Summer has hit with the force of a tsunami here on Cape Cod.

It arrives earlier every year. When I was a college student working at a hotel here, the season started on July 4th. Then it edged back to the middle of June when the schools let out. Now it seems as if the official season begins on Memorial Day.

Let the crowds arrive.

Let the eating begin.

Already I’ve gone out for fried clams and onion rings. Last week while dashing out on an errand, I stopped to pick up a bag of chips and bottle of crème soda - me who rarely eats junk food. And when I was shopping yesterday I dropped a quart of orange sherbet in the cart. (Sherbet was the tip-off as to what was really going on. Instantly I recalled riding my bike to the corner store to buy a pint of raspberry sherbet and then sitting on the front steps and eating it right out of the carton.)

Here’s the thing. Childhood summers meant liberation from school and from coats and sweaters. It was a season of permission. Endless hours outside. No bed time. And it was a relaxation of food rules. A&W root beer. French fries dunked in ketchup. Cotton candy. Roasted peanuts in a warm and greasy bag. Fried clams. Potato salad. Hamburgers on the grill. Lobster roll luncheons at the church. Grape flavored Popsicles.

These days, as if trying through food to recapture the sweetness and - especially - the freedom of those long ago years, I eat things I would never consume during the remainder of the year. I was talking about this with my friend Joan and she told me she went to a party yesterday and ate three hot dogs. With all the trimmings. Relish. Mustard. Chopped onions. By the time she got to the third, there were no rolls left but she didn’t care. As she told me this, I heard a definite note of pride in her voice.

Laurie, another writer friend, is having lobster for dinner tonight. “It’s the best way I know to kick off summer,” she says. “It’s almost a superstition. Memorial Day and Labor Day. Lobster to start and end the season.” And she and her children have already hit the clam shack near her home.

School’s out. Let the eating begin.

What’s your summer food memory?

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E. B. White, an author who suffered great anxiety about both writing and public speaking, said: “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”

I can only echo, “Amen.”

Many readers assume that those who write for a living seldom have to confront fear of writing. Writers, too, succumb to this myth, believing that while one personally may have to struggle with the demon fear, other writers don’t. The truth is that fear is a universal experience for anyone who puts pen to paper. Everyone who writes has to summon from some deep place inside the courage to write, the nerve to write true.

For writers, courage is “the first essential,” said Katherine Anne Porter.

Cynthia Ozick wrote, “If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
It is revealing, I think, that both Ozick and Porter link the word “essential” with courage when describing the task of writing.

“You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer,” Margaret Atwood wrote. “An almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.”

I like the simile: Courage as the physical quality that provides stability and balance, allowing us to the traverse the unstable, slippery terrain of both our psyche and our material.

In his book THE COURAGE TO WRITE, Ralph Keyes perfectly captures the litany of fears a writer can get lost in. “Whenever I start writing a book, my fears follow a predictable path,” he writes. “First I’m scared that I won’t finish it, that I’ll be exposed as a fraud who conned a publisher into thinking he could write a book. When I do complete a manuscript, I’m afraid my editor won’t accept it. If my editor does accept the manuscript, I’m worried that critics will hate it. If critics don’t hate it, I’m sure no one will buy my book. And even if readers do buy my book, there’s danger that they won’t like what they read. They might find it laughable. Worst of all, someone I know may ridicule my efforts. These are the types of fears that keep me, and anyone who presumes to write for public consumption, awake at night.

Rejection, ridicule, failure, the fear of being wrong: The Four Horsemen of dread. Add to them the trepidation of revealing that which we fear we should not disclose. It requires a certain dauntlessness to expose particular topics to our readers. I think of this as the “I can’t write about that” phenomena.

A participant in a writing workshop I gave in Kenmare, Ireland one spring was the wife of the local vicar. In response to an assignment on characterization, she wrote a strong and enchanting story about a male stripper with a tattoo on his bum. After the class, she confided in me that the boy in the story was her son. By the end of the workshop she felt safe enough to share that news with the others in the class, but she said she could never publish the piece because of what people would think about her, her son and her husband the vicar.

To mine the rich territory, we must find the courage to write the one thing we feel we can never write about, the subject that makes one break into a sweat to even consider divulging. This is the pay dirt, the very thing we must write.

Ralph Keyes writes, “A warm flush of embarrassment is like a dowsing rod pointing its quivering tip right at deep wells of rich material.”

I think we don’t extinguish our fears as much as write in spite of them, and in the process we discover that many of our fears are phantoms born of our own imagination. And those which are not, we survive. We don’t die when we get a poor review, but actually go on breathing and live to write another day. We discover that breaking taboos not only does not isolate us, it connects with others.

When I allow fears to pollute my mind and silence me, I remember that the root word for courage is derived from the Latin “cor” and that the French word for heart is “coeur.” I remind myself that my heart remains the sturdiest of the writing muscles.

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One summer, as she worked diligently to meet her publisher’s deadline, author North Cairn kept at her side a copy of “Endurance.”

The 1957 classic by Alfred Lansing is a narrative of explorer Ernest Shackelton’s audacious expedition to Antarctica in 1914, the stranding of his crew following the destruction of his boat, and his struggle to survive against daunting odds and save his men.

Shackelton, a demanding leader and dreamer, had planned to cross the then unexplored ice-bound continent by foot. Shortly into the journey, his ship, Endurance, was locked in an ice pack and then crushed by the weight of the shifting floes. His dream of crossing the continent was lost, his remaining goal solely to get his men out alive. In a desperate gamble, he split the party, leaving 22 on the shore of Elephant Island and set off in the ship’s whaleboat with five men in search of rescue. Their journey lasted 850 miles. Eventually all were rescued.

Shackelton became Cairn’s spiritual companion. Inspired, she used his example as fuel to finish her own project which, at that time, was feeling not unlike crossing a continent.

She had ten weeks to transform an eight-page book proposal, essays she had previously published on her subject, and mounds of research into a finished manuscript.

Her schedule was to work everyday from seven to noon, have lunch, and return to work until 5:30. She would then take a long walk, have dinner, fall into bed, and read another chapter of Lansing’s book. Riveted by the story, heartened by the courage of the men, she also resonated with the element of the transformative impact of isolation in a natural setting, a theme which paralleled one in “By Monomoy Light,” her book about the time she spent alone one summer on the wildlife refuge off the coast of Chatham, (Northeastern University Press, 1999).

“These men had nothing ahead but the prospect of death, and I took from their story information about the process of persevering,” she says. “They had already been through so much and, exhausted, they had to make this last journey or die. They went though hell and lived.”

That sounds a lot like what writing a book can feel like.

Writing any book demands endurance. It requires a surprising amount of physical strength and dogged emotion resiliency. In Cairn’s case seeing her project through to completion also called for an almost lock-jawed stubbornness in the face of disappointment. Mid summer she learned the book’s acquisition editor was leaving Northeastern Press. The project was turned over to an editor unfamiliar with it and occupied with the manuscripts of his own authors. Discouraged, Cairn turned to Shackelton. Good, God, she would tell herself. If these guys can get through this, I guess you can finish a book.

Shackelton’s family motto was Fortitudine vincimus. By Fortitude We Conquer. This axiom is not only eerily prescient for his Antarctic journey, but seems a fitting epigraph for writers in for the long haul.

Completing a four or five hundred page manuscript means creating, forming and shaping material, then editing and revising it, sometimes four or seven times. Often, it means doing battle with the personal demons not yet faced. Or reengaging those faced in the past.

Inevitably, it means dealing with the vicissitudes of the publishing business. Editors leave publishing houses, conglomerates swallow up houses and writers are set adrift. Sometimes it means dealing with all this while experiencing death or divorce, illness or loss in one’s personal life.

No wonder fortitude is called for.

Passion and enthusiasm drive a writer to the desk, as does love of words and story, but to stay the course, stores of physical stamina, emotional tenacity, and mental toughness serve a writer well. As does patience, a necessary component of fortitude, I think, as it suggests acceptance of one’s self and tolerance for the process.

As North Cairn discovered when she turned to Shackelton, a mentor to instruct or inspire one in these matters helps. Writer might do well do hang the Shackelton family motto over their computers.

Fortitudine vincimus.

By fortitude we conquer.

Or as novelist Elizabeth Berg, puts it in “Escaping Into The Open,” her book on writing, “If you want to ride, stay on the horse.”

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A friend recently gave me an article containing an interview with Andrew Harvey, the co-author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. One passage leapt off the page for me.

“I don’t say follow your bliss,” Harvey says. “Look where that has gotten us. I say follow your heartbreak.”

Perhaps Harvey’s statement resonated so profoundly because lately there has been much heartache in my life.

I was in Virginia during the time of the murders at Virginia Tech and word reached me there that Jamie Bishop, the son of my friend the sci-fi writer Michael Bishop and his wife Jeri, had been killed at the school. My heart breaks for Mike and Jeri - and for all those affected by the horrific event - with a sorrow that is marrow deep.

And on Monday, during the long drive back to Cape Cod , three more pieces of sad news reached me.

A friend of Hillary’s had been in a bad accident and his foot had to be amputated. My sister-in-law received her test results and starts chemotherapy this week. My sister is getting a divorce.

And always - always - there is the every present backdrop of the daily death count from Iraq.

How to we nurture and sanctify life in the face of tragedies like the Virginia Tech shootings? How to we hold on to hope in the face of personal loss, of disease and destruction, global warming, ecological devastation and war?

Harvey, a religious scholar, says heartbreak can strike us “like a sword of light through the heart.” He suggests that it is the passion behind our heartbreak that will compel us to work for change. He calls for “sacred activism,” a policy of respect and compassion for ourselves and our planet.

My heart is breaking. Now I ask myself, What will I do with the heartbreak?

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