When Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) wrote that we should write about what we love and create a space in which to do it, I thought choosing to write, giving myself permission to do it, and carving a space for it was not an issue for me. I was an English professor and was expected to commit at least half of my time to research, writing, publishing, and promoting. That’s what happens at a research one institution. My passion had always been exploring how people represented themselves, who they said they were, representations of identity. It even appeared thinly disguised in my dissertation about writers and writing – student writers who said they were writers apart from any assignment to write, self-sponsored writers. Every project I wrote while at the university had something to do with someone’s representation of identity within a matrix of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. One day I realized I was no longer focused on writing or teachers but theorizing possible worlds; I was writing stories about the way the world worked for my subjects within a specific time frame and circumstance. It continued to make sense for a long time. I was still following the data. But as my work became less reporting and more theorizing and the “why” of everything became more interesting to me than the “what” and  “how,” I had a Goldberg moment: I wanted to write for myself.

The first one hundred drafts of WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART were called The Bone Spinner. It was not called that for the reasons the title seemed to suggest. And that was a problem. There were no traditional bones in those drafts. The Bone Spinner was not a crime novel with a forensic team or even an archaeological one. Rather the bones were bones of life not death: love and loss, hardship and happiness, cruelty and compassion, deceit and dignity, folly and forgiveness, and more – things that made a life. Or as Natalie Goldberg put it, when we write down the bones, we write things we care about. Bones of life are in the cherished tales as well as those that chafe, stories about who we are or think we are at any given moment, stories that not only dignify experience but also add flesh and blood to characters like Sara, Soren, and Henry (WCKTH). Moreover, story bones can be as organic as human bones, imprinted with residual meanings and practices carried from one generation to another.

As I began to tease out and nurture the bones that brought Sara, Soren, and Henry to life (WCKTH), I saw the role flight took. In the next fifty drafts, I wanted to call the novel Long Distance Running but was afraid it would be mistaken for a nonfiction account of marathon training when it was a fictionalized version of running away. Henry (Soren’s father) runs away to become the street performer, Wizard, spinning prophetic tales from his tin box of memories. He acts as though everything is illusion, the world obscured, everyone doubled, split; he wears constructions of self as if a suit of armor. Soren (Sara’s mother) also runs away but lives as if everything is exactly as it seems, life without randomness, only a ripple effect and her father’s box of shadowy leavings more evidence that everything is connected. To Sara (Henry’s granddaughter), life is tumbling chaos. She is the constant runner but says she refuses to let circumstance define her. She perceives everything and nothing is connected, is the product of everything and nothing, and that people only think they know each other because it makes them feel better. After her mother’s death, she discovers her grandfather’s mysterious tin box and the cautionary bones that can link Sara to her past if she is willing. Her examination of the relic-like mementos is at once an exercise in undoing her childhood and a realization of the conflicts her mother and grandfather experienced and choices they made on the way to becoming who it seems they were – people she did not know.

I finally settled on WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART, even at the risk of readers thinking it was a romance novel. The title seemed to fit the narrative of deceit I had constructed. In the broadest possible sense, it is a nontraditional love story. As I worked the tension between primary characters (father, daughter, granddaughter) I thought of Huck and Jim’s river (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). This time I saw the river not merely as a representation of Huck and Jim’s freedom but as a thread that bound them – the tie that binds, a tie that runs throughout stories and lives, braiding but not tethering and always flowing toward the not yet, a chronicle of how one thing can change everything.