Relenting to Joy

We are so honored to host award-winning author Janice Lynn Mather's essay on our blog today. Read her powerful essay below:


Memory 1: I am 17, and bothered.
I’m bothered by crime rates. Bothered by the frequency of motorcycle fatalities. Bothered by how often father-aged men hit on me.

Now I’m sitting in the upper bleachers of an auditorium filled with students, flanked by two writer friends. We’ve all entered the awkwardly titled I’m Okay, You’re Okay! poetry competition. I eagerly listen for my name, equally hopeful for a win and certain that the judges won’t appreciate my scathing verse, penned in outrage at the condescendingly optimistic theme. 

Spoiler alert: I did not win. 

Though scathing correction is never my goal anymore, I still write the tough stuff. My teen characters live through sexual assault, through abandonment, family struggles, grief, loss, simply because teens actually do live through these things. Humans are beautiful and amazing. We are resilient, even when we shouldn’t have to be. You are beautiful and amazing. You are resilient, even when you shouldn’t have to be. But if our stories of strength and survival are told with what feels like one-sided heaviness, it can be hard for others to listen.

Memory 2: The message pops up and my heart is in my mouth. The agent who asked to see my full manuscript! This could be the moment where my writing path, my whole life, changes for the best. 
I see afraid and not quite the right fit and my dreams crash down faster than I can slam my laptop closed, but not before I also glimpse a comment that my main character’s situation feels unrelentingly bleak.

I plumet into a funk of discouraged indignation. How dare she? Did she even read the whole thing? 

    When my initial horror wore off, I read and reread that agent’s handful of actually quite thoughtful feedback, and set about reworking Learning to Breathe, my first novel, looking for chances for my main character, Indy, to feel hope. To even feel joy.      
    
So when I write about Karmen, scouring her home and her community for any shred of information about her brother’s life that might help her understand his death, I thought unrelentingly bleak. And then I let her breathe a little bit. 

This is why Karmen hurtles down the street on Julian’s reclaimed skateboard. 

Why she pauses to enjoy the guava French toast her dad treats her to, one morning.

Why she lets a roll of soft yarn linger in her hands as she curls up to finger-knit with her best friend.
Why she sinks into love with Isaiah. 

All while she’s reeling from her brother’s death.
​
It’s important to keep resilience, hope, possibility, within reach. Important for it to feel real that joy exists. Important to know that, even if you’re mired in grief, or loss, or struggle—and we all have a moment, a season, of feeling that way—there can still be moments where it relents. Where you feel wind on your face and something sweet in your mouth. Where someone holds you like you’re the world’s greatest treasure. Where you, like Karmen, feel like you can carry on. Like you can even have snippets of joy.

Janice Lynn Mather

Read more about Where Was Goodbye here: 
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Was-Goodbye/Janice-Lynn-Mather/9781665903950
 

Janice Lynn Mather is a Bahamian Canadian author. Her first novel, Learning to Breathe, was a Governor General’s Award finalist, a Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize finalist, shortlisted for the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award, an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection, an Amelia Bloomer Book List pick, and a Junior Library Guild Selection. Her second novel, Facing the Sun, was an Amy Mathers Teen Book Award winner. Where Was Goodbye? is her third novel for teens. Janice Lynn lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
 

Book cover