Jessie Cole - Desire - Book Launch
One of the great things about writing is making writer friends. When I moved back to the Northern Rivers at the start of the pandemic, I lucked out with finding a great bunch of writers. Jessie Cole and I had our publishing schedules almost in tandem, for my first and her fourth book. Despite having different publishers, our editorial dates were just about in line and our books came out in the same week in August 2022.
At her launch at the Book Room in Byron, Jessie asked me to say a few words that might convey some behind-the-scenes insight into the writing & publication of Desire. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this. There’s plenty I could say about what a great friend she’d been as we had our parallel book experiences, but that wasn’t the point of the night. The point was her book, and how to contextualise it for the crowd. Here’s what I said:
Speech from the launch:
I was listening to the poet David Whyte speak as I drove home the other day. Courage, he said, was a word that tempts us to imagine someone out in the world, perhaps bravely battling against an enemy, conquering an impossible feat. But. The linguistic origins of the word tell a different story, an inward story, coming from the old Norman French – Coeur, or heart.
Courage, he said, is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life.
I had to pull my car over. To be courageous, he continued, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we feel deeply and then live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
I replayed it a few times. This process he described is exactly what I have had the privilege of witnessing up close, in seeing Jessie bring her book DESIRE: A RECKONING out into the world.
In writing this book, Jessie has allowed a window into an intimate world of thoughts, impulses and experiences. The first time I read it, a little over a year ago now, I was struck by how much it felt like a letter from your closest friend, on their most honest day. She lets you in, right in. From the first pages, Jessie was articulating things I didn’t even know I thought. As the book unfolds, in its exquisite structural form of vignettes, Jessie shows us what it means to stay close to your true nature, to let yourself live with your whole self. To me, it is a book about someone falling in love with themselves, or at least accepting themselves as they are, more than any one relationship. She lets you into her life, and by doing so, she lets you into your own.
But what does it take to let people in that close? To make a book that feels this effortless takes an enormous toll. I can give you a small peek behind the curtain, at Jessie’s request. As I think she’ll speak about in more detail, Jessie wrote as the events were happening. Writing like that is one thing, but then editing it means you have to relive your experiences, your choices, your very recent past, over and over. And in a pandemic, and in catastrophic floods. Jessie and I live close enough to each other that we could regularly walk through all of it, and I would hear the huge physical, emotional and mental energy this book required of her. Right when most of us would want to turn away from what we had just experienced, to let the dust settle, Jessie had to turn back towards it. It’s an intellectual and emotional feat.
But all of this is an effort you’d never know as a reader. What a gift you’ve given us, the readers. To have a book like this, that says here I am, here I am, here I am. A writer that is willing to show you what she cared deeply about, and was willing not to erase her hopeful self to protect her current self. In Whyte’s words, in the pages of this book, Jessie has made conscious those things she feels deeply and then lived through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
If courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, let us give Jessie all the medals, a parade, all the spoils of a returning hero. Not only did she live with her whole heart, she was truly courageous enough to let us in, to perhaps give us a map to untangling our own true natures.
Congratulations Jessie. And thank you all.
