and literatures represented and also strategized to defend writers arrested, disappeared, and killed by authoritarian regimes.

“PEN has power but not power to prevent some writers getting killed,” said International PEN President Burhan Sönmez. “But we won’t leave people of art in the hands of dictators.”

Opening Ceremony at PEN International World Congress in Uppsala Sweden: Romana Cacchioli, Executive Director PEN International (left); Burhan Sönmez, President PEN International (right), Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

The bid for fellowship and a collective voice to protect writers under threat continues to inform PEN’s work a century after its founding. The 88^th PEN World Congress sent its members back across the globe to work. The poem “Fairwell” by Federico García Lorca, read by PEN’s International President, went with us:

“Fairwell

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The little boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I can see him.)

The reaper is harvesting the wheat.
(From my balcony I can hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!”

I keep taking pictures of the sky and its changing scenery. I don’t need to go anywhere to travel its corridors of beauty and drama though as the summer ends, I will be on the road more often, and the sky will more often turn gray and the drama on the ground more compelling.

But on this last week of summer, this first weekend of September, I share the sky and its vistas, the sun rising and setting, and hope the perspective inspires days ahead.

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

There’s a chill in the air this morning. I don’t know if it will last, probably not since it is still August, but I turn on the fire pit and wait for the sun to rise in the sky and warm my sleeveless arms in the tee shirt I slept in. My dog sits on my lap keeping me warm as she watches and listens to each morning sound, the starlings in the bird house, the crows in the trees, the many other birds whose sounds I can’t identify. A friend has given me a book on birds so perhaps I’ll learn to identify these occupants living on this patch of earth we share.

The world outside this haven is fraught with the shattering news of attacks and deceptions. I move between what seems a fraught nexus in Washington DC and the calm of the Chesapeake. I am conscious of the dichotomy, though also conscious that if I lift my sights higher like the birds who have now started to take their morning flights, I might see a larger view and see the oneness and harmony. I sit by the fire pit looking up….

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

I’ve lost emails I’d saved as drafts on my phone. I have searched everywhere—in Trash, in Junk, in Sent, and in Received and have concluded they have disappeared, perhaps into the cloud. “The cloud” is a relatively new concept, at least for my generation. The miracle and mystery that all our information can be stored out there “in the cloud” still bends the mind. Who named this ephemeral space “the cloud”?

I am sitting outside on this cool summer morning staring up at a puffy ceiling of clouds above me. These clouds are shrouding the sun and keeping the temperature relatively cool. I know these are not “the cloud” the technicians mean, but I look up anyway for reference and to contemplate the vastness of the sky and beyond that, the universe.

Photo credit: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

This past week we were let into a view of that vastness with the photos from the James Webb Telescope which sent back pictures from billions of light-years* away. (Who can comprehend even one light-year?) We are told that whatever we are seeing would have already happened and is millions/billions of years old. Any life out there that might be viewing us would be seeing our lives in the 17th century if they were just 300 light-years away. If 300 million light-years away, they would be seeing earth before homo sapiens evolved or at 200 million light years they might see dinosaurs like the Allosaurus.

Webb’s First Deep Field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks. The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSc

Where does that leave us? Projected images of light on a continuum of time? Ideas transporting instantly?

And where are my draft emails? In some cloud cruising the universe? The mind begins to expand as life and light expand and thought moves upward. I once read that most people (here on earth at least) see and comprehend only about two percent of what is going on around them.  Does that seem about right? Depending on one’s optimism, that may be good news if we conclude the other 98 percent might be magnificent and revelatory depending on our expanding perception above the clouds, though the idea that “dark energy and dark matter” may make up 95% of the universe sounds more ominous. We are told we can’t see dark matter but see only its effects.

In the meantime I’ll call my nephew who is trained in cyber security and see if he can tell me how to find my lost emails. Maybe he and others can even find two days’ worth of crucial lost text messages of the US Secret Service for January 5 and 6. Those too may be traveling out into space and can be recovered by someone just a fraction of a light year away.

Photo credit: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

*Light-year: 5.88 trillion miles light travels in a year.

I sit in the early morning—5:30am—as the sun is coming up. I listen to the birds chirping across the sky and to the watermen on the river trolling for crabs or oysters, also with lines down for perch or trout or occasional catfish.

I’ve come downstairs to let my dog out. The morning is beguiling as it awakens with mottled light spreading on the water and the river humming with early traffic, so I let my day begin and sit on the porch listening and watching.

I’m always surprised how clear sound travels on the water. I can hear a little girl on a boat talking with her father though I have to adjust my camera to zoom in ten times the distance to get a silhouette. I can’t entirely make out the words, but I am eavesdropping though I am at my home on the shore, and they are drifting by.

Summer’s solstice has recently passed. There is much summer left, but I am sorry the light will now recede a little each day, though perhaps I’ll get more sleep. I never close the curtains and so often rise with the sun. I don’t like dark rooms. I want to know when the day begins.

Photo credits: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman