Susan Oleksiw

Unless you live in antarctica you have experienced some part of the heat waves plaguing North America. In some areas temperatures are 25 degrees above normal. This isn't a one-time event; the heat wave covers days and weeks, beginning in June and still with us in July.

Until recently I would have found this heat burdensome, a natural environment that slowed me down, my reading, my editing, my thinking through various projects. But at least I was still moving forward, or trying to. The worse the weather got, the more I packed into the coolest part of the day, which this year wasn't very cool. Even though I've lived in India, and managed to write and do research and edit my work while there, I found the heat in New England this year enervating. It's eating up my energy. But it's doing something else.

Unexpectedly I'm sitting still and glad to do so. Instead of the usual flood of ideas I can't get to because of the temps, my mind sifts through them slowly or ignores them completely. Time spent on the back terrace looking over the yard that still needs a lot of attention brings a humming stillness. The birds are braving my presence to get to the water bowl, and the squirrels are ignoring me as always. I'm just one more animal coping among many. 

There's something liberating in recognizing that we humans don't have to be heroic all the time—working in weather that is warning us to slow down, pushing forward when we've been given the gift of time to do just the opposite. For all the months, years, I've been worried about the declining population of songbirds, it hadn't occurred to me until this summer to sit still and find out who's still around or recently returned. 

I'm paying attention to nature, listening to the warnings, taking advice. And counting birds not seen often or at all over the past few years. The robins, cardinals, blue jays, and sparrows are always here, but now so too are the catbirds, goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, baltimore orieoles, red-wing blackbirds, juncos, and phoebes. In the stillness with only a light breeze lifting the leaves above me, the birds dart and hang and settle in a birdbath and ruffle their feathers clean with cool water. The rare times when it rains brings up the worms, something more for the feathered visitors to find.

This is usually considered downtime, when we're resting, ignoring work, but for me this might better be called uptime, when everything I see is brighter, more alive, richer. In my quiet corner of the garden I observe closely the business and antics of the natural world when its members don't know or care that I'm watching. I see them share, or not share, the birdbaths or a particularly productive corner of the garden. Finding this part of the natural world so active and rich gives me perspective, a sense of being grounded, but also with a clearer relation to the world around me. Downtime. Enrichment time.

For several years I've worked on the program committee of the New England Crime Bake mystery conference, held every year on Veterans Day weekend. A group of us rack our brains to come up with a mix of old and new writers, a variety of topics and formats, and maybe a surprise or two in something new. We send out the invitations, and then wait. This week we're waiting to hear from the writers we've invited, and once again I'm in the position many writers would like to be in.

I know what it's like to hope to get onto a panel during a particular conference, and not make it. It's a disappointment, but I still appreciate the efforts of the organizers to accommodate so many writers. There are a lot of us in this genre, and fortunately a growing number of conferences, in all sizes. The New England Crime Bake conference usually tops out at three hundred, so it's not exactly an intimate crowd, but I'm often surprised at how quickly we all become pals if not friends. This is the place to find like-minded souls living not too far away ready to talk about writing, the terrific book they're reading, or the one they're about to write.

The first responses to our invitations have come in, and they're surprisingly refreshing. One writer commented that this would be her first time on a panel and she was thrilled to have been asked. Someone else said much the same thing, but was quieter about it. One of the more successful writers in our genre responded with enthusiasm, which also gave me a boost.

As one of the editors of Crime Spell Books, I hope we will find stories that represent the writer's first effort to be published. It is a thrill to launch a writer, and we seem to do this if not regularly then often enough to remain ever hopeful that "this year," we'll find a "first" story. I remember my first story, in the 1960s in my college literary magazine, and much much later my first panel. 

Maybe waiting for the approval of others isn't a good way to go through life, but in the arts it's inevitable. No matter which side of the desk we're on, we're waiting for that email that opens a door, beckons us into the future, promises a step forward no matter how modest. So if you've been invited to participate in something, never think it's a small thing. And if you do the inviting, think of all the people you're helping in their careers.