From Randee Russell Bieler, formerly of Raleigh, now of Malibu: 

 

 

Amazing, the resilience of fear.  I went away for a week, a long overdue family vacation, and four days in, I had  forgotten all the positive things I have figured out  about self-publishing this book.  Why is fear my default  position?  It really is a problem.

 

But then on the plane, I ran across documentaries about the use of social media to reach an audience with a particular message or product.  Like my ability to reach readers who might be interested in "Quilt."

 

And there was a memory – Richard Yates was at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when I was there, and he had just published his next book after Revolutionary Road, and he couldn’t get his publisher to push it.  He wanted ads in the Times Book Review and The New Yorker.  They said, no.  He offered to pay for them himself.  They said, no.  They just didn’t say, no, they forbade it!

 

But here I am in sexy 2011, saying yes to myself.

 

Then, of course, we get to the root of this fear, which is:  How exactly do I say this yes? &  What exactly is this yes? & Who, besides myself, do I  say this yes to?  Just by my asking these questions, my old faithful fear goes geyser. 

 

Still, somehow I remembered that I know my target audience is mothers.  And I remembered this thing that I believe about mothers – that we are connected by an umbilicus of experience that is powerful beyond all imagining.  It’s what drew me to this story in the first place.  I was a brand new, first-time mother when I  heard about the Slave Mother finding her sold-away children in the midst of the Civil War.  I was just riveted to her, I had to know more.  And nearly every time I say just that brief story to any mother, anywhere, her eyes get big.  

 

I think that umbilicus is the reason why my own Mom got so upset about me finishing my cereal because there were children starving in India.  She sees a photo of a mother with a starving child in India and she looks across the breakfast table and there’s me playing with my food.  I never understood that until I walked into the kitchen one day and on TV there’s a starving mother trying to feed her starving baby from shrunk flat breasts.  And I look up from the screen and there is my own kid playing with her food.  That’s the umbilicus between mothers making us crazy, but maybe we can ride it somewhere else.

 

At any rate, that’s my audience – mothers, connected by motherhood.  Motherhood, as in the word, brotherhood.  Not a state of being, but a relationship. Women umbilicated by deep, hard, yet somehow lighter-than-air experience.

 

There’s a pouch in my belly that will not disappear

Because

There was

A baby here…