People who know me, know that I am not an overtly religious nor sentimental person. I hardly ever watch television. And I am definitely not a celebrity stalker, even though I have worked with many celebrities in my professional life. So what happened today surprises me more than I can tell you.

What I saw today was something oh so familiar. It was a heartfelt expression of the faith tradition I embraced in high school after early years of being a sedate Catholic. At 15 years old, there was no turning back once I experienced the comraderie of the Liberty Baptist Church family who embraced me; the rousing ministry of music by no less than three choirs (including the youth choir in which I sang); the eloquent and emotional preaching of the Gospel by our pastor, Rev. Abraham Patterson Jackson.

In anticipation of the start of today’s service for Whitney Houston, a commenting minister reminded viewers that it was the African American faith tradition that carried us through the hard times of slavery and the civil rights struggle; that healed us in the wake the bombing of four little girls in Birmingham and, by inference, the murder of our King of Peace (Martin Luther King)  and our shining Prince  (Malcolm X). CNN commentators repeated several times that Whitney’s mother, Cissie Houston, “brought the world to church today.” And indeed she did.

Kevin Costner spoke candidly of the racial dynamic of casting Whitney in her first movie, along with sharing stories of his own Baptist upbringing (surprise!). Dionne Warwick kept viewers on the path to deliverance. Tyler Perry showed us that he is so much more than Madea (and could have a second career as a preacher). Potter’s House pastor T.D. Jakes reminded us that “love is stronger than death.”  Alicia Keys cried out to an angel. Donnie McClurkin urged us to “Stand.”  The maligned R. Kelly sang out his heart with “I Look To You.” And then…. Pastor Marvin Winans extolled us to get our priorities in order. Stevie Wonder put us notice to get our act together “quickly” because the time for change is NOW. Even the pall bearers … when they hoisted Whitney’s stunning platinum casket onto their shoulders…. Ooooooooooooooooo what a moment.   That is not all I saw, just a few of the many extraordinary moments that touched my heart.

Seeing this live, unadulterated presentation of a a real church service — one that is all too familiar to African Americans everywhere — exponentially increased my pride in being black — a member of a cultural community that has always  and incontrovertibly been an incredible example of strength, perseverance, forgiveness and spirituality.

As I digest today’s experience, it makes me think about the work Tom and I are trying to do: Bring people to the “church of reconciliation.”

I can’t help but believe that white people have a lot to learn from us. They need to stop having knee-jerk reactions… stop crucifying our black president for what he is trying to do…. stop trying to find “a great white hope”… stop living in fear that history, as heinous as it is, will come back to hurt them.

Let the world say AMEN!

One was my granddaughter Alison, who was born that day. The other was my editor at Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik, who I met by telephone when I called her from my daughter’s hospital room.

As Sharon and I continue to prepare for the publication of Gather at the Table in October, edited as my first book was, by Gayatri, I wrote about my celebration of February 9 at my other blog site.

My work was finishing up the review Sharon and I have been doing of our copy edited manuscript for Gather at the Table. We received it from the managing editor at Beacon Press last Friday. We’ve spent approximately three hours each day on the phone since then, working our way through the manuscript page by page, discussing whether to accept, reject, or modify each word, sentence, or paragraph our copy editor has recommended that we change. Almost every page has at least one recommended change; some have several.

The role of a copy editor is to correct errors in grammar, spelling, word or phrase usage, and style guidelines established by the publisher. She or he is charged with improving the flow of a story, to tighten things up and eliminate awkward phrasing.  We LOVE our copy editor! We’re proud of what we’ve written, and her work has made our book better.

You’d think it would be tedious to review a copy edited manuscript, but it isn’t. We continue to enjoy every aspect of the publishing process. This morning we sent the manuscript back to the managing editor. This part of the process has all been done online. According to our publishing schedule, sometime in late March we’ll receive a physical copy of the page proofs, which we will then proofread and mark corrections in red pencil; our final review before the book is prepared for printing.

So what does this have to do with my wife watching the Australian Open? Exactly one year ago at this time, Sharon and Lindi and I were in Tobago. Sharon and I wrote the first three chapters of Gather at the Table during our two week sojourn there. Our host for the trip, the owner of the house in which we stayed (Sharon’s daughter-in-law’s father) is an avid tennis fan just like Lindi. I’m not sure we’ll ever watch the Australian Open again without thinking about the wonderful – and warm – adventure we had in Tobago with Sharon. With all the snow and ice and freezing wind at our home in Oregon these days, I wish we were back in the Caribbean!

Our adventure continues, as does the countdown to publication in October.

Credit: ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/TIMES-DISPATCH

Our friends Betty Kilby Baldwin and Phoebe Kilby are featured in an article that appeared today in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia: Women Heal Wounds by Facing History.

Sharon and I met Betty and Phoebe through Coming to the Table, the community to which we belong, and which provides the healing foundation at the core of our book, Gather at the Table.

On this day, as we honor the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I hope you’ll be inspired by these two women who have committed to living out his dream in their lives and to sharing it with others.

Sharon and I will spend most of this year preparing for (and anxiously anticipating) our book to hit shelves (both physical and virtual) on October 9. Gather at the Table will be available in hardcover as well as electronically (Kindle, Nook, etc), and hopefully on audio.

Throughout this year we will update you on news about the book, our ongoing journey, and will create occasional videos from our travels together. We thank you for spreading the word to your friends. Anyone can subscribe to this blog (click the link in the upper right corner of this page) and to our YouTube page (yellow “subscribe” button near the top left of the page).

We’ve just posted our latest video, a brief encapsulation of our 6,000-miles-in-one-month-road-trip through 21 states this past spring. Let us know what you think!

It is hard to be a writer. I know because I am one — and wow, does that feel good to say!

Beginning as children (well, most of us), writers are compelled to express themselves. The opinion driven angst of youth urges us (often in dreams) to get things off our chest. So we write in diaries, post our thoughts on Facebook, Tweet and text voluminously. In the old days, we filled yellow legal pads and diaries with long diatribes (at least I did).  I lost my writer’s ”virginity” when my mother hunted and found my locked diary, read my private thoughts and loudly berated my insolence. After that, I evolved into craving a larger audience — one that might not be so judgemental.

In the long run, the ultimate goal of writers is that our prose will incite millions of thinkers to think and readers to read — not for the money (although that would be nice) but for the pleasure of striking the musical chord of popular resonance. We have at our disposal 26 letters and approximately one million words with which to do this — in a form that is grammatically superior. When all else fails, we thank God for spell check and writer’s license!

I started honing my writing skills early in life. In grammar school, Sister Mary Martin De Porres taught us to write in cursive; Sister Theodore taught us to diagram sentences with perfect precision. In high school, Sister Evangeline taught us the archaic roots of language with Latin. In a secular state college, rhetoric was my favorite class (lots of puns; no nuns). All along the way, when my work was offered to the scrutiny of peer review, I was both attracted and repelled when my innocuous poetry and amateur essays induced accolades from students and teachers alike. I eventually accepted that writing is something I was meant to do. I have been at it ever since — walking a long and arduous road toward continuously improving my skills with every tool I can find.

Enter Strunk and White.

In their 105 page book — Elements of Style —  the authors wax in prolific brevity (an oxymoron I know) through evenly divided sections. There are 11 “Elementary Rules of Usage,” 11 “Elementary Rules of Composition” and 11 “Matters of Form.” Borrowing from their wisdom, my motto is “Good writing is concise” (much to the chagrin of some editors who want more and more and then some.)

When my first book, Inheriting the Trade, came out almost four years ago, it was initially available in hardcover and audio formats. Within a year it became available in softcover and digital editions. The softcover is the preferred version for reading clubs and is now in its second printing.

The digital launch of Inheriting the Trade was pretty low-key. How things have changed in four short years. EBooks have become the fastest growing segment of the publishing world. According to the American Association of Publishers, eBook sales in August 2011 were up 116.5% over August 2010. Sales of hardcover books in the same time period were down 11.2%; softcover sales were down 5.7%. The one other bright spot in book sales was for downloaded audio: up 30.2%.

When Sharon and I met with the marketing and publicity team at Beacon Press in late October regarding next year’s publication of Gather at the Table, they made a point of letting us know that our book will be available digitally right from the start.

Sales of Amazon’s Kindle readers quadrupled on Black Friday this year compared with 2010. Barnes and Noble experienced a loss in the third quarter this year due to the decline in the sale of physical books. They plan to invest more heavily in their Nook e-book reader and digital media.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you own a digital reader? How do you like it? If you don’t own one, why not? Personally, I haven’t invested in one yet. Until recently I never even considered it. Now, I’ll be surprised if I don’t have one by the time Gather at the Table is published next October…

Astrology is one of many subjects about which I maintain an ongoing curiosity. I accept the idea that celestial bodies have an influence on human behavior. Native American prophesies intrigue me. I have read Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, and the books of Seth. I am inclined to believe something hugely significant will occur on December 21, 2012.  Add into that mix of prophetic resonance the realities of wars, global warming,  food insecurity, water and energy resource depletion.

The convergence of so many huge challenges all at the same time makes it impossible for any thinking person to ignore that things are, indeed, changing — prophesied or not.  They have to.

By the time Gather at the Table is published in October, 2012, who knows what the state of the world will be? The leadership of numerous countries will have changed. The winner of the American presidential election will not yet be known. The EuroZone may no longer exist.  Occupy Wall Street may well have packed up its tents and gone home.  The writings of H.G. Wells may gain new import. Wars may have proliferated. By the end of December, the world as we know it may no longer exist at all.

Whatever does or does not happen, Gather at the Table will enter the public consciousness at a propitious time. A time when people are actively engaged in laying destructive legacies to rest; seeking new solutions to old problems and building new footpaths toward a better world.

It is my fervent hope that, of the 3,000 books published each day, Gather at the Table will find its way to the top of the heap as a beacon of hope in a world of change.

October 24 was the day everything shifted for us.

Two years, two months and eighteen days after we first talked about writing together (I just love what you can figure out with Google these days), Sharon and I submitted our draft manuscript to Gayatri Patnaik, executive editor at Beacon Press, and we met over lunch with the editorial, marketing and publicity team. Sharon wrote about the experience a few days later in Special Delivery. It was indeed a special day.

For the past two-plus years Sharon and I have traveled. A lot. We’ve spent time with each other, with each others’ friends and with each others’ families. We’ve put thousands of miles on our Jeeps (mostly Sharon’s). We’ve done research together. We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. We’ve pondered. We’ve shared lots of meals. We’ve talked and talked. And we wrote.

And on October 24 everything shifted from a focus on the art and imagination of creating our journey and writing about it, to molding the draft manuscript into a book. There is still a lot of art and imagination going into the process, and there is also a new focus on forging words and sentences and paragraphs into a story that readers will find compelling, and into a package that booksellers, marketers, readers, and the media will pay attention to among the quarter-million-or-so books that will be published next year in the United States.

The stage we’re in now works like this. Gayatri reads our manuscript. She makes detailed recommendations for improvements; what we should cut, what needs to be expanded, sections to move, things that need clarification, and so on. We respond to those recommendations by accepting (almost all) or rejecting (very few) her suggestions. Then we make the changes.

We received the manuscript back from Gayatri on November 14. We were thrilled to read that she was “quite pleased” with the draft; that we had given her “such great material to work with.” Her confidence in us and our manuscript means a great deal to us. Our highest hope is that our readers will truly understand what we’ve experienced along this journey of healing, and will want to travel with us through each page.

Sharon and I spent three hours on the phone on November 15 talking through every “track changes” note Gayatri had written. We agreed to a process whereby we would each review the entire manuscript and make the changes that were most appropriate to one or the other of us and then pass it back and forth. I had it for a few long days, then Sharon did. The next pass took one day each. There were a few final issues to haggle through that we did by telephone, and that was it. Yesterday, November 22, we submitted Draft 2 (which is how there is finally time to write a blog post!)

We’ll get the manuscript back with final recommendations in a couple weeks. We’ll then have our last opportunity to make significant changes. When we send in our final submission, everything will shift once more. Many steps remain, including copy-editing, proof-reading, cover design, the creation of publicity and marketing plans, and more, all leading up to the publication of Gather at the Table in October 2012.

Then everything will shift again.

Zora Neale Hurston

I always aspired to be a writer. That is, a full-time creative writer who makes a living from the written word — a good living. But I learned early on that a creative writer is highly unlikely to be remunerated in fair proportion to effort expended. I therefore chose a different career, as a marketing communications consultant. My choice ended up being, fortunately, a career that enabled me to write a great deal… just not about the subjects dearest to my heart.

My default profession, motivated as it was by compromise, enabled me to make a very good living indeed. I used my talents to wax prolific about the attributes of consumer products. My writing inspired sales of Coca-Cola soft drinks, McDonald’s hamburgers, Barbie dolls and Beefeater gin, amongst many others. It was a proud day indeed when Harper’s magazine, after culling the universe for “gleaming points of significance,” reprinted one of my sales boosting essays — a character sketch of an “authentically African American” Mattel doll named “Shani.” Mattel sold 15 million units in record time. Was that vindication for the choice I made?

Emboldened by the praise of employers, I tucked my creative aspirations away, joking to friends that I couldn’t give free reign to my ambitions because I didn’t want to live in a garret. (For those who don’t know, a garret is “a room or unfinished part of a house just under the roof.”) In my romantic imagination, this was the inauspicious abode of the writers I most admired. As I read the stories of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin galavanting around Paris, I envied their spirited lives, fully aware that all of them undoubtedly went home to attic apartments. (This is a reality I experienced firsthand when I lived in Paris as a restaurateur, trying to get a grip on my frustrated ambition of writing a cookbook.) Baldwin endured poverty for eight long years. Hughes worked as a nightclub doorman.  Wright lasted 18 months before fleeing, in existential angst, to Argentina. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer spent nights playing cards at Le Dome, surely reluctant to go home to who can imagine what accommodations. Zora Neal Hurston, although never a resident of Paris but one of my idols nonetheless, died an impoverished maid, interred in an unmarked grave. These were fates I chose not to embrace… until now… in these last days that are left to me to say what I need to say before being consigned to the memories of my grandchildren, Julian and Violet.

At this late date, I am aggressively working to change my personal paradigm. I long to unburden so many things that have been on my mind for a lifetime of days, weeks, months, years…. decades.

Writing Gather at the Table has been a phenomenal exercise. I am ecstatic about being provided the opportunity to push many of my thoughts about race, slavery, life, healing and justice out of the confines of my private thoughts into the light of written words. Tom and I have collaboratively written the absolute best we can on this topic that is dear to our hearts. It is a soul exposition that awaits its birth into public consciousness.

Today, here I sit in my upstate New York retreat — the place to which I absconded to find peace of mind and write — enduring the finalization and publication of Sharon’s first long-form effort — a fully realized BOOK…. an actual, tangible, incredible, heartfelt expression of things I have been holding inside me for lo these many years.

The wait is excruciating.

I am not so naive as to think this novice effort will make me rich. Certainly not in money. But, what is rich?

I live in a nice house.  Three bedrooms. Two baths. Ensconced in a rural area surrounded by nature. Resting upon an acre and a half of land, deer graze in my back field. Squirrels romp in the attic. A bear ravaged my trash can a few weeks ago.  Field mice are coming in for the winter (which makes my cat very happy.) I love it!

Even so, I am chastened with the fact that my savings are exhausted. I eat because of the public benefit of food stamps. I have no idea how I will buy oil for winter heat.  I don’t have money to imbibe alcohol, consume cigarettes (a good thing) or take in movies that I so love to watch. The petrol in my car allows only a once weekly visit to the post office to collect mail dominated by demands for payment of money I no longer have. I am living in the garret I so assiduously sought to avoid.

All I can hope on this day is that I can write myself into a new place…. a new reality… a world where money is not the definition of who is worthy or who is not. A place where who we are is not defined by what we have. A place that is warm and cozy with recognition of what is really important.

I write and therefore I am.