Giants, Fairies & Foxes - Oh My! By Leigh Verrill-Rhys

 Story-telling is in my DNA and I became aware of this proclivity at the age of three. I had awakened from a nightmare that I still remember. My father was asleep when I crawled into my parents’ bed and snuggled between them. I told my father a story about a big round house I wanted him to build for me. The nightmare and the story had nothing in common, except perhaps the story was my way of dispelling the fear the nightmare instilled.

Stories are a human reaction to life’s tribulations. From earliest times, humans have coped with terrors by relegating them to tales to entertain us around the campfire. A story shared is a fear conquered, an experience shared is one less trial to be faced without knowledge.

My story-telling included tales I made up while I played alone in a grove of lilac bushes in the woods behind our house in Maine. I shared stories of actual experience when I started school after my family moved to California and had the opportunity to Show and Tell along with my 1st Grade classmates. Once, I had seen a fox in Golden Gate Park and described this sighting to my class,but my teacher was skeptical and told my mother that I had an active “imagination” — which was certainly true, but the sighting was not imaginary. 

My mother and siblings made fun of me about my “active imagination” — very little I said during this time was accepted as truthful. That alone kept me from expressing my thoughts and experiences to my family, so I began to “think” my stories while drawing my characters on newsprint paper with pencil and crayons. 

Many months passed before I was vindicated by a television news report about foxes in the park. 

I had learned a lesson. I kept my stories safely to myself, fact or imaginative. 

A few years later, in fifth grade, our teacher assigned homework to encourage her students to write a fairytale — a completely imaginative story about an imaginary being. I sat at the table in our living room while my parents and siblings watched television and wrote a story about a giant. I now have no recollection of the story itself, only the experience of writing on lined paper with a green school pen that wrote with blue ink. I remember how excited I was to be able to write what my own imagination allowed me to conceive with the permission of my teacher. 

Whether I received any plaudits or a good grade for my effort was and is irrelevant. I was free to tell a story. I was encouraged to use my imagination. Although I continued to think my stories as I drew my characters, that one opportunity was the catalyst for taking story-telling and writing seriously. 

Another positive writing experience in education came when I was in ninth grade. The assigned reading was John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony about which we were required to write an essay. My teacher at the time was Mr. Lombardi who was a treasure trove of excellent writing techniques, all of which I continue to implement. My essay began with the statement, “Gitano was dead.” Whatever followed has been lost in the many years that have passed, but I had made that statement as the most important fact I wanted to state and was also one of the treasures Mr. Lombardi shared with his class. When he returned my essay, the grade was written in red at the top: “A”. 

I had the assurance from a teacher I admired that I could indeed write well.

I started college as an art student with ambitions to be a sculptor or painter or illustrator. I was soon shown the error of my ways and took a screenwriting class instead. As much as the idea of making films appealed, the fact remained I had an attachment to language and words on the page. When I accepted that I painted pictures skillfully with words on a page or on a computer screen, that realization supported my decision to move from being an art student to become an English Major with creative writing as the foundation. 

My decision was not greeted with enthusiasm by my mother, but my stories were published in small, independent literary magazines, the Creative Writing department’s own yearly publication, broadcast on a local NPR radio station. I won a writing contest and an award for my contribution to a national newspaper. 

I cherish that award and have kept it near ever since although I have moved house and countries often over the decades. Learning a new language, marriage, parenting, career changes, all demanded the time I had had to write while still in college. And I did write. I had manuscripts stacked, like Margaret Mitchell, as bookends, and makeshift tables. When I moved house, my manuscripts were transported in my father’s World War II Army trunk. 

While the children slept and before a long day’s chores closed my eyes, I wrote words and words and words on lined paper, telling the stories of imaginary characters who lived their lives in my head. At one point, I was determined to destroy all those words, shred every sheet of handwritten ink-blotched paper, exterminate these giants, fairies and their foxy friends. That lesson from my childhood was indelible. Those college professors and critique groups were winning me over to write important words, make serious efforts to be an important author.

Yet, I resisted the call to take writing seriously enough. No serious topics came to engage my imagination. No words were lofty. No words were world-changing. No words mattered. 

Then came the event that set in stone what my resistance meant: someone asked me what I did. I answered, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.” That admission embarrassed me to the core.Resistance meant I would never be a writer. I would dream of writing a book but I would not write one. I made a decision. The manuscripts I had written may not change the world. I may not win a Glittering Literary Prize. I may not even be published but I would have a finished novel.

I read every manuscript to find the one I had the hutzpah to finish, the one that I could pour all my love of writing into and could commit to transcribing from handwritten to typescript! I found one story among all the scores of half-completed manuscripts I had amassed. Words came that brought characters to life as people. Words came that celebrated the joy of finding love and heartbreak of being alone. Celebration. Dreams. And human spirit. I worked, rewrote, polished, edited again, completed and submitted the first three chapters of the manuscript to an agent.

The response eventually came: “My reader quite liked it.” The agent requested the complete manuscript. I could say “I’m a writer” at last. Months later, disappointment came but not before I had presented a proposal for another novel to a New York publishing company’s editor at a writers’ conference. 

That synopsis and three chapters was already on its way to the publisher’s office and a request for the full manuscript soon followed. Again, months passed. Late one December night, six months later, I received an email from the editor. “We would like to acquire Wait a Lonely Lifetime.”

I skipped and trotted down the stairs into the kitchen. Bottle in hand, I swooped into the living room and asked my husband, “Is this the best champagne we have?”

He knew instantly why I asked. As I had promised myself three years before that night, I have never had to say “I have always wanted to be a writer” again.

Bio - Leigh Verrill-Rhys

A native of Paris Hill, Maine, Leigh spent most of her childhood and early adult years in San Francisco where she took a Welsh language course and met her future husband before emigrating to Wales to marry and raise three sons. She has been a writer, editor and lecturer for most of her life, intermingled with career portfolios in marketing, finance and community arts.
An award-winning editor, she has published three volumes of women’s autobiographical writing about their lives in Wales and during World War II, through the Welsh women’s publisher, Honno. A former member of the Welsh Academy and currently of the Authors Guild, Wait a Lonely Lifetime was her first published novel. Leigh is now a publisher of independent authors (EresBooks.com) and has started an imprint to publish the stories of serving and retired military personnel and their families (VeteransWords.EresBooks.com). Leigh is the owner of Camfa Technologic, website design and content development.
Leigh admits to running with scissors and leaping before she looks.
 
 
Leigh Verrill-Rhys, Novelist
Celebrating the Human Spirit, Love & Liberty - One Novel at a Time
That Kentucky Boy, an “In Maine” novel, 2021 | Dance by the Light of the Moon, 2021
Pavane for Miss Marcher, an “In Maine” novel, September 2018
Nights Before, “In Maine” novellas, September 2015 | This Can't Be Love, January 2015 
Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls, March 2014 | Wait a Lonely Lifetime, April 2012