Dear Folks,
It’s Saturday morning and Foundation Farm is humming. John is downstairs vacuuming his rooms (the living and dining rooms are his to keep clean). Kate is in the kitchen making bread (Suzanne and I clean the kitchen; we’ll do it whent he breadmaking is done). Suzanne has just gone out to pick up the mail at the post office and to find Dennis, who set out running south and asked her to come get him in an hour, to see how far he could go. (Dennis is in a fine fitness jag, has lost 20 pounds, and runs nearly every day.) I’m sitting up here in my room at the word processor, with Tansy purring on my lap. The “Messiah” is playing on the radio. The dogs are out rooting around in the snow.
Tomorrow night, the last night we’ll all be together before Christmas, we’ll have our household party. Suzanne leaves the next morning for Christmas with her family and then for her annual trip to India. We won’t see her again till February. Kate will go home for Christmas with her family in Cambridge Mass. Brenna will be with her mother’s family. John, Dennis and I will have a quiet Christmas here. John will spend Christmas eve delivering packages to some of the poor families in town, and Christmas day he’ll go cook at the big Community Dinner.
We had a big snow two days ago, very welcome because it covered up an accumulation of glaze ice.
Question: How do you get down the hill from the chicken house when it’s slick ice and your pockets are full of eggs?
Answer: Very carefully. Sometimes on your hands and knees.
You may wonder why one would carry one’s eggs in one’s pockets. The answer is that that’s where I always carry them. I have received a good deal of kidding from my housemates about that, especially at the rare times when I have a slight accident. I don’t get much sympathy as I ruefully wash out my pocket. They have bought me a sweet little basket that is just perfect for carrying eggs, but I rarely use it, because:
- I usually do the sheep chores and then the chicken chores, and there’s already so much to carry that there’s no room for a basket.
- My chore jacket is 20 years old and covered with so many stains that one hardly notices a little egg in the pocket.
- It has four wonderful pockets, perfect for carrying eggs.
- I always forget the darn basket anyway.
The pocket system works surprisingly well. I remember one classic slip, with my legs flying out in front of me and me ending up flat on my back, and not one of the seven eggs in my pockets even cracked. I quote that incident when my housemates tease me, but they tend to remember the (rare) events when for one reason or another I have ended up with an eggy pocket.
I got my revenge one day when I was in Vienna and Dennis was taking care of the farm and he wrote me to apologize for all his teasing about eggs in pockets. It turned out he was in a hurry to get to work one morning and he ended up breaking one in his suit coat pocket!
Anyway, we are now into Iron Hard Winter and until the last snow the farm was glazed solid for weeks. It looked beautiful, but it was treacherous, especially on the hills. The dogs developed a four-legged skiing slide that got them down the hills fast, if not very gracefully. But with a five-gallon water jug, two grain pails, and a pocketful of eggs, I didn’t dare slide. I crept. No eggs or bones were broken. And now, finally, we’ve had a Big Snow. Now the dogs and I can go charging down the hill, spraying snow in every direction.
You all deserve a year-end report on the newspaper column business, the ups and downs of which you have been reading so patiently and supportively all year. Last year at this time “The Global Citizen” appeared, regularly or irregularly, in 8 newspapers. Now it appears in 15 (I expect the 16th to join on next week). They are, in decreasing order of frequency (the first 5 use every or nearly-every column):
- Lebanon NH Valley News
- Nashua NH Telegraph
- Barre-Montpelier VT Times-Argus
- Torrington CT Register-Citizen
- Harrison AR Daily Times
- Keene NH Sentinel
- Berkshire MA Eagle
- Framingham MA Middlesex News
- Kennebec ME Journal
- Waterville ME Morning Sentinel
- Brattleboro VT Reformer
- Concord NH Monitor
- Schenectady NY Gazette
- Hartford CT Courant
- Cape Cod MA Times
And next week, I hope, the New London CT Day.
My gross income from the column is now up to $600-$800 per month, more than double what it was a year ago. I haven’t yet calculated what the net income is. There are now 60 subscribers to the Dana Meadows News Service. A year ago there were 28.
My syndicate, the South-North News Service, has yet to sell my column to a single paper. I spent some time this month talking to another syndicate that wanted to take the column, but, perhaps unwisely, I turned them down. They are a brand new syndicate, based in New York. They have so far only 5 regular features to sell — I would have been the 6th.
I said no, after long thought, because I didn’t feel good about working with the people, and I didn’t think they would understand or represent the column as well as Peter Martin at SNNS does (and I think that after struggling for a year, he’s about to make some sales). They wanted me to change the name from “The Global Citizen”, but I couldn’t think of any name I liked better. They wanted me to focus the column more — make it more consistently about some theme or set of subjects. But I didn’t think I was capable of doing that. So, reluctantly, because I so badly need someone out there selling the column and some help with all the darn bookkeeping and phone-calling, I said no.
As you will see from this month’s columns, I have been listening to those of you who are telling me to publish these letters I write to you. Part of last month’s letter turned itself into a column, about the November sheep. It was a popular one with the readers. People sent me poems and called me and stopped me in the street to comment on it. I approached three different magazines about carrying an edited version of this monthly letter about the farm, and all three turned me down. (Free-lance writers get lots of rejection letters. There is no other occupation, I think, that provides such excellent opportunity to break through all one’s lurking fears of rejection.) I haven’t given up; I just haven’t found the right magazine yet.
You may remember that I set my 1986 target to get taken by a syndicate and to make $6000 on the column. I met both those targets. So here’s my 1987 target. (Gulp.) To get into 50 papers. (I really want to make it 100. But I don’t think that’s possible even for a big syndicate to pull off in a year.) At least 3 of those 50 should be major metropolitan papers. At least 20 of the 50 should run the column every week.
That target sounds impossible to me right now. I can’t do it single-handedly; I will need successful syndication to pull it off. I feel stupid even sharing it with all of you, but I’m doing so both to solidify my own resolve, and to enlist your support. If any of you feel like taking copies of the column into your local editor and telling him/her why your paper should run it, feel free to do so. For the U.S. readers I’m even including a card you can leave so the editor knows how to reach me.
The other thing you can do to help is to give me honest feedback. I think I’ve made the column better this year. I’ve learned to make it the right length, and I hope the writing is improving. I’m always working on it. But knowing what you like or don’t like will help me make it always better. I want to write a column just exactly for people like you; I want it to tackle issues you want tackled, to raise questions you want raised.
Above all, I want the column to home in on the truth, as close as I can come to the truth. My big battle every week, having chosen my issue, is to search for the truth of it. I spend hours doing what does not look like writing a column — pacing, meditating, doing library research, talking to people — all just looking for some grain of truth. It’s tough sometimes. And it’s fun.
Enough for now. Happy holidays to everyone. Think peace.
Love, Dana
