The Ant Circus

One of my favorite writer has to be Kate DiCamillo. When I first came across her works, I was excited, but when I watched her interviews, I felt connected. It seems like she answers the questions without any pretense, acknowledging the times when she works part times to part times, acknowledging moments when she felt like a failure, and accepting fears or anxiety. But, always, just like her stories, there is a sense of hope and faith that there is a better ending. There is perseverence that endures the negative thoughts and feelings. It's like saying, "Yes, I am scared, and I am still going to feel afraid. But, I own these feelings, I embrace them in me. They don't own me." Here's what she wrote on her facebook wall several days ago:

For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about this joke that my father used to tell: there’s a man who has been in jail and who spends his time training ants to perform the most fabulous tricks. With a lot of patience and hard work he forms an ant circus. When he is released from prison, the guy takes his ants and puts them in a matchbox and goes into a bar and sits down and says to the man sitting on the stool next to him, “I’ve got he most amazing thing to show you.” He opens the matchbox and the ants run out and across the counter. And the guy says, “Hold up a minute. There’s these, wham, ants all over the, wham, bar. Okay,” he says when all the ants are dead. “Go ahead and show me the amazing thing.”

The fear with writing is always that I will open the matchbox and let the story (all that work, all that preparation) out onto the counter. And someone will say, “Wait a minute. There’s these ants all over the place here.” Wham, wham, wham. “Okay, where’s your story?”

I’m going to keep working anyway. I’m going to keep on trying to fashion a little ant circus.